Based on ethnographic research on bilingual motherhood in New York City, this dissertation explores language and identity among Japanese mothers who traverse the linguistic borders between Japanese and English and the cultural borders between Japan and the US. This study asks how mothers inquire and transform ideologies of language and gender. It also asks how these experiences affect the ways in which they organize language socialization and identity in the bilingual context.

The methodology of this study included participant observation, formal and informal interviews, and recording naturalistic interactions between mother and child. Through observing and recording mother-child interactions, I learned and identified language socialization practices among the mothers. With the interviews, I did not originally intend to probe the mothers’ identity issues in particular, but rather aimed to learn about their experiences of bilingual motherhood. The interviews nevertheless became examinations of these mothers’ identity construction processes and practices because through their bilingual motherhood experiences, mothers manifest alternative and multiple identities both locally and transnationally.

This study demonstrates that Japanese mothers construct their bilingual motherhood, including language socialization, through their experiences with Japanese and English. That is, Japanese mothers are empowered by being assigned the important role of Japanese language transmitter in the inner sphere (family) while they are marginalized by being labeled as incompetent English speakers and deficient English teachers for their children in the outer sphere (school). The mapping, however, is more complicated. Japanese often diminishes their authoritative status in the inner context when the mother-child relationship is challenged by children who know English better than their mothers and deride them. Accordingly, mothers’ language socialization offers a site of tension and compromise between them, their children, and their children’s schools. This study reveals that mothers constantly negotiate the traditional roles of Japanese wife and mother and the new roles of language transmitter and migrant mother in this foreign environment. It concludes that these mothers invent an “in-between” sphere in which they make sense of their bilingual motherhood and emerge with viable identities.