In this video, I discuss the example of bilingual signage in Nanning City, China. I ask who recognises the Zhuang language that’s found on some public signage there, and some of the varied responses which people – even Zhuang speakers – have had to it. Then I explain what this case study can tell us about multilingual signage policies more generally, and about language policy research. I hope this helps you teach Linguistics, or learn Linguistics, or even do your own ‘linguistic landscape’ research!

Related resources:

Grey, A. (2022). ‘How Standard Zhuang has Met with Market Forces’. Chapter 8 in Nicola McLelland and Hui Zhao (eds) Language Standardization and Language Variation in Multilingual Contexts: Asian Perspectives (#171, Multilingual Matters series). De Gruyter, pp163-182. (Full text available)

Grey, A. (2024) ‘Using A Lived Linguistic Landscape Approach for Socio-Legal Insight’, Frontiers of Socio-Legal Studies’ Methodological Musings Blog, Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies.

‘Language rights in a changing China: Brynn Quick in Conversation with Alexandra Grey’ Language on the Move Podcast, New Books Network (1 January 2025)

Transcript:

Alex and Kristen in the studio, 2024

[Opening screen shows text: Making Zhuang Language Visible, by Alexandra Grey and Kristen Martin, 2024.]

[Narrated by Alexandra Grey:] In 2004, the local government in Nanning, a city in South China, began adding the Zhuang language to street-name signage to preserve Zhuang cultural heritage. The Zhuang language, which originated thousands of years ago in this region, had largely been overshadowed by Putonghua, a standard form of Mandarin Chinese and the official language of China.

However, the public response to this initiative, including from Zhuang speakers, was not as positive as intended. In this video, I will share insights from my research in the 2010s on Zhuang language policy, including a case study of its implementation and reception in Nanning.

China officially recognises the minority group called the Zhuangzu, who have traditionally lived in south-central China, particularly in the Guangxi Zhuangzu Autonomous Region, where Nanning is the capital. There are millions of Zhuang speakers, but China has such a large national population that these Zhuang speakers constitute only a small minority.

The Zhuang language can hardly be read even by Zhuang speakers themselves. This is due to the inaccessibility of the Zhuang script; most people do not have access to formal or even informal ways of learning to read Zhuang. This has significant implications for the region’s linguistic landscape.

My research aimed to understand the impact of local language policy. I met with 63 Zhuang community leaders and Zhuang speakers for interviews, including interviews in which we walked and talked through the linguistic landscapes. I also found and analysed laws and policies about Zhuang language, from the national constitution down to local regulations. One important set of regulations were interim provisions introduced in 2004 and formalised in 2013 through which the local government added Zhuang script to street signs in Nanning.

This script these street names used was a Romanised version of Zhuang using the Latin alphabet, and it was always accompanied by Putonghua in both Chinese characters and its own alphabetic, Romanised form. The Zhuang script, which uses letters identical to English and also identical to Romanised Putonghua except for the additional letter ‘V’, was never displayed alone and was always in smaller font on the street name signs. In some cases, the signs contained additional information about nearby streets, but only in Putonghua.

In the broader linguistic landscape, these Zhuang street names were a visual whisper. Most public writing in Nanning is in Putonghua, with occasional English. Only a few public institutions, like the regional museum and library, have prominent bilingual signage that includes Zhuang. Otherwise, Zhuang is absent from common public texts such as road directions, commercial signage, transport maps, and safety notices.

From the community’s perspective, this new bilingual signage caused confusion. Newspaper reports from 2009 indicated Zhuang language was mistaken for misspelled Putonghua, leading to complaints. In my interviews, even some Zhuang speakers had been unaware of any Zhuang script in their environment, often mistaking it for English or Putonghua until it was pointed out to them, or until they started learning to read Zhuang as young adults, if they had that opportunity. Some were not aware that the Zhuang language could be written at all:

[Interview excerpt in Chinese dubbed in English by Kristen Martin]

A university student interviewee: Because it is Pinyin script, no one pays it any regard, they can’t read it. In the recent past, people even thought it was English or [Putonghua] Pinyin, something of that nature, but it is not Pinyin, so they could not conceive of it being Zhuang script. 

Interviewer: Right. 

Another university student interviewee: To look at, it looks the same as English, I think.

In my article, I argue that the invisibility of the Zhuang script is partly because people need to learn to read it, even if they speak Zhuang. My research, which includes reports and census data in addition to the interviews, shows that access to learning Zhuang literacy is very low. Additionally, people are not accustomed to seeing Zhuang as a public language, or as a written language.

Why is this the case? Besides its limited presence in public spaces, Zhuang is also largely absent from educational settings and from the media. There was an irregular newspaper in Zhuang and a bilingual magazine in print when I began my study, but by the late 2010s, that magazine was only printed in Putonghua. This lack of exposure to written Zhuang in everyday life affects the recognition of written Zhuang, even when it is displayed in Nanning today.

Two key themes emerged from my participants’ reactions to Zhuang in the linguistic landscape. Some Zhuang people appreciated the Government’s effort to include and preserve their cultural heritage, but they doubted the policy’s effectiveness; since they couldn’t read the script themselves, they wondered how anyone else would learn anything about Zhuang language or culture from these bilingual signs. Others viewed the policy as tokenistic. They highlighted the lack of accessibility to the Zhuang script and the frequent errors in its display.

[Interview excerpt in Chinese dubbed in English by Kristen Martin]

Interviewer: But I’ve heard it’s often written wrongly.  

A community leader interviewee: That’s right, it’s often written wrong but no matter how erroneously those sorts of things are written there is no-one who can pick that out, because Guangxi people have no opportunity to receive a Zhuang script education; who can read and understand?

Another point of dissatisfaction was that the way Zhuang has been standardised, which has made it more similar to Han Chinese – more similar to Putonghua – which felt like a reminder of the marginalisation of Zhuang speaking people in Nanning.

[Interview excerpt in Chinese dubbed in English by Kristen Martin]

Another student interviewee: This Zhuang writing, frankly, this grammar is in my view a really erroneous usage. It’s completely Hanified Zhuang language. Our Zhuang script must have as its goal opposing that, Guangxi’s so-called Standard Zhuang, which is not endorsed. It doesn’t stick to the grammar of our mother tongue, so we feel relatively disgusted.

For these readers, the bilingual Zhuang street names in the landscape were a visual reminder of other aspects of Zhuang language policy that they felt did not adequately support the language.

[Interview excerpt in Chinese dubbed in English by Kristen Martin]

Interviewer: So, when you see those signs, what do you think?

A community leader interviewee: It’s simply a joke, to use Chinese it’s “to hang up a sheep’s head and sell it as dog meat”, so it’s on the façade, but in their hearts there is no respect.

These perspectives suggest that efforts to include minority languages in public spaces can be perceived as futile or even offensive if the community cannot engage with the script. The Zhuang case study highlights the importance of accessibility and education, not only display, when policies are aiming to support minority languages, but it also highlights the importance of policy responding to the habits and expectations about that language which people will have already developed from childhood onwards from the way they experience the language being absent or devalued in all sorts of places and activities. People bring those habits and expectations and value structures with them into the linguistic landscape.

Broadening our perspective from Nanning to consider the policies for marginalised or minority languages in general, this case study challenges two common assumptions about display policies.

First, there’s the assumption that displaying a minority language increases its visibility in the linguistic landscape.

[Screen shows text: Is the Zhuang language on display in public actually visible as Zhuang?]

Second, there’s the belief that when a powerful entity, like the government, includes a minority language in public spaces, this symbolises the inclusion and valorisation of the speakers of that language, or more broadly the people who share that linguistic heritage.

[Screen shows text: Does the display of Zhuang language symbolise the inclusion of Zhuang speakers?]

These assumptions are foundational in linguistic landscape research, but this study encourages us to question them. The findings suggest that public display policies need to be integrated with other language policies to be effective. In the case of Zhuang, literacy and script policies undermined the efficacy of Zhuang language displays, making them almost invisible.

[Closing screen shows text:

Making Zhuang Language Visible, produced by Ed Media Team at the University of Technology Sydney, 2024.

Narrated by Dr Alexandra Grey.

Interviews dubbed by Kristen Martin.

Script by Alexandra Grey and Kristen Martin, based on Grey (2021) Full text

Thanks to Dr Laura Smith-Khan for content consultation.

Thanks to Wei Baocheng for singing his translation of the song ‘Gaeu Heux Faex’ into Zhuang, from Qiao Yu and Lei Zhengbang’s 藤缠树. Full rendition at: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WO0-biO5xJI ]

Tazin and Jia discuss crisis communication in a linguistically diverse world and a new book co-edited by Dr. Jia Li and Dr. Jie Zhang called Multilingual Crisis Communication that gives us insights into the lived experiences of linguistic minorities affected during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Multilingual Crisis Communication is the first book to explore the lived experiences of linguistic minorities in crisis-affected settings in the Global South, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic. China has been selected as a case of inquiry for multilingual crisis communication because of its high level of linguistic diversity. Taking up critical sociopolitical approaches, this book conceptualizes multilingual crisis communication from three dimensions: identifying communication barriers, engaging communication repertoires, and empowering communication justice.

Comprising eight main chapters, along with an introduction and an epilogue, this edited book is divided into three parts in terms of the demographic and social conditions of linguistic minorities, as indigenous, migrant, and those with communicative disabilities. This book brings together a range of critical perspectives of sociolinguistic scholars, language teachers, and public health workers. Each team of authors includes at least one member of the research community with many years of field work experience, and some of them belong to ethnic minorities. These studies can generate new insights for enhancing the accessibility and effectiveness of multilingual crisis communication.

This book will be of interest to academics and postgraduate students in the fields of multilingualism, intercultural communication, translation and interpreting studies, and public health policy.

This volume brings together 23 contributors and covers a range contexts in which crisis communication during the COVID19 pandemic has been investigated. Focusing on China owing to a high level of linguistic diversity, this book uses critical sociopolitical approaches, to identifying communication barriers, engaging communication repertoires, and empowering communication justice.

Advance praise for the book

‘Setting a milestone in critical sociolinguistic and applied linguistic studies, this volume offers critical insights into overcoming communication barriers for linguistic minorities during crises, promoting social justice, and enhancing public health responses through inclusive, multimodal, and multilingual strategies. It also serves as testimonies of resilience, courage and kindness during the turbulent time’ (Professor Zhu Hua, Fellow of Academy of Social Sciences and Director of International Centre for Intercultural Studies, UCL, UK)

‘The global pandemic has brought to the fore the key role of multilingual communication in disasters and emergencies. This volume contains cutting edge ethnographic studies that address this seriously from the perspective of Chinese scholars and minoritized populations in China. A decisive contribution to the burgeoning field of multilingualism and critical sociolinguistics in times of crisis.’ (Professor Virginia Zavala, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Perú)

Related content

For related content, visit the Language on the Move Covid-19 Archives.

Transcript (coming soon)

In The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet, Gerald Roche sheds light on a global crisis of linguistic diversity that will see at least half of the world’s languages disappear this century.

Roche explores the erosion of linguistic diversity through a study of a community on the northeastern Tibetan Plateau in the People’s Republic of China. Manegacha is but one of the sixty minority languages in Tibet and is spoken by about 8,000 people who are otherwise mostly indistinguishable from the Tibetan communities surrounding them. Recently, many in these communities have switched to speaking Tibetan, and Manegacha faces an uncertain future.

The author uses the Manegacha case to show how linguistic diversity across Tibet is collapsing under assimilatory state policies. He looks at how global advocacy networks inadequately acknowledge this issue, highlighting the complex politics of language in an inter-connected world. The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet broadens our understanding of Tibet and China, the crisis of global linguistic diversity, and the radical changes needed to address this crisis.

Related content

You can read more of Gerald’s work in his blogposts.

Transcript (coming soon)

Rooted in a Bourdieusian approach to language, power and legal discourse, this is the first major publication to integrate contemporary debates in linguistics about mobility, capitalism and globalization into a study of China’s language policy.

This book came out in May 2021 after almost a decade of Alex’s doctoral and postdoctoral work. Her doctoral dissertation was recognised as the best dissertation on the sociology of language, internationally, through the 2018 Joshua A. Fishman Award.

Some academic work and concepts that are referenced in this episode include Language on the Move posts about Dr. Grey’s and Dr. Laura Smith-Khan’s Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Network (LLIRN), “aspiring monolingualism” and the one-nation-one-language ideology.

If you enjoy the show, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Further readings

Grey, A. (2022). ‘How Standard Zhuang has Met with Market Forces’, in Nicola McLelland and Hui Zhao (eds) Language Standardization and Language Variation in Multilingual Contexts: Asian Perspectives (#171, Multilingual Matters series). De Gruyter, pp163-182. https://doi.org/10.21832/9781800411562-011
Grey, A. (2021) Language Rights in a Changing China: A National Overview and Zhuang Case Study, Abridged Mandarin Version (translated by Gegentuul Baioud), pp1-22. Language on the Move: Sydney. http://hdl.handle.net/10453/172165
Grey, A. (2021, published online 2019). ‘Tourist tongues: high-speed rail carries linguistic and cultural urbanisation beyond the city limits in Guangxi, China’, Applied Linguistics Review 12(1). 11-37. DOI: 10.1515/applirev-2019-0099.
Grey, A. and Baioud, G. (2021). ‘Education Reforms Aim to Mold Model Citizens from Preschool in the PRC’. China Brief. 21 (17) 23-29. The Jamestown Foundation: Washington. https://jamestown.org/program/educational-reforms-aim-to-mold-model-citizens-from-preschool-in-the-prc/
Grey, A. and Martin, K. (2024). ‘Making Zhuang Language Visible’ [Video]. UTS. [link TBC] K Thorpe, L Booker, A Grey, D Rigney, and M Galassi (2021) The Benefits of Aboriginal Language Use and Revival – Literature Review. UTS Jumbunna Institute of Indigenous Education and Research. https://www.alt.nsw.gov.au/assets/Uploads/downloads/files/The-Benefits-of-Aboriginal-Language-Use-and-Revival-in-New-South-Wales-Literature-Review.pdf

Transcript (by Brynn Quick; added on February 21, 2025)

Brynn: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Brynn Quick, and I’m a PhD candidate in Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. My guest today is Dr. Alexandra Grey.

Alex is a Chancellor’s Research Fellow in the Faculty of Law at University of Technology Sydney in Australia. Alex researches laws about using or not using certain languages and how they impact upon social identities and social justice. For example, what the internationally recognized right to health obliges a government such as Australia’s to do in terms of communicating public health information in languages other than English.

Or, as another example, whether choice of language is part of freedom of expression and whether denying choice of language can be a form of racial discrimination. She is currently researching new legal directions in Australian government support for Aboriginal language renewal. Today we’re going to talk about Alex’s book entitled Language Rights in a Changing China, a National Overview and Zhuang Case Study.

This book came out in May 2021 after almost a decade of Alex’s doctoral and post-doctoral work. Her doctoral dissertation was recognized as the best dissertation on the sociology of language internationally through the 2018 Joshua A. Fishman Award.

Alex, welcome to the show and thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr Grey: Oh, hello Brynn, and I have been looking forward to this for weeks.

Brynn: As have I, I’m really excited to talk to you today. Listeners of this show and readers of the Language on the Move research blog will very obviously recognize your name and might already know a little bit about you. But I’d love for you to start us off by telling us a bit about yourself, how you became a linguist, as well as what led you to wanting to conduct research into language rights in China.

Dr Grey: Look, it’s a bit of a long story and it didn’t feel as linear in the living of it as it might sound in the retelling. So, take heart if you’re working out a pivot in your own career. But I essentially pivoted from law to linguistics.

Over a series of steps. And that was because I had always loved learning languages and learning about languages. And then in my 20s, I started learning Chinese and I found a way to move to China to work in a legal aid centre doing research and training and studying Chinese language part time.

And then I went back to university there full time. And while I was doing this and living in China, I started to learn more about the linguistic diversity in China, which I just really hadn’t realized it. And at the same time, I was also becoming more interested in the Chinese legal system, particularly the way the constitution deals with minority peoples and minority languages.

And I had always hoped one day to do a PhD. And suddenly I was starting to feel like, yes, this is my question. It’s calling to me.

So, I did a bit of asking around and I heard that Professor Ingrid Piller at Macquarie University was a superb supervisor and also quite suited to this topic. So, I met with her and we hit it off. And, you know, the rest is history in that sense.

We’ve been collaborating and working together and become friends over many years now. And so that’s how I got into the doctoral work that we’re talking about today, this law and linguistics sort of combined research that’s focused on China. And then since then, I’ve really tried to expand that more to develop both for myself and then for other people too, this sense of law and linguistics as a research field in itself, not just in my specific project.

And that’s why I do a lot with my former PhD peer and my still close friend, Dr. Laura Smith-Khan. Through the network we set up, the Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers Network.

Brynn: That’s really amazing. The fact that you were able to combine law and linguistics, which I think is probably not something that many people would automatically think go together, but those of us in the linguistics field definitely see happening quite a bit. And the need for that to happen, for research around that to happen.

So, with your research that you did in China, you, like I said, you ended up writing an entire book, which is amazing. And the title of your book talks about a Zhuang case study. So, for those who might not be familiar, can you tell us what the Zhuang language is, and why you chose to examine it in regard to language change and globalization in China?

Dr Grey: Certainly. The first reason is that for one person, one book, one PhD, all the languages of China is just too much. And so, I had to do a case study in some sense.

Part of what I was looking at was a national framework and how things work for all languages or for all official minority groups. But then I was really narrowing down. And to choose how to narrow down, I chose this group.

The people are called the Zhuangzu, and the language that is officially associated with them is called Zhuang language. I chose that because there were, on the one hand, reports that there were something like 17 million speakers of Zhuang. By population, the Zhuang people are the biggest of all the official minority groups in China.

So, they, you know, foreign minority, they have a lot of speakers. But on the other hand, there were also reports that the Zhuang, and now I’m quoting, are completely assimilated, or had, you know, lost any distinct linguistic or cultural identity. And I thought, well, that’s confusing and interesting, you know, what’s going on.

And then in addition, the Zhuang people have nominally autonomous jurisdiction over a region in South Central China called Guangxi Zhuangzu Autonomous Region. And from this legal perspective, I thought, oh, that’s interesting. Maybe there’s more power or more ability to govern language in a slightly distinctive way within China for this group.

In terms of the language itself, of course, you know, there’s just infinite variety in the way people speak. And so, when I talk about the Zhuang language, I’m really aware that I and many scholars and many people sort of talk about what is essentially a boundary we’ve put on this group, excluding some other ways of speaking that are related to Zhuang. But what is generally recognized as Zhuang language is part of a family called the TAI, Thai languages, and THAI, Thai language of Thailand, is another of those languages.

It’s also very similar to a language, arguably the same, as a language recognised as a separate language within China, a language of another different official minority group called Buyi language. But it’s essentially a range of dialects, a range of ways of speaking that have been spoken for millennia in that south central region of China, just above Vietnam and slightly to the west of Hong Kong or that sort of area. In terms of why I wanted to do a case study at all and then what else I could see, particularly through the Zhuang case study, I could tell from my preliminary research that there was this very rigid mid-20th century categorization of land into territory and associating that with certain peoples in China.

And then the kinds of legal framework that supported or appeared to support minority languages was related to that. So, it’s a very rigid mid-20th century structure. But then since the mid-20th century, China has gone through just enormous upheaval.

For example, by the time I was doing my research in the 2010s, the urbanization rate was over 50% even in this Guangxi area. The development of the economy, I think everyone knows, took off in the late 20th century. But for the Guangxi sort of area, it was a little bit later and it was really still taking off with some direct government funding in the 2010s and now.

And so, there was this real change in context, both for what was happening within Guangxi, but then also the people who were recognized as Zhuangzi people, who might be Zhuang speakers, they, like everyone else in China, was increasingly mobile, moving to cities, but also moving far away even from South Central China, elsewhere in the country. And so, there was this dispersal of what might have been expected to be a cohesive language group. And then on top of that, while the national language, which is a variety of matter in Chinese called Putonghua, while that had increasingly gained popularity over the 20th century, in the year 2000, a national law was passed that really enhanced or supported the use of Putonghua and its promulgation.

And so with these contextual factors, these changes, I thought it’s really important to use the minority as a window into what’s changing in terms of social organization and social stratification in China. And then the Zhuang seemed a particularly rich and hitherto relatively sort of unresearched group of people or languages.

Brynn: And as someone who I myself do not speak Mandarin, I don’t read it. So, coming at this from this point of ignorance, so pardon me if this is not a wise question, but can the speakers of Zhuang understand Mandarin and vice versa? Are they mutually intelligible or are they not?

Would the speakers of each language have to make a concerted effort to be able to understand the speakers of the other language?

Dr Grey: Good question Brynn. Look, they’re not related languages and so the linguistic view is that they’re mutually unintelligible. I might add that the dialects of Zhuang are also said to be mutually unintelligible to each other.

So, there’s enormous variety within Zhuang. In the mid 20th century, the Chinese government standardised Zhuang language in an attempt to form a hybrid that could be accessed by all sorts of Zhuang speakers. And then also that was for a short period of time taught to incoming government officials who came from a Mandarin speaking background.

What then happened over the latter part of the 20th century is that schooling was rolled out in the medium of Putonghua much more widely throughout the Zhuang speaking regions. And in fact, people had historically probably been multilingual in various Chinese dialects as well as Zhuang dialects in that region. But people started to have more access to and more demand placed upon them to speak standard Chinese, so Putonghua, the national language.

And so, research by people like Professor Zhou Minglang, who’s a real expert on the history of Chinese language policy and now is based at the University of Maryland. He did some work, for instance, showing that throughout the late 20th century and early 21st century, people who were categorized as being part of the Zhuang minority group were increasingly bilingual in Zhuang and Mandarin, and then also shifting towards not even speaking Zhuang at all. So, there’s a real language shift going on there.

Brynn: And is this what you were referring to when you said that in the year 2000, that the Chinese government made like a proclamation about language? Was it about this more trying to go towards this standardized Putonghua, or was it something different?

Dr Grey: It’s about that. It’s particularly carving out exclusive domains or exclusive functions where that standard Mandarin has to be used, certain types of media jobs, for example. It’s also carving out, along with education law, space for bilingual education.

So, there’s a right to Putonghua, and that has to be expressed through access to education, but there is also scope for bilingual schooling, so a language like Zhuang alongside Putonghua. So that national law is both about supporting the national language by creating exclusive domains for its use or obligations on people to use it, but also obligations on institutions like schools to promulgate or to spread Putonghua. And then alongside that, there’s been a lot of policy directed at trying to improve, if you like, the quality of people’s Putonghua, people who think they have learned it or speak it, maybe are still not speaking it in the standardized way.

And so, there’s also been since 2000, a lot of government push to get, if you like, a more universal version of Putonghua spoken and written, in particular, across all of China.

Brynn: And speaking of that idea of standardization, I’ve found it really interesting that toward the beginning of your book, you talk about how the Zhuang language, including, as you said, its dialects, went through this governmental process of written standardization from the 1950s to the 1980s. So, what did this standardization of writing mean for Zhuang? And how was it viewed by the state?

Dr Grey: It was viewed by the state as really important. And this was happening not just to Zhuang initially, but to all the official minority languages in China. And for a brief time also to the majority or the national language, Putonghua, there was a real push to standardize and create alphabetic writing systems to support what was seen as a mass literacy goal.

And this was part of the building of the new nation after to the civil war in the mid 20th century. What happened with Zhuang in particular is there were sort of two phases of standardization. And this happened to oral or spoken Zhuang as well, but we’ll particularly talk about the writing as you asked.

And this was done with the participation of Zhuang people but led by the government. In the 1950s, a writing system was developed that used a mix of Cyrillic letters and the kind of letters that our listeners might be very familiar with from the alphabet we use for English. And it had no diacritic tones.

It used letters to represent letters that looked like numbers in terminal positions to indicate the tone, the numerically ordered tone. I’ve explained that a little bit badly, but it’s a bit confusing.

And then in the 1980s, there was a renewed push towards the standardization of written Zhuang, but at the same time, a push to make it more typable. And so, the Cyrillic letters were dropped and it reduced to just the 26 letters that we also know from the English alphabet. There’s an official auxiliary Romanized script for the standard national version of Chinese as well.

And that uses the same letters, but it doesn’t use V. So, it uses 25 letters and Zhuang uses 26. Now, a few things happened along the way here.

First, there just wasn’t that much teaching of literacy in either of these standard forms of writing Zhuang. And so, people just didn’t learn to use standard Zhuang in this way. And then something I talk about particularly not in the book, but in an open access chapter that people could look up and read for free from 2022 in a book called Language Standardization in Asia edited by McClelland and Zhao.

And in that chapter, I talk about how marketization interacted with standardization of Zhuang. And in particular, something I’m drawing out there is that there ceased to be a visually recognizable or iconic version of the language. And that then also reduced the prospects of using Zhuang in certain more commodified ways as a visual icon, or even just making it recognizable as something distinct from English or Mandarin Chinese when people look at it written in the linguistic landscape.

And so, this standardization process created, as I say in that chapter, an obsolescent form of Zhuang, perhaps not intentionally, but it became increasingly inaccessible to Zhuang speakers. And I should just put there that in the background, historically, Zhuang was not standardized, but it was written by certain people in Zhuang speaking communities who had a sort of social role to be a scribe or to be someone with a literacy practice. And David Holm has written some phenomenal work on this, this really intricate histories of the use of what are called the old Zhuang character script.

So, in particular, if people are interested, he’s got a great book from 2013 on that older writing system.

Brynn: That’s what I was going to say. Was there more of the character-based writing system before this standardized, more Latin-based alphabet that you said was brought in? And it sounds like yes.

Dr Grey: Yes, there was. It just wasn’t widely known either because literacy just wasn’t a widely taught individual practice historically.

Brynn: For anyone, really, in any language context. Yeah.

Dr Grey: Exactly. Exactly. And so, when the government came to interest itself in the standardization of Zhuang, it counted Zhuang as a language with no written script along with certain other minority languages.

And that’s why there was this sort of full tilt effort to create this Romanized or alphabetic way of writing Zhuang.

Brynn: Fascinating that they kind of landed on the Romanized form and they ended up dropping the Cyrillic form. And you said a lot of that was for ease of typing, yeah, in the 1980s?

Dr Grey: That’s my understanding. I mean, there’s some other things to it too, because China was increasingly estranged from the Soviet Union and the Soviet linguists that it had previously worked with. More on that sort of thing can be found in a book by Thomas Mullaney.

He’s got some great work on the history of type and type technology in the Chinese context. In addition to a book I should have mentioned before, he’s got a wonderful book on the initial creation of these minority peoples into official minorities and official languages associated with each and the kinds of divisions or merging together that happened for certain people. And he’s traced back to the diaries and the field notes of the Chinese government’s linguistic ethnographers who went out to do a whole lot of survey work and then early census data from the mid-20th century.

So that’s a wonderful resource to really bring home this idea that people maybe just don’t realize that, you know, are people or a language, neither of these is a natural fact. These are important, but they’re social facts. And we can see in the Chinese context more than in some other contexts, that process of construction.

And one of the reasons we can see that more is the government is more involved using laws and policies and records and documentation in that construction than perhaps in other contexts like other countries.

Brynn: That’s what I find fascinating in your book is that process of construction. And that’s what really comes through in the book. And it was something that I myself hadn’t really thought that much about.

And something else that I learned in reading your book was that Imperial China standardized Mandarin script and then actually banned non-Mandarin scripts in the third century BCE and that there has always been a national narrative around language and its use in China. And you talk about how the China of today has a national constitution that addresses non-standard or minority languages and scripts, like you were talking about with the Zhuang language. So, tell us about what the Chinese Constitution says about language, including these minority languages, and what your research found about how minority language rights are actually interpreted in practice.

Dr Grey: Thanks for that question. And that really gets to the heart of why I did this project. You know, what is in that Constitution and what does it mean in practice?

So, the Constitution in Article 4 gives the recognized minorities, and there are 55 recognized official minority groups in China, the freedom to use and develop their language. And then separately in Article 19, there is also a right to the national standard language, Putonghua. And so, there’s been constitutional reform over the last 70-odd years, but there’s always been some version of that freedom to use and develop minority languages.

And then one of the things that flows from that is a quite intricate and I would argue quite fractured system of authority, different government institutions at the national and the regional and the local level dealing with different aspects of language governance. And then on top of all of that, there is, I would say, a narrative or a preoccupation that sort of cuts against making the most of that freedom. And that is particularly what I call developmentalism, an ideology, a language ideology, but more broadly, an ideology of developmentalism that comes through in the laws and policies about language.

And that positions languages as falling into either less developed or more developed languages, which in itself can be really problematic or stifling for people’s expectations or people’s use or what people do with policy. And then also, increasingly, there is a sense that some languages are no longer useful. They’re not instrumental for particular economic development.

And I mean minority languages. And so, there’s less expectation or less push to, say, teach them in education because it is seen that the work of bringing people together has already been done. And now, that development needs to happen through the medium of Putonghua, or maybe I should say through the embodied citizenship of Putonghua speaking citizens.

And over time, there’s been other narratives as well that go with language. One that sort of waxes and wanes, but probably is ascendant at the moment, is a sense that you have to have allegiance to a language to have allegiance to a nation. And the flip side of that, if you are bilingual, you are inherently underlined.

Some people call this linguistic securitization. In my own data, I didn’t sense that people who were bilingual were identifying as both Zhuang and Chinese. There was a layered identity for them, but not a raptured or conflicting identity necessarily.

The other discourse that’s really prominent in Chinese language policy is poverty alleviation. And the idea that people are very poor and the solution to that is better access to Putonghua. And I don’t talk about this at length in my book, but one, maybe not one, I wonder to what extent that poverty is caused by speaking a language other than Putonghua.

And to what extent coming out of poverty needs to come at the expense of that home language or that traditional language or that minority language.

Brynn: I feel like that’s something that could be said of many different language contexts in many different countries and cultures. And we certainly see it in the English-speaking world as well.

Dr Grey: Enormously in the English-speaking world. This sense that not only is English the ticket to development, but that any other language is actually holding you back and a waste of time.

Brynn: Yeah, exactly. And you mentioned just a couple of minutes ago, the idea of the linguistic landscape. And that brings me to a question that I have about the type of methodology that you used while you were conducting this research that would later become the book.

So, you described this as a lived linguistic landscape methods. Now, listeners of this show will have heard previous episodes where we talk about linguistic landscape studies. But can you tell us what the difference is between sort of your standard linguistic landscape study and a lived linguistic landscape methodology?

And then how did you use it in this research?

Dr Grey: I’m really proud of this aspect of the book. And the difference basically, Brynn, is putting the people back in. I think particularly when we’re talking about languages, sometimes we forget we’re talking about speakers of languages or notional inheritors to quote some other scholars, people associated with a language suffer the disempowerment or the marginalization or the advancement or whatever that comes with the use of certain languages.

And so in the lived linguistic landscape approach, or starting from this basis, which I think is there right from the origin of linguistic landscape studies, and that is a sense that not only does the built environment offer data for research about language, what language is on display, particularly written, but also maybe audio or other forms of recorded language, but that there’s a power to that. So, the initial point of departure is that the emplacement of language in this way creates a sense of normativity of what language is in place or what language is out of place in a particular physical context or in the sort of practices or discourses associated with that place. And I wanted to take that further.

And so, I brought in people, if you like, or the lived aspect in a couple of ways. First, I did walk and talk interviews with participants through various linguistic landscapes in the study to get their sense of how they interacted, what they remembered, what was important to them. When we did occasionally see Zhuang in the landscape, for example, they could tell me when they first learned to recognize it as Zhuang, how they learned to read, or what it meant to them.

Was it, for some people, it’s actually very offensive because they didn’t like the way it was written. These sort of things, these sort of more subjective or perceptual data came from walking through but also living in the landscapes in a more ethnographic where I spent a lot of time in these places. And then I took that another layer up, if you like, in what I call my Linguascaping Through Law layer.

And that’s to look at what law does to give agency or to not permit agency to certain kinds of actors, both to be authors in the public space, but also to be regulators of language in the public space. And then another aspect I added in there, there had already been quite a bit of research at this point on what was called the Semiotic Landscape, looking beyond just linguistic data in the landscape to other meaning making. But I focused that Semiotic Landscape data a little bit more on how we saw or didn’t see people doing Zhuang language or people being Zhuang speakers represented in the landscape.

And I found that they weren’t. They were representations of Zhuang culture in certain kinds of landscapes using motifs associated with Zhuang history and musical practice and weaving, textiles, that sort of thing, costumes. But there wasn’t a representation of being a Zhuang speaker, of practicing Zhuang language that wasn’t represented semiotically in the environment.

And to a large extent, it wasn’t linguistically represented either. And then the laws that intervened or shaped the linguistic landscape were not doing a lot to support individual language use in the landscape. They were allowing and at times mandating the government to use standardized Zhuang in certain naming practices or certain kind of signage.

And that’s, you know, that’s not nothing, but it’s a very particular kind of authorship. It’s a very particular kind of discourse that it participates in.

Brynn: And you conducted this research into language rights in China, but talking to you, I’m kind of hearing a lot that reminds me of even here in Australia, how English is positioned, how speakers of minority languages are positioned, the linguistic landscapes that we might see around Sydney, for example, in other languages.

So, I’m curious as to whether or not you saw or you see parallels between how the Chinese state treats language and how language is treated by the Australian government here in Australia. So, what similarities or differences do you see between these two nations’ policies around language?

Dr Grey: Yeah, I see these resonances too, Brynn. And, you know, for that reason, I urge all listeners, even if you work in other contexts, if you work in North America or Europe, go and read my book. You know, it’s not another planet.

It says something about language policy in general, this book. But in terms of Australia specifically, that’s where we now both live. That’s where I focus my current research.

I’m constantly seeing some parallels. You know, the first parallel is, of course, there is enormous linguistic diversity. And we might think of it as both old and new.

There were languages in Australia that have been spoken for millennia, likewise in China. And then there’s also linguistic diversity that’s come more recently through the migration or the sort of reorganisation of where people live. There are also some really similar current policy concerns.

In China, there’s a lot of investment and policy towards building what’s called a cybermuseum of languages that’s going to gather all sorts of resources about minority languages in a digital form. Australia is not quite as far along in that, but the same idea is actually underway at the national level, as I understand it. Another thing that’s really similar in both is the way linguistic diversity is transformed in the urban environment.

It doesn’t entirely go away, but it becomes marginalised or stratified, I would say, in the sense of how language is used in the built environment of this city, and what it does or doesn’t say about the sociolinguistic order in that city. I actually am trying to steer some current research of mine further towards lived linguistic landscape work in Australia, because I think there is an interesting overlap there. In terms of what’s different, look, in Australia, the politics of indigeneity are much more developed, much more important in the local context.

I would say also that demands from indigenous people, and in Australia, we particularly think of both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups, demands from those groups for access to their linguistic resources and control over language policy, I think is stronger here, particularly in recent years. When I first started this research, something I thought was different is that Australia is a nation that doesn’t really concern itself with language as a national or constitutional issue. Whereas China, as you pointed out in an earlier question, has for a very long time.

But I think that is changing actually in Australia. There is a move towards national language policy in Australia again. And of course, there’s still that de facto policy of English as the national language, or I think it’s Francis Holt has used the phrase aspirational monolingualism in the North American context.

I think we can see that here and in China. Of course, when you stop to think about Australia, the Australian government and the state governments have involved themselves in language policy and laws about language, actually since the early days of colonisation, but usually in a more obstructive or oppressive way than we might choose to focus on today. But that history of language is a really important part of shaping, you know, what we might call civic engineering, shaping the populace, shaping also the national identity.

That’s really important in both China and Australia. And the tension between a multicultural national identity and the practice of multilingualism is something in both contexts.

Brynn: And that’s what I see quite a bit of in my own research as well. And I think it is worth going back to what you were saying about that one nation, one language ideology, that idea of, well, allegiance to a country is going to necessitate allegiance to a certain language or certain dialect. And I think we absolutely see that here in Australia as well, especially with certain political groups, certain people who have certain ideologies about languages, and what that says about our allegiance to a country too.

Dr Grey: Believe me, Brynn, and I would add to that to what I call a zero-sum mentality. You know, it’s very easy for people in China, in Australia, many other places to argue, well, we need everyone to speak the same language. We need to support that through policy and schools and rules so that we can get things done, so that it’s cohesive to govern, so that the economy runs well.

You know, I’m not necessarily saying that that is wrong, but in addition to that, people can have more than one language, and many people around the world still do, and historically people have been very multilingual, and we tend to forget that you can have a lingua franca and something else, and then when we remember it, often we talk about it in this zero-sum. Well, if you have another language, that’s, you know, that’s reducing your ability in that lingua franca. It’s undermining your accent or the time you can spend learning to read or, you know, whatever.

It’s somehow a deficit that’s holding back your participation in that lingua franca community, and in doing so, you’re, you know, you’re robbing us all of a sort of a chance for prosperity. It’s, you know, it’s a very loaded kind of zero-sum thinking, and it doesn’t need to be that way. And a lot of the, you know, the interviewees in this podcast series have spoken about that, usually in reference to English rather than Mandarin.

But this idea that it can be, you know, lingua franca and, and that can be really beneficial for you and your community and your nation.

Brynn: Exactly. I agree. And I want to know what’s next for you.

Are you continuing this work into China? You mentioned that you wanted to maybe do a lived linguistic landscape in Australia. Do you have any projects that you’re working on now?

Where are you headed now?

Dr Grey: Yeah, look, everything’s happening slowly because good research takes time. But this year, I’ve, so this is 2024 when we’re recording. I’ve just had an article accepted in the Melbourne Asia Review and I’ve also just with my wonderful research assistant, Kristin Martin, produced a little video that will be online soon and both of those are about the Chinese context.

The video is particularly drawing out some ideas to do with language display policy and who that assists or whose aspirations that represents and the short article, which will be freely available online, that’s updating Chinese language policy to look particularly at the use of constitutional law mechanisms in recent years and how that is adding to the infrastructure in support of Putonghua. But other than those things, I’m now going to park my focus on China because I’m really, really interested in what I’m doing in my new project or relatively new project and it needs all of my attention.

I’m working with Kristin who I just mentioned and a couple of other colleagues here from the UTS Jumbunna Institute and a scholar from Sydney Uni who are all indigenous people from the eastern part of Australia and together we’re doing a project that’s really examining the role of the state and in particular the use of government resources like laws in Aboriginal language renewal with a focus on this eastern, southeastern part of Australia.

One of the big questions we have there or the motivation for the study is how is this push for sovereignty or how is this principle of self-determination able to sit with the renewed interest of governments in Australia in Aboriginal language renewal?

Brynn: Wow, that sounds amazing. I can’t wait to hear more about that. Alex, thank you so much for coming on and chatting with me today and I highly recommend this book to everyone.

Dr Grey: Brynn, it’s just a delight to talk about all these years of research and thinking.

Brynn: It makes a big difference when we get to talk about our work, doesn’t it?

Thank you so much and thank you for listening everyone. If you liked our chat today, please subscribe to the Language on the Move Podcast. Leave a five-star review on your podcast app of choice and recommend the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends. Till next time.

Image 1: Chinese and international brands in the most developed commercial area of Rongwo (Image credit: Giulia Cabras)

One of the most striking aspects that catches the attention of researchers or travelers visiting ethnic minority areas in Northwest China is the rapid growth of infrastructure, new buildings, and commercial activities. In Tibetan areas such as Amdo (Qinghai), regions that were once predominantly rural are now becoming increasingly urbanized, transforming into fully developed towns amidst valleys, mountains, and pasturelands. As urbanization expands, public signage plays a significant role in shaping the visual identity of these emerging urban spaces.

In this post, I will guide you through the town of Rongwo (Chinese: Longwu), its commercial signs, and how they reflect broader trends of urbanization and economic development. Located in the Rebgong (Chinese: Tongren) Tibetan Autonomous County in the Rma lho (Chinese: Huangnan) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Rongwo is undergoing rapid urbanization and migration. The town has a population of approximately 50,000, with Tibetans constituting the majority ethnic group; it also hosts Han, Hui, and Salar ethnic groups.

In Tibetan autonomous areas, the use of Tibetan in public spaces is legally mandated. However, there is often a significant gap between language policy, its implementation, and the benefits for minority languages.

Image 2 : The ice cream brand Mixue (Image credit: Giulia Cabras)

In response to the dominance of (Standard) Chinese monolingualism in Rongwo’s public spaces, local authorities introduced a series of regulations in 2017 aimed at promoting bilingualism in public signage (Regulations on Tibetan Language Work in Huangnan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture). A diachronic study of various types of public signs reveals that these measures have indeed contributed to an increase in bilingual signs in Rongwo (Wang, 2024: 196–220). Nonetheless, the study found also that, although both Chinese and Tibetan are present on signs, Chinese occupies a hierarchical position in terms of size and the amount of information provided. Exceptions to this hierarchy are observed in signs for businesses selling Buddhist religious objects, as well as in restaurants and hotels that emphasize a Tibetan connection.

While conducting research in the area, I noticed that variation in content and lexical choices across these signs reflect the products or services offered, which, in turn, highlight the different commercial trends shaping the town’s economic development.

Chinese brands and the standardization of space

Strolling through the streets of Rongwo, it is common to encounter numerous franchise shops primarily selling Chinese brands, especially in the more developed area of the city. The signage for these shops typically exhibits a similar visual organization in which the Tibetan language is smaller and marginalized.

Image 1 displays one of the main streets of Rongwo, where Chinese, written in both pinyin and characters, is significantly more visible than Tibetan. Without the small Tibetan language insertions, one might easily mistake this area for a city on the eastern coast or in central China, rather than a town at the edge of the Tibetan plateau.

Image 3: ‘Snow Ladies’ a clothing shop (top), and ‘Elegance of the Land of Snow’ a photo studio (bottom) (Image credit: Dorji Drolma)

A closer look reveals signs from well-known Chinese brands, such as Huawei and China Telecom, leaders in China’s telecommunications industry, as well as technology holdings and multinationals like Skyworth and Siemens. In some cases, such as with the Skyworth/Siemens sign, Tibetan is entirely absent.

In these cases, the content organization of the signs typically includes the Tibetan transliteration of the Chinese brand, along with a caption in Tibetan explaining the type of product or service being offered. This model is exemplified in Image 2 by the sign of a Chinese ice cream and iced tea chain store called ‘Honey snow iced city’ (蜜雪冰城 mixue bingcheng).

Conversely, the Tibetan version displays the transliteration of the Chinese name: མུས་ཞུའེ་ mus zhu’e (note that in the Amdo Tibetan dialect, mus is pronounced as [mi]). As discussed in another Language on the Move post, transliteration reflects only a semblance of bilingualism that ultimately results in the Chinese brand name being written in Tibetan.

The Tibetan content also includes the caption ‘sweet frozen drinks’ (འཁྱགས་བཟོས་བཏུང་རིགས་མངར་མོ་  ). This description in Tibetan clearly explains what the shop sells, whereas the Chinese expressions ‘honey snow’ and ‘iced city’ are more evocative and imaginative. It is noteworthy that the font of the Chinese name is creative (with character strokes designed to resemble water drops), while the Tibetan font is quite standard.

Local Tibetans I spoke with have varying perceptions and opinions regarding the content and lexical choices of these signs.

For some, a catchy and creative presentation is not important; what matters most is a clear description of the product or service offered. This clarity helps avoid misunderstandings, particularly for older generations, who are unfamiliar with the names of Chinese brands.

Image 4: A Tibetan restaurant displaying ceremonial scarves and the Kālacakra (wheel of time) on its door (Image credit: Dorji Drolma)

For others, the Tibetan content is perceived as too lengthy, complex, and unattractive. This opinion highlights a common challenge faced by minority languages competing with concise languages such as Chinese, a phenomenon also documented for the Uyghur language (Dwyer 2005: 28).

Signaling Tibetan identity

Rongwo is also home to local businesses, often related to restaurants, clothing, religious paraphernalia, and thangka art. In these shops, we observe a more balanced visual representation of Tibetan and Chinese, suggesting that making Tibetan more visible positively impacts their commercial activity. Moreover, Tibetan serves as the source language, as evidenced by terms that refer to Tibetan landscape and philosophical-religious tradition.

Some examples are shown in Image 3: ‘Elegance of the Land of Snow’, a photo studio (གངས་ལྗོངས་སྒེག་ཉམས་), a restaurant named after the rope used by kings to ascend to heaven (རྨུ་ཐག་), ‘Snow Ladies’, a clothing shop (ཁ་བ་བུ་མོ་), ‘Treasury of Zambala’, a clothing shop, named after the Buddist fortune god Zambala (ཛམ་དཀར་ གཏེར་མཛོད་).

Often, the signs display visual elements, such as ceremonial scarves, philosophical and religious symbols such as the wheel of time or the wish-fulfilling gem, and Tibetan greetings or blessings, as shown in Images 4 and 5.

Local Tibetans I spoke with expressed positive opinions about the choice of shop names and emphasized the growth of local Tibetan entrepreneurship in sectors such as accommodation, Tibetan food, clothing, and art, and  Buddhist items, contributing to the local community both culturally and economically. In this case, the Tibetan language can be seen as a form of linguistic capital, serving the dual purpose of ‘pride and profit’ (Duchêne and Heller, 2012): it emphasizes a sense of belonging to the ethnic group while also bringing economic benefits.

Language and urbanization: opportunities and challenges

Image 5: A Tibetan clothing shop featuring the norbu membar (wish-fulfilling gem) on the sign, with the blessing ‘May you be well’ (ཨོཾ་བདེ་ལེགས་སུ་གྱུར་ཅིག།) written on a red piece of paper above the door (Image credit: Giulia Cabras)

The linguistic landscape of Rongwo reflects the commercial development of the town, which appears to follow two contrasting directions.

One model of development is based on Chinese brands, and to a lesser extent, multinational companies, making towns in Tibetan areas indistinguishable from other cities in inner and coastal China. In this scenario, Tibetan is present primarily due to language regulations but remains marginalized in terms of size and content.

The other model is fueled by local or Tibetan entrepreneurship, where the Tibetan language and references to Tibetan cultural heritage play a role in shaping the nature of the business and enhancing its appeal.

The perceptions of local Tibetans regarding the content of commercial signs reveal both the opportunities and challenges that minority languages face, highlighting critical aspects of language policy and urban development.

In some instances, Tibetan is merely a transliteration of Chinese brands, and lacks the attractiveness expected from commercial signage. This demonstrates how even languages with an established literary tradition, such as Tibetan, struggle to compete with nationally promoted languages and standardized models of economic and urban development.

References

Duchêne Alexandre & Monica Heller (eds.). 2012. Language in late capitalism: Pride and profit. New York and Oxford: Routledge.
Dwyer, Arienne M. 2005. The Xinjiang Conflict: Uyghur Identity, Language Policy, and Political Discourse. Policy Studies East-West Center Washington D.C.
Wang, Zixi. 2024. Contacts des langues dans le paysage linguistique scolaire. Regards sociolinguistiques et géo-sémiotiques sur l’Amdo (Qinghai). Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3.

Acknowledgement

This blog post was written as part of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions project “(In)visibility of Multilingualism in Amdo Tibet”, funded by the European Union (Project 101106116). Project website: https://userblogs.fu-berlin.de/invisibility-multilingualism-amdo/

For some images of Ibrar’s work, check out the Sino-Muslim Literacies Project.

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The interview explores the Alliance’s origins, research themes, and future directions. The episode not only highlights the significant contributions of this dynamic research group but also provides a glimpse into the personal and professional journeys that have shaped this academic endeavor.

Enjoy the show!

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Further reading

Li, C., Shen, Q., Zhao, K., & Zheng, Y. (2022). The Shanghai alliance of multilingual researchers: Fudan University, Tongji University, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, and Shanghai International Studies University, China. Language Teaching, 55(4), 583-587. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261444821000379

Transcript

Yixi (Isabella) and Yongyan present about language management in global corporations

Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Yixi Qiu. You can call me Isabella.

I’m a PhD candidate in Applied Linguistics in Fudan University, Shanghai, China. I’m also a member of the Language on the Move team. My guest today is Professor Yongyan Zheng, a full professor at the College of Foreign Languages and Literature, Fudan University, Shanghai, China, where she teaches English academic writing and applied linguistics.

Her research interests include second language development, bilingual and multilingual education, and academic literacy practices. She is the editor-in-chief of Language, Culture, and Curriculum, and also the co-editor-in-chief of System. She is a leading scholar in the Shanghai Alliance of Multilingual Researchers. In today’s interview, we will focus on this Shanghai Alliance of Multilingual Researchers, talking about the motivations behind the Alliance, its key research themes, and some of the methodological innovations that the Alliance has pioneered. Welcome to the show, Professor Zheng.

Zheng: Thank you, Isabella, for having me today.

Bella: Could you please start us off by telling us a little bit about this Shanghai Alliance, its members, and its main focus?

Zheng: Yes. We are a group of scholars from four leading universities in Shanghai, especially the northeast part of Shanghai, including Fudan University, Tongji University, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, and Shanghai International Studies University. We’ve been working together for over 15 years already, and our focus is on the role of multilingualism in China’s unique cultural and educational landscape. Now, our team includes about 10 core researchers, and we are also currently guiding around 30 master’s students, doctoral and postdoctoral researchers. Our work covers three main areas, multilingualism in language education, its influence in Chinese society, and the research methods we use to explore these topics.

Bella: Well, thank you very much for the introduction, Professor Zheng. Now, I’m quite curious about the origins of this Shanghai Alliance. What motivated you and other members to establish this group?

Zheng: The idea for the Alliance actually started from personal connections and shared interests among leading scholars. We are, me, of course, and then Professor Qi Shen from Tongji University, Professor Ziting Li from Shanghai International Studies University, and Professor Ke Zhao at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. We actually are friends in our life, and Professor Li and Professor Zhao and I, we went to the same PhD program, and so our friendship goes way back. But then we work together, and especially our universities are quite close to each other, so we believe in knowledge construction, we share common interests in exploring multilingualism.

Then we say, why don’t we just start our own alliance? Well, there is a little story here. When we first started, we didn’t call ourselves Shanghai Alliance, but gradually, through our practice, we realized that we were doing something really significant. Originally, we wanted to call ourselves Wujiaochang Alliance, because Wujiaochang, namely the Pentagon Square, is where the four universities are located. But then we thought probably Shanghai Alliance, this name is easier to remember, and here we go.

Bella: Okay, thank you very much, and especially thank you very much for telling us the story behind this group. Could you please share the core philosophy behind Shanghai Alliance? How do you personally view its role and impact of this alliance?

Zheng: Yes, so as I mentioned before, we believe in collaboration, we believe in sharing our research, and particularly because we are doing multilingualism, we believe in the concept of researching multilingually.

So this approach was actually proposed by Professor Prue Holmes and her colleagues at Durham University UK, but then we believe that this approach is also suitable for our own research agenda. This approach encourages the use of multiple languages in the entire process of doing research, from idea generation, data analysis, interpretation, knowledge dissemination. So this approach enables us to orchestrate diverse linguistic and intellectual as well as cultural resources to cover a broader range of topics and break free from the constraints of single language research traditions.

Personally, I think this alliance is especially driven by the philosophy of researching multilingually as a transformative force in the field of applied linguistics, because it allows us to pull our resources together, our ideas, expertise, methodological repertoires together, not only to enhance our collective understanding of multilingualism, but more importantly, to impact how multilingualism is studied and understood in Chinese society.

Bella: Thank you very much for sharing the philosophy behind this group, and researching multilingually is indeed impressive, as it emphasizes the process rather than just the outcome, and emphasizing the cooperation and the growth that can be the most rewarding aspects of studying multilingualism. I have the personal experience in that aspect as well.

And as we discuss how multilingualism is studied and understood in society, you mentioned earlier three main areas of focus within the alliance, and could you please introduce about the multilingualism in education, how do you approach multilingualism in language education in your alliance? Y

Zheng: Yes, of course. The main concern or the very first impetus for me to put my emphasis on multilingualism in language education was the realization that there was too much emphasis on English, despite the fact that I was an English professor. So, our work in this area wants to look at language in education planning at a macro as well as the meso level, and we also want to explore the lived experiences of multilingual teachers and learners at different levels.

For instance, I had the opportunity to collaborate with Professor Andy Gao from the University of New South Wales, and we together co-guest edited a special issue entitled Multilingualism and Higher Education in Greater China, for the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development back in 2019. This special issue was very well received by the readers, and some of the articles were still highly cited even until today. So, then our interest actually expanded to not only the lived experiences of students, but also to the meso level language planning.

Researchers such as Dr Xiuwen Chen, Professor Ke Zhao, and Dr Jian Tao from the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics have conducted a series of studies in the context of China’s national initiative to diversify foreign language education. Me, myself, and also my PhD students have also explored how an elective Arabic program was successfully implemented at Fudan University. So, these initiatives have some social impact on the learning experiences of our students as well.

Another focus is teacher development, because we believe that teacher development or teacher in-service training is also a critical component of our multilingual education planning. So, researchers in our alliance have launched various projects aimed at supporting multilingual teachers’ development, particularly in response to the huge pressure of the university research assessment system.

Bella: Thank you so much for the detailed introduction to the first theme. Let’s move forward then. I think we are particularly curious about the next focus area. I think it’s the multilingualism in Chinese society. How does this alliance explore the complexities of multilingualism in China?

Zheng: The second theme is related to another strand, language policy and planning and the sociolinguistics or let’s say the sociology of language that we have been focusing on. This strand is particularly featured by Professor Qi Shen and his team at Tongji University. They have been very productive in this area, particularly through their work over the past five years.

Back in 2019, Professor Shen and Professor Andy Gao also guest-edited a special issue entitled Multilingualism and Policymaking in Greater China, Ideological and Implementation Spaces for the Journal Language Policy. This special issue was also highly cited. So, they explored the notion of resource orientation and then they want to see how this notion allows various stakeholders to negotiate language policies which could help preserve linguistic diversity within China’s tradition of linguistic unity.

Bella: Yes, that sounds like a critical exploration of policy that could actually shape the future language policy and planning in significant ways.

Zheng: Yes, right. We hope so. And at the micro level, our research explores family language planning. We’ve looked at ethnic male families in southwest China, ethnic Korean migrant families in Shanghai, urban families of varying socioeconomic statuses. So, our studies highlight the intricate interplay of family dynamics, socioeconomic factors, language practices and identity against the backdrop of China’s modernization, urbanization and globalization.

And currently, we’re also examining Chinese transnational families in the USA, in Latin America as well as Arabic families doing business in China. We want to explore topics including heritage language maintenance, adolescence bilingual identity construction, parental agency as well as language ideologies. We believe that these topics are highly insignificant for us to understand the linguistic diversity and how people from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds can equally participate in social affairs.

Bella: Yeah, indeed. And it’s really fascinating to see such a wide range of research areas that you mentioned. And then how about the third strand? The third strand is about multilingualism in the workplace.

Zheng: We are studying how multinational corporations in China manage language policies and practices. For instance, Professor Ke Zhao and her team at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics have analyzed a Spanish bank’s language management in Shanghai, the complex language dynamics in foreign banks against the changing context of foreign direct investment. And they also explored corporate language capacity at a German IT multinational company in Shanghai.

So, they emphasized the crucial role of middle-level management in designing and implementing language-related activities to support the goal of developing corporate language competence. I believe this strand is also related to the focus, the economic and financial focus of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. And nowadays, Professor Ke Zhao and her team are also focusing on the language or the corporate language capacity building of Chinese corporations which want to go overseas. So, I believe that this is an interesting, under-explored area in social linguistics.

Bella: Wow, thank you for outlining how the second theme is approached in the alliance, with each member bringing their unique focus. Given the innovative approaches you’ve mentioned, our audience might be eager to learn more about the research methodologies utilized by the alliance. Could you elaborate on some of these methodological innovations used in this alliance?

Zheng: Yes, we believe that methodological innovations are indispensable for pushing the boundaries of theoretical development. So, guided by this kind of spirit, our group places a strong emphasis on pioneering qualitative research methods. For instance, my colleagues and I are the first batch of Chinese researchers who use the Q methodology in applied linguistics.

This method has proven useful in offering a systematic and a comprehensive exploration of subjectivity. So, we have already published a lot on Q methodology. For example, on a modern language journal, language teaching research, and also a journal of multilingual and multicultural development.

If you’re interested, you’re very welcome to check our publications on those journals. Additionally, we explore the use of social network analysis. For example, Professor Ziting Li from Shanghai International Studies University combines this social network analysis with ethnographic methods to study the pragmatic choices of international students in China.

Currently, Li and her team are applying different social network analysis techniques in their projects. One focuses on how multilingual STEM doctoral students from Africa and South America construct their personal networks to support their academic endeavors in China. And the other project examines the interaction between various types of support and personal network development in enhancing Chinese language teachers’ professional capacities.

Bella: I’m truly impressed by the theoretical and especially methodological advancements achieved by the alliance. And building on this, could you please explain how this alliance, this Shanghai alliance, promotes and shares its research and findings both within the academic community and with the wider public?

Zheng: The alliance is committed to advancing research methods on multilingualism among Chinese researchers. And equally important, we are committed to training early career researchers who are interested in doing multilingual research in Chinese contexts.

So we have already hosted eight language studies forums for emerging scholars since 2015. The most recent forum focused on English medium instruction in emerging contexts and attracted around 2,000 participants online. We have also invited distinguished scholars like Professor Li Wei from UCL, Professor Zhu Hua from UCL to conduct workshops on multilingualism and academic writing.

These events were offered mostly free to Chinese researchers. And we have also three social media accounts that share research insights and they have already gathered more than 20,000 subscribers. The upcoming forum, we call it the language studies forum for emerging scholars, the upcoming one will be held in early July.

That will be the ninth forum in a row. We hold this kind of forum every year. So this year’s topic is linguistic landscape and multilingual education. We believe that this would also be a very interesting topic to explore in the Chinese higher education as well as basic education contexts.

Bella: Thank you very much and thank you for sharing the information on the upcoming event, especially the July activity. And I’m very much looking forward to participating in this productive event. And before we wrap up, could you please tell us what’s next for the Alliance? Where is this amazing community headed?

Zheng: Yes, absolutely. We will continue to focus on three main research themes and further innovate our methodological approaches. For example, we are currently enhancing our use of social networks as both a theoretical framework and an analytical tool to investigate the various aspects of multilingualism.

Our team is also advancing the use of other innovative methods like qualitative comparative analysis, QCA, and more data-driven natural language processing techniques to study language policy and planning. These techniques are crucial as we explore patterns in language and education planning and language management across educational institutions and transnational families.

Bella: Thank you. I love those ideas. It’s absolutely amazing to see the techniques expanding and developing. Thank you very much, Professor Yongyan Zheng, for speaking with us today. We really appreciate it. And thanks for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a five-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Till next time.

尽管有诸如此类的国际保护措施， 原住民在教育领域仍然处于劣势地位。 本文着眼于以超语实践理论， 探求解答这一问题的途径。

English version of this article available here.

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作者： 余星星, Nashid Nigar, 钱祺

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Tibetan Buddhist stupa and houses outside the town of Ngawa, on the Tibetan Plateau (Image credit: Wikipedia)

自体认到语言少数群体的教育困境后， 我们三人作为国际间的非土著教育工作者携手合作， 尝试提出一些新颖的教学模式。 以西藏英语课程为例， 我们将藏语和藏族文化融入藏族学生的英语课程， 旨在解决“资源不足”以及“原住民教育优先级低”的问题。 我们的重点在于反思与改革一种倾向于强调主流语言而忽视或贬低原住民语言、 文化和知识体系的教学法。

2021年， 钱祺在四川省甘孜县进行了一个月的英语教学工作。 在此地，藏族人口超过 80% （甘孜藏族自治州人民政府， 2021年)， 钱老师任教的班级， 所有的学生都是藏族人。

三语教育的现况及问题 

在具有高度多元语言背景的环境中， 钱祺发现， 以藏语进行教学时， 学生们的注意力更易凝聚。

这些学生通常接受三语教育。 他们在刚入小学时， 除了学习藏语之外， 也需学习汉语。 而当他们进入中学后， 英语课程则成为必修科目。 在此情形下， 藏族学生非但需要掌握藏语， 还需要学习另外两种语言。

近来， 研究者发现藏族学生在三语教育中有两大主要问题。 首先， 相较于汉族学生， 由于藏区教育资源的匮乏 （例如教师数量不足）， 藏族学生常被误认为是“赤字”语言学习者。 藏族文化和语言， 以及学生的民族身份， 常常被汉族主导的意识形态所轻视， 这在以普通话进行教学的英语课堂及汉族文化占主导地位的英语教科书中均有所体现。

在此背景下， 我们并没有提出一种理想化且以人权为导向的宏大改革计划 （在中国的现实情况下， 这可能并不切实际）， 而是提出了一种更务实的解决方案。 这个方案一方面在现行的教育政策框架下为可行之策， 另一方面， 它可以帮助藏族学生更快地掌握英语， 并为他们的多语言身份做出贡献。 同时， 该方案也为教师在将多语言视角纳入英语教学时行使他们的权力铺平道路。

超语实践理论的引入及课程设置 

余星星和钱祺在墨尔本大学深造期间， 在 Nashid Nigar 的指导下， 对超语实践理论有了更深入的了解。 我们讨论了如何将该理论引入到钱祺的藏族学生英语课程中。

超语实践理论对所谓的“命名语言”持批判性立场。其实践，尤其是创造性和批判性部分具有变革潜力，因为它们能超越命名语言的社会构造边界。超语实践视为一种世界观，认为说话者可通过利用他们语言工具箱中的所有资源，积极地拥抱并培养自己的多语言身份。

因此，藏区英语老师应充分利用学生的语言资源，不仅要激活学生的语言创造性（以便他们能更有效地学习英语），还要让学生有能力设疑汉族主导的语言和文化的主导地位。

以此为基础，我们为藏族学生学习英语制定了一个新的课程，主题为“发现西藏之美”，包含四堂课和一个评估任务。

首先，为了让现有的官方英语教科书对藏族学生更有价值，我们对其进行了改编，增添了有关西藏宗教、历史和地理的信息。变更后的教材主题涵盖了西藏历史上的重要人物、古代节日的描绘，以及对西藏文化的洞察。如果学生的学习材料的背景来自他们自己的文化经验，他们对英语学习将更加投入和积极。教学资源将鼓励学生透过促进藏语和英语的非等级化使用，从他们的全部语料库中取得滋养。

我们的课程中融入了许多活动。这些活动旨在向学生介绍西藏丰富的文化遗产和壮美的风光。这些活动包括学习该地区独特的动植物种类，探讨著名寺庙的历史意义，研究西藏的艺术和建筑。这些活动有助于提高学生对英语学习的投入，并在英语和他们的母语–藏语之间建立联系。

学生们将共同完成一些项目，例如制作一本小册子或一部简短的纪录片，介绍他们家乡、社区或整个青藏高原的历史、文化或自然风光。学生将被鼓励利用他们的语言能力（藏语、普通话、英语）来制作高质量的作品。这种集体努力旨在鼓励学生为自己的文化遗产和英语水平感到自豪，并在此过程中相互学习和教导。

“我眼中的西藏”是一项评估任务，根据学生制作多媒体演示文稿的能力来评分。这些演示文稿将展示西藏的某些方面的辉煌（如其文化、历史或自然风光），作为最终项目的一部分。我们鼓励学生充分利用他们的语言资源（藏语、普通话、英语），以提供一个有趣的、信息丰富的演讲。学生可以通过在抖音等社交媒体网站上发布他们的演讲，接受来自同伴和网络社区的反馈和建议。

我们期望通过这个计划，能帮助藏族学生提升他们的英语水平，同时增强他们对自己文化遗产的自豪感和对西藏壮丽风景的热爱。我们相信，当学习材料引人入胜且强调团队合作时，积极的学习环境和对提高英语技能的真诚愿望自然就会萌发出来。

成功经验

钱祺的实践成果显示，通过持续练习和表达，学生对自己的英语交流能力有了更大的信心和自豪感。他们的口语流利程度显著提高，这进一步证实了自信心与语言技能之间的正相关。

在超语实践理论的指导下，钱祺对西藏英语教育的改良，帮助藏族学生接受并认同了自己的多语言性。我们认识到，在当前中国的政治体制下，建立一个完全包容和民主的课程，尊重且赞美西藏文化和语言，可能面临很大的挑战。然而，尽管政府有严格的审查和监督，但我们依然可以通过一些实际的方法，帮助使用少数民族语言的学生不仅克服语言学习的障碍，还可以肯定和提升他们的文化和语言身份。这个过程在很大程度上依赖于教师的专业能力，以及他们对回应性教学法的热诚和代理权。

我们相信，在各种各样的教学环境中，语言和写作教师都可以根据他们的需要，调整并实施这种课程改革的方法。

关于作者

余星星是墨尔本大学墨尔本教育研究生院TESOL专业的硕士。她在中国国有企业的工作经历和她在中国西部偏远地区的家庭历史，激发了她对中国教育不平等问题的研究兴趣，包括性别和民族差异，以及城乡差距。

Nashid Nigar是墨尔本大学教育研究生院的讲师，教授TESOL硕士和教育硕士课程。她正处于完成莫纳什大学教育学院博士学位的最后阶段。她的研究兴趣包括使用跨学科的理论视角和解释学现象学的叙事方式，研究澳大利亚移民教师的专业身份。

钱祺在墨尔本教育研究生院完成了他的教育硕士学位。他曾在四川省甘孜藏族自治州的甘孜民族中学担任志愿教师。他现在在另一所初中教英语。

Tibetan Buddhist stupa and houses outside the town of Ngawa, on the Tibetan Plateau (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Editor’s note: “Indigenous peoples have the right to establish and control their educational systems and institutions providing education in their own languages, in a manner appropriate to their cultural methods of teaching and learning.” (Article 14, UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples).

Despite international rights and protections such as these, indigenous people continue to experience educational disadvantage. This article examines how this disadvantage can be mitigated through translanguaging.

点击此处获取中文版本。

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Xingxing Yu, Nashid Nigar, Qi Qian

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Cognizant of the educational disadvantage of linguistic minorities, we, three non-indigenous educators, worked together internationally to experiment with and propose some novel ways to incorporate Tibetan language and culture into the English language curriculum for Tibetan students in order to overcome the obstacle of “inadequate resources and low prioritization of education for indigenous peoples.” This is important for textbooks, materials, and pedagogy that focus on the dominant language but leave out or downplay indigenous languages, cultures, and knowledge systems.

Qian, a master’s student at the University of Melbourne in 2021, spent the summer of that year teaching English in Garzê County, Sichuan Province. According to the People’s Government of Garzê Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (2021), although not physically located in Tibet, the Garzê Tibetan Autonomous Region has a Tibetan population of over 80%. All of the students at the school where Qian taught were Tibetan.

Trilingual education

Qian noticed that students pay more attention in class when they are taught in Tibetan.

These students commonly experience trilingual education. As soon as they enter primary school, they are taught Mandarin Chinese in addition to Tibetan; by the time they reach secondary school, English becomes a further compulsory subject. In this context, Tibetan students are expected to learn not just Tibetan but also two additional languages.

Two major drawbacks of trilingual education for Tibetan students have recently been uncovered by researchers. First, compared to their Han counterparts, Tibetan students tend to be stigmatized as “deficit” language learners due to a lack of educational resources (teachers, for example) in Tibetan areas. Tibetan culture and language, as well as students’ ethnic identities, are devalued by the Han-dominant ideology, which is reflected in both Mandarin-taught English classrooms and English textbooks where Han-culture predominates.

Instead of envisioning a more idealistic and human rights oriented big picture in terms of policy change, which seems impractical in China, we propose coming up with a more pragmatic approach that, on the one hand, is permissible within the realm of current educational policy. On the other hand, it can help Tibetan students learn English more quickly and contribute to their multilingual identities. It also paves the way for teachers to exercise their own agency when it comes to incorporating a multilingual lens into their instruction of English.

A new approach to curriculum

Qian and Xingxing learned about translanguaging while we were both master’s students at the University of Melbourne under Nashid Nigar. We discussed how to incorporate it into the English Language (EL) curriculum for Qian’s Tibetan students.

Translanguaging approaches take a critical stance towards named languages. Translanguaging practices, particularly the creative and critical aspect of them, have transformative potential because they are able to go beyond the socially constructed boundaries of named languages. Translanguaging is a worldview in which the speaker actively embraces and cultivates their plurilingual identity by drawing on all the resources available to them in their linguistic toolkit.

Educators in Tibetan classrooms should, then, make the most of their students’ linguistic resources in order to not only activate students’ language creation (so that they can more effectively learn English) but also to give their students the agency to question the dominance of Han-dominated language and culture.

We have developed a new curriculum for Tibetan students to learn English based on translanguaging theory. The topic is “Discovering the Beauty of Tibet,” and it consists of four classes and an assessment task.

First, in order to make the existing official English textbook more useful for Tibetan students, we adapted it by adding information about Tibetan religion, history, and geography. Stories about important figures in Tibetan history, accounts of ancient festivals, and insights into Tibetan culture have all been incorporated into the adapted materials. Students will be more invested in and motivated by their English studies if the materials they use to study are contextualized in terms of their own cultural experiences. The instructional resources will encourage students to draw from their full linguistic toolkit by facilitating a non-hierarchical use of both Tibetan and English.

Activities designed to introduce students to Tibet’s illustrious cultural heritage and breathtaking landscapes are woven into the course structure. Learning about the unique flora and fauna of the region, discussing the historical significance of famous monasteries, and researching Tibetan art and architecture are all examples of what might fall under this category. Activities like these help students become more engaged in their studies of English and make connections between that language and Tibetan, their first language.

Students will work together on projects such as making a brochure or a short documentary about the history, culture, or natural beauty of their hometowns, neighborhoods, or the Tibetan plateau as a whole. They will be prompted to draw on their abilities as Tibetan and English speakers to produce quality work. This group effort encourages students to take pride in their heritage and their English proficiency, and to teach and learn from one another.

“Tibet through My Eyes” is an assessment task. Students will be graded on their ability to produce a multimedia presentation highlighting some aspect of Tibet’s splendor (its culture, history, or nature, for example) for the final project. Students are urged to make full use of their linguistic resources (Tibetan and English) in order to deliver an interesting and informative presentation. Students can gain exposure for their talks by posting them on social media sites like Douyin (TikTok in China) and thereby receiving comments and suggestions from their peers and the online community.

This program will help Tibetan students improve their English while also fostering a sense of pride in their heritage and a desire to learn more about the stunning landscapes of Tibet. A positive learning environment and an earnest desire to improve one’s English skills will flourish when the emphasis is placed on interesting material and group work.

Successes

Student confidence and pride in their English communication skills increased noticeably after repeated practice in front of the camera. Their oral fluency dramatically increased, supporting the contention that self-confidence is correlated with foreign language profciency.

Qian’s reform of the English language education system in Tibet, which was informed by translanguaging theory, has helped Tibetan English language learners embrace their multilingualism. We believe that under China’s current political system, it is extremely unlikely that a fully inclusive and democratic curriculum that recognizes and celebrates Tibetan culture and language will ever be established. Even so, there is a lot that can be done to help minority speakers, despite the government’s strict censorship and surveillance, not only overcome language learning barriers but also affirm and promote their cultural and linguistic identities. This process relies heavily on teachers’ ability to grow professionally, as well as their own agency and ethical dedication to responsive pedagogy.

Literacy and language educators in a wide variety of settings can adapt this method of curriculum reform to meet their needs.

About the authors

Xingxing Yu holds a Master of TESOL from the University of Melbourne’s Melbourne Graduate School of Education. Experience in working in Chinese state-owned enterprises and her family history in remote areas of western China have prompted her to study educational inequities in China, including gender and ethnic disparities, as well as urban-rural imbalances.

Nashid Nigar has taught Master of TESOL and Master of Education programs at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne. She is at the final stage of completing her PhD at Monash Education. Adopting a transdisciplinary theoretical lens and hermeneutic phenomenological narrative enquiry, Nashid has investigated immigrant teachers’ professional identity in Australia.

Qi Qian completed his Master of Education at Melbourne Graduate School of Education. He has taught at Garzê Ethnic Middle School in Garzê Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province. He is now teaching English in another junior high school.

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‘The Glory’, a Korean drama, has ranked the top among the ten most watched TV and films since its release on March 10, 2023 on Netflix. The Glory has received 1.82 billion views on Weibo, the second largest Chinese social media platform at the time of writing this blog. Chinese youths, the largest group of Weibo members, are enthusiastic about discussing the plot, sharing their memes about this drama, and picking up popular terms for fandom communication.

Over the past two decades, Korean cultural products such as dramas, movies, music and dance, food, cosmetics etc. have gained worldwide popularity, and the global spread of Korean culture is known as Hallyu or Korean Wave (한류). Hallyu has been promoted by the South Korean government as cultural diplomacy and soft power projection since the 1997 financial crisis. The global promotion of Hallyu turns out to be a huge success. There are about 51.74 million population in South Korea, but the number of Hallyu community members reaches over 156 million people across the globe. China constitutes over half of the fan community with over 86 million.

As Hallyu emerges as a global cultural consumption among young people particularly in China, learning Korean has rapidly carved out a niche market for China’s youth to craft their subjectivities and produce bundles of skills. Mr. Bin He, a postgraduate student at Yunnan University under the supervision of Professor Jia Li, has conducted an ethnography with four Chinese university students on how relevant practices and discourses socialize Chinese youths to align themselves with learning Korean through self-study and out of class channels.

Even though China has the largest number of students learning English as a compulsory course, Chinese youths do not necessarily see English as the only source for empowerment and upward mobility. Chinese students who are economically and linguistically under-privileged find it more useful and easier to learn to speak ‘small languages’ (as we previously discussed here and here). This is exactly what happened to Bin’s participants who major in English but found it more desirable and promising to invest into learning Korean and dreamed of taking up Korean-related jobs.

Performing cool posture

Chinese youths develop their initial incentive to learn Korean because of their desire to get close to their Korean idols and their orientation to be part of a Korean-oriented consumption style. The digitization between China and South Korea facilitates such transnational communication. By subscribing to a paid app (about 5 $) per month, Chinese youths can get in contact with their Korean idols by listening to their voices or reading their updates online on a daily basis. They also choose to spend about 20$ collecting a Korean album imported from South Korea to show their distinct cultural taste.

Ming’s Weibo post

Their affective attachment to the Hallyu community gets closer through their interactions with other Hallyu fans on public and private social media platforms. Ming, one of Bin’s participants, has been learning Korean by himself for over six years. Like many Hallyu fans, Ming has developed basic Korean proficiency by watching Korean dramas and variety shows and listening to Korean songs. To test his Korean proficiency and to enhance his reading competence, Ming took up a volunteer job translating Korean idols’ stories into Chinese on Weibo for Chinese fans to keep updated with their idols. In addition to being recognized as a legitimate member of the Hallyu community because of his Korean proficiency, Ming also likes to share his consumption of Korean lifestyle on Weibo.

The screenshot captures Ming’s enjoyment with his friends drinking 참이슬 (“Chamisul”), the most popular brand of Korean liquor that frequently appears in Korean dramas, TV series, and variety shows. 참이슬 is recontextualized as symbolic source styling himself as someone cool and authentic. Using English ‘talk with’ indicates both modernity and the imagined engagement with the Korean world as Ming told us in interview: “感觉喝着烧酒，仿佛喝着烧酒就置身于韩剧中。” (“I feel like drinking soju, it’s like I’m physically in a Korean drama while drinking soju.”)

Consuming desire

Longing is one of the most featured themes in Korean dramas. The filming locations of hit Korean dramas are often promoted as must-go destinations for Chinese tourists travelling to South Korea. For Chinese youths who are living and studying in China, love stories constitute an important part of their romantic imagination as reported by Fang, a Chinese female university student: “想去首尔学习生活，去看看电视剧里出现的各种场景。” (“I dream of studying and living in Seoul. I want to visit the featured locations that appear in Korean dramas.”

Fang’s post

As someone who was born and brought up in the hinterland, Fang has grown up with the imagination of the sea, and the sea is often depicted as semiotic potential for romance in Korean dramas. Fang expressed her sense of attachment to 갯마을 차차차 (Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha), a romantic story in a small coastal village. She posted a moment on her Chinese social media in Korean: “아~듣기만 해도 바다 냄새 맡은 것 같애” (“Wow～ Just listening [to the song in Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha] I feel like the smell of the sea”).

Fang’s sense of enjoyment and desire is also expressed by her semiotic and linguistic choices. Using tilde ‘～’ after ‘wow’ (아) emphasizes her desire and longing. The choice of using Korean indexes her sense of feeling distinct and unique compared to her Chinese peers who might understand English but who are unlikely to be able to read Korean.

Crafting a niche in learning Korean

Ad for Korean online classes

Both Ming and Fang started to learn Korean online through various apps after they had been exposed to Hallyu for some time. Their desire to seriously invest in learning Korean took a clearer form when they saw an ad for online classes:

Why learn a small language
Korean

• The most accessible second foreign language. You will be surrounded by Korean from the moment you turn on your app.

• There are about 70% of Chinese words in Korean. Korean is the language that sounds like ancient Chinese. Chinese students learning Korean do not start from zero.

• Cheap tuition fee for overseas study. The best choice for the working-class family.

• Advanced educational system with the combination of the East and the West and world-leading IT shipping industry, mass communication, e-sports etc. All of these advantages can provide Korean learners with more opportunities.

In contrast to the way Chinese youths learn English, learning Korean has been discursively constructed as ‘accessible’, ‘easy’, ‘affordable’ and ‘advanced’. This promotion discourse is particularly attractive to those who cannot afford to travel to Western countries and who are fed up with the exam-driven learning style in English. As confessed by Ming, “我就是不知道为什么我对好莱坞电影、美剧不感兴趣，我想可能是讨厌英语总是考试吧” (“I just don’t know why I didn’t have any interest in watching Hollywood movies or American TV series. I guess it’s because I was tired of taking English exam.”)

Feeling cosmopolitan

After two years of formal training at a language school, Ming decided to take the Test of Proficiency in Korean (TOPIK), and pursue her master’s degree in South Korea after her graduation from an English department in China. When she prepared her application documents, she worked as an English tutor for a Korean family where she taught two children English in Korean. Because of her capacity in Korean, Fang was able to communicate with the Korean mother about her children’s English performance, which in turn facilitated her Korean oracy. Over two years, Fang used the money she earned by working as an English teacher to pay for her Korean language test and tuition fee for Ewha Womans University.

Fang’s chat

In September 2022, Fang started her postgraduate study online due to the restricted travel policy and the Covid-19 pandemic. Fang was eager to go to South Korea and socialize with local people to fulfill her Korean dream. While doing her online classes, she liked to share with her WeChat friends her Korean learning experiences.

The image in Fang’s chat shows the official promotion image of her Korean university with the blooming cherry flowers and one of its famous buildings. By re-posting this world-famous university, Fang also displays her privileged access to advanced education in Seoul, a cosmopolitan city with all her imagination for study and lifestyle in South Korea, as commented by her post “나한테 이게 학교아냐 자유다” (“To me, this is not only a school but also freedom.”) It is worth noting that Fang’s choice of studying in South Korea is partly due to her unwillingness to follow a planned life trajectory by working as an English teacher in her hometown like her peers. Despite her parents’ disagreement with her decision, Fang gave up working as an English teacher and chose to take the risk of investing into an unknown future with Korean.

Becoming entrepreneurial

Apart from desire and cosmopolitanism, Hallyu also displays a strong embodiment of neoliberal discourse upon individuals. Both Ming and Fang have been nurtured by entrepreneurial discourses while exposing themselves to Hallyu. Self-entrepreneurial ethos prevails in many Korean songs, books, and movies. Growing up with Hallyu for over 10 years, Chinese fans have witnessed the ups-and-downs of their idols and have been encouraged by their positive and never-give-up spirits, as Ming shared: “一直喜欢她(Taeyeon),我能从她身上看到许多积极的能量，情绪低落的时候，我就会听听她的歌或是刷刷她舞台表演的视频。” (“I’ve been one of Taeyeon’s fans. I can sense her positive power. When I’m feeling down, I would like to listen to her songs or watch her dancing performance.”)

Ming recalled his struggling experiences when he prepared for his postgraduate entrance exam. For over a year, Ming had to fight alone given that most of his classmates decided to look for a job and very few people including his parents understood his emotional struggles. By listening to Taeyon’s songs, Ming felt understood and comforted. Ming drew strength from witnessing Taeyon’s confrontation with suicide. Taeyon’s re-fashioning herself as someone overcoming her depression became a mental power for Ming to draw from in his own struggles in a competitive and stressful society.

Fang’s post about her Korean readings

Self-regulated and self-enterprising discourses are often circulated on Fang’s social media. Apart from signing up for a gym club and following a healthy lifestyle, Fang also likes to share her reflection on reading Korean novels. The caption about the images of the books she’s reading says: “One section a day; 43 days to finish the book; a story book on life experiences for the youth.”

By purchasing imported reading materials from South Korea, Fang said that she could kill two birds with one stone: enhancing her Korean reading capacity while enriching her life experiences. The philosophical statements of life experiences in the book are mainly self-enterprising and self-driven as indicated by her underlined notes like “너에게 주어지는 기대에 합당한 자기관리를 시작해” (“Start taking care of yourself and meet your expectations”) or “값진 자아 반성 시간” (“the valuable time of self-reflection”).

Navigating between freedom and precarity

Language learning in the digital economy is not problem free. Despite their aspiration to manage their life trajectory through neoliberal promises, Chinese youths find themselves constantly navigating between their desired freedom and structural constraints.

One of the problems that hinder their desire to invest in learning Korean is their lack of time. Chinese youths keep their strong connection with Hallyu but they find it hard to keep learning Korean as learning a language requires consistent and systematic devotion. As English majors at university, they are kept busy by taking exams and getting various certificates to enhance their employment prospects. Two of Bin’s participants imagined that they would have more time for themselves to pick up Korean after they started to work as English teachers in future.

For those who squeeze time and save money to take the TOPIK, their devotion to learning Korean may suffer from anti-Hallyu sentiments due to the diplomatic disputes between China and South Korea. Over the past three decades, the surge of Hallyu has also coincided with several waves of anti-Hallyu movements in China. Ming’s diligence and persistence in learning Korean is not recognized but misunderstood by populist nationalists as “媚韩” (literally, “flattering South Korea”), meaning betraying China and showing allegiance to South Korea.

Publicity shot of Korean star Taeyeon

For Fang who is receiving her master’s degree in South Korea, she is confronted with high living expenses in Seoul and thinking of returning to China to settle down. However, when it comes to her future employment prospect in China, Fang seems to lack of confidence. For one thing, she does not think she can compete against ethnic Korean Chinese for a job position in teaching Korean to Chinese students. For another, her master’s degree in TKSOL is not as desirable as an English major to secure an English teaching position.

By the time of writing up this blog, two of Bin’s participants had to give up learning Korean because of their overwhelming workload and new identity as English teachers. Only Fang and Ming still kept learning Korean. As noted, Fang is doing her master’s degree in South Korea, and Ming has just got a job offer from a Chinese multinational automotive subsidiary targeting the South Korean market. After several months of training, Ming will be sent to South Korea to work for this Chinese company in South Korea.

This study has provided a nuanced understanding of Chinese youths’ Korean language learning experiences in the context of emerging Asian pop culture and digitization. Chinese youths’ learning of Korean is not driven by pragmatic pursuits or academic pressures, but largely rooted in their desire to be part of the Hallyu community. Growing up with Hallyu and learning Korean opened up new spatial and affective imaginations for them to capitalize on their performance and cultural consumption that traverse national boundaries in our digital age. Despite having access to Hallyu and learning Korean through new technological affordances, their pursuit of Korean-related subjectivities gets inculcated with the affective facets of language learning activities rooted in the neoliberal logic of self-management, human capital development and surging populist nationalism.

Related content

Li, J. (2020). Foreign language learning for minority empowerment? Language on the Move. Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/foreign-language-learning-for-minority-empowerment/
Li, J. (2021). Esports are the new linguistic and cultural frontier. Language on the Move. Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/esports-are-the-new-linguistic-and-cultural-frontier/
Li, J. (2021). Peripheral language learners and the romance of Thai. Language on the Move. Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/peripheral-language-learners-and-the-romance-of-thai/
Ma, Y. (2020). Empowerment of Chinese Muslim women through Arabic? Language on the Move. Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/empowerment-of-chinese-muslim-women-through-arabic/

Figure 1: Notice at village turn back point (Weibo screenshot)

There has been ongoing international debate over China’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, yet the specific language and semiotic resources used in China to enforce local measures to contain the pandemic require further assessment.

As a Chinese person living overseas, I have become aware of disturbing narratives around the coronavirus pandemic through my engagement with Weibo. In this post, I report my observations of selected COVID-related signs created by local authorities in China. These grassroots COVID-19 linguistic landscapes, I argue, suggest creative language use but convey exclusionary ideologies.

Roadblocks and fear

A key feature of COVID-19 linguistic landscapes in local rural communities in China is the use of linguistic and semiotic resources drawn from the immediate environment where such signs are placed. An example is Figure 1, which shows a sign stuck on a blackboard placed in the middle of the road. The sign reads:

亲情告示
各位父老乡亲，疫情依然严重，防控期间严禁出门，严守规矩，我们这没有雷神山，没有火神山，没有钟南山，只有抬上山！大家尽量别出去，别出去，别出去！别让大家的努力前功尽弃！！！
Kind Notice
Dear elders, relatives, and fellow villagers, since the pandemic is still severe, going out is strictly forbidden and rigid adherence to the rules are expected during the prevention and control period. There is no Leishenshan (Thunder God Hill Hospital), nor Huoshenshan (Fire God Hill Hospital), nor Zhong Nanshan (Pulmonary Specialist), but Taishangshan (lifting the bodies up the hill). Everyone please don’t go out, don’t go out, don’t go out! Don’t let all our efforts end up in vain! [my translation]

This sign was posted by the villagers’ committee in an early attempt to contain the COVID-19 outbreak. The word play of the last syllable 山([ʂan]) in Leishenshan, Huoshenshan, Zhong Nanshan, and Taishangshan adds playfulness and strength to the message.

For background: Thunder God Hill Hospital and Fire God Hill Hospital were temporary hospitals used specifically to treat COVID-19 patients in Wuhan. The construction of these hospitals was completed within just two weeks during the early outbreak of the coronavirus. Zhong Nanshan is a widely trusted infectious disease expert who won acclamation for coordinating diagnosis and treatment efforts during the SARS outbreak in 2008.

Figure 2. Red banner addressing village returnees (Weibo screenshot)

Villages obviously have none of these resources.

Due to the lack of hospital facilities and medical experts in this rural area, ‘Taishangshan’ is intended as a joke but also as a warning to villagers of the potentially lethal outcome of getting infected with COVID-19 – up the hill is a grave for those who might not survive. More importantly, the notice not only enforces the stay-at-home order linguistically but, positioned at the middle of the road, the blackboard on which the notice was stuck and the bamboo pole at the back physically act as a barricade restricting the mobility of people attempting to go to and from the village.

At the same time, this sign not only serves to warn and protect but may also ignite fear and prompt more extreme measures to segregate the healthy from the infected because of the implied gravity of the pandemic.

Red banners and defamatory discourses

There is also a particular genre of signs that single out members of the overseas Chinese community and portray them as the ‘culprits’ in spreading the coronavirus. These signs are situated within a broader discourse around returning overseas Chinese who fail to comply with quarantine regulations after entry into China. After countless reproductions in the online space, the debate quickly escalated into hate speech targeting all returnees.

Figure 2 illustrates an extreme example of this narrative. The image depicts a red banner which blatantly states “带病回村 不孝子孙”, meaning “returning village with disease, what an unfilial child you are”. This denigrating statement not only employs a rhythmic rhetorical device (村 [tsʰʊən] and 孙 [sʊən]) but also conjures the potential breach of filial piety – a core cultural and moral value in Confucianism and a powerful social norm in the governance of compact rural communities with their inherited patriarchal clan social system and close ties between parents and children – to warn against the movement of travellers.

Figure 3. A ‘Positive Building’ blocked by green fences (Weibo screenshot)

Red banners represent a specific genre of ideological propaganda that can be found in both cities and rural villages, although their political connotation has often given way to pragmatic usage in modern Chinese society. This disheartening message suggests a flat rejection of returning villagers from overseas and internal migrants from other provinces by characterising them as infectious and unfilial. It also discourages those who are worried about becoming the target of criticism from travelling because there is a slight chance that they might be infected and contagious yet asymptomatic during the incubation period.

A viral phrase that was part of this discourse asserts that “家乡建设你不在，万里投毒你最快” (You were absent in the hometown’s construction, but now you are travelling from afar and spreading poison most swiftly), again blaming overseas Chinese returnees for spreading the virus even though only a few members of this group were reportedly disobedient with relevant preventative procedures.

Building fences and symbolic deterrence

Such exclusionary ideologies continued to be reproduced in the recent Shanghai lockdown, starting in March 2022. As Figure 3 shows, fences were installed around the entrances to residential buildings. This type of ‘hard quarantine’ was often implemented by street or neighbourhood committees to segregate ‘lockdown zones’ (residential areas with reported positive cases) or ‘positive buildings’, as per municipal policy requirements. These fences were not made of sturdy materials, however, and did not appear to be strong or tall enough to prevent genuine rule-breakers and were more likely serving as a symbolic deterrence to residents and visitors.

For ‘controlled zones’ (other areas in communities or towns where lockdown zones are located) and ‘precautionary zones’ (areas outside lockdown zones and controlled zones), other forms of fencing were observed. Figure 4 shows the use of road fences bearing the notice “安全生产，文明施工” (Safe production, Civilised construction). This represents the appropriation of a sign from a construction site to a new context — COVID prevention and control (Curtin, 2015).

Figure 4. A ‘controlled zone’ blocked by road fences (Weibo screenshot)

Unlike the green ones, these fences were not fixed to the ground, and their portability allowed people some mobility. In a sense, the types of material objects employed as passage blockers are suggestive of allowable human movement and thus the severity of restriction. The emplacement of language in this physical environment (in front of a residential building) not only deprives the text of its original meaning but also endows it with a sarcastic perlocutionary effect, as ‘civilised’ contradicts the stringent COVID restriction measures in the broader context. It should be noted that, as I was writing this blog post, the Shanghai lockdown was lifted (on 1 June), and the removal of these fences soon followed.

In summary, I have discussed some examples of grassroots COVID signs that were created using a variety of linguistic and semiotic resources drawn from the local surroundings. These roadblocks, red banners, and building fences have illustrated the creative uses of languages including word play, rhetorical device and perlocutionary effect. Meanwhile, they constitute the COVID-19 linguistic landscape and bear witness to the proliferation of fear, defamation, and exclusion in this ongoing battle against the coronavirus.

Reference

Curtin, M. L. (2015). Creativity in polyscriptal typographies in the linguistic landscape of Taipei. Social Semiotics, 25(2), 236–243. https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2015.1010315

Related content

For extended coverage of the COVID-19 linguistic landscape, check out our COVID-19 archives at https://languageonthemove.com/covid-19/

The Bainu social media platform in China

Bainu was founded by two young Mongols in 2015 and now it is the only surviving Mongolian language social media platform in China. A 2015 news report claims that there are around 400,000 registered users although that number has shrunk significantly since the government’s crackdown on Mongols’ protests against the 2020 bilingual education reform.

Although many subjects cannot be discussed openly on Bainu, one topic has never stopped attracting Mongols’ unwavering attention: the “purely” linguistic matters which include but are not limited to Mongolian grammar, spelling, translation, standardization, and regional dialects. Perhaps it is precisely because of the strict policing of social media spaces that seemingly “professional, innocuous, and apolitical” discussions of language proliferate there.

This map briefly settled the debate over “sheep meat” vs “sheep’s meat”

Big debate: “sheep meat” or “sheep’s meat”?

A long-running debate has been over whether it is honin mah (literally “sheep meat”) or honin-ii mah (“sheep’s meat”). To support their respective arguments users post pages from their old middle school grammar textbooks or carry out surveys among speakers from different regions. Recently, the debate was briefly settled (it has now flared up again) when one Bainu user, to the awe of many, triumphantly posted a self-made language map.

This map at least temporarily resolved the question that has intrigued, excited, and frustrated Bainu users for months. The map maker, having attributed the differences in expressions to regional differences, did not forget to settle another long-lasting debate, too: whether it is “putting on a hat” or “wearing a hat”. According to the map, the regions with red shade are areas where “sheep meat” and “putting on a hat” are commonly used, while the rest say “sheep’s meat” and “wear a hat.”

Translation debates

Apart from grammatical problems and dialect differences, the translation of new terms is another field of battle where foes and friends are made. In June 2020, the question of how to translate “emoji” into Mongolian sparked a spirited debate. Some advocated for a native Mongolian word while others supported charaiin ilerel, which is a word-for-word translation from Chinese: 表情 (“facial expression”). Yet others have adopted an internationalist stance and have chosen emoji. My observation over the year 2021 suggests that emoji seems to be winning out among Bainuers.

But not all terms are controversial as shown in their almost unanimous approval of translating “barbecue” into shorlog, or the terms translated by the volunteer translation group anabapa, mostly comprised of Bainu users (see “brake light” image).

Why do metalinguistic discussions proliferate on social media?

Emoji on Bainu

You might wonder why Bainu has become a key platform where metalinguistic discussions proliferate or why users are so keen to translate new terms to replace the common Chinese loans in Inner Mongolia, or to what extent these Mongolian translations are successful.

You can find an answer in a new study of Mongolian linguistic purism discourse on Bainu by myself and my co-author Cholmon Khuanuud. In the study, we situate purist discourses in the sociopolitical, cultural, and linguistic context of Inner Mongolia. We show that the weakened autonomy of minority Mongols compounded by the spread of market economy, and China’s drive to build a nation essentially following the “one people, one language (Mandarin Chinese)” model exerts tremendous pressure on the maintenance of Mongolian language. This produces linguistic anxiety, and it underpins purist discourses saturating mediatized spaces such as Bainu.

“Mixed” Mongolian as an emblem of loss

We find that, apart from translating new terms, another two key purification strategies are prominent in Bainu. First, as with language activists in many other minoritized communities, Mongol purists construct “mixed” Mongolian as an emblem of loss, including the loss of land, culture, political rights, racial “purity,” and language over the last seven decades. By doing so, they stigmatize “mixed” speech forms, raise awareness about ethnolinguistic boundaries, and invoke historical experiences.

What is noteworthy is that the explicit association of the losses experienced by minority Mongols with mixed language has almost disappeared since the 2020 reform for fear of punishment.

Another widely used purification strategy is to faithfully transcribe “mixed” everyday speech and post it on Bainu. In particular, by positioning the transcribed “mixed” speech vis-à-vis the “pure and correct” Mongolian, purists banish the “mixed” speech to the realm of non-language.

In the context of Inner Mongolia, the stigmatizing power garnered by the orthographic representation of “mixed” Mongolian also has to do with the highly-ideologized classical (vertical) Mongolian script. This traditional script has been retained in Inner Mongolia while abandoned in the country of Mongolia for the Cyrillic script in the 1940s. Clearly, the purists’ transcription of “deviant and impure speech” through the medium of a valued classical Mongolian script enhances the shaming effect.

To learn more, including how the transnational status of Mongolian language influences purist discourses, who exactly Bainu users are, what “wooden Mongolian” is, or how technology impacts minority language ideology and practices or vice versa, our article has just been published in the Journal of Sociolinguistics – it is open access so feel free to click through to the journal!

Reference

Baioud, Gegentuul, & Khuanuud, Cholmon. Linguistic purism as resistance to colonization. Journal of Sociolinguistics, n/a(n/a). doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12548 [available open access]

Related content

Baioud, Gegentuul. (2020). Fighting Covid-19 with folklore.  Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/fighting-covid-19-with-folklore/
Baioud, Gegentuul. (2020). Will education reform wipe out Mongolian language and culture?  Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/will-education-reform-wipe-out-mongolian-language-and-culture/
Piller, Ingrid. (2017). Anatomy of language shaming.  Retrieved from http://languageonthemove.com/anatomy-of-language-shaming/
Piller, Ingrid. (2017). Explorations in language shaming.  Retrieved from http://languageonthemove.com/explorations-in-language-shaming/

The South China-Laos-Thailand region with the new railway line (Source: South China Morning Post)

Language learning through watching films and playing videogames is a new trend. This kind of informal language learning differs significantly from language learning in the classroom or in immersion contexts.

Language learning through media brings new languages to the fore that have not been widely learned in the past, and it is particularly marginalized speakers of peripheral languages for whom media provide new language learning opportunities.

Here, I will illustrate mediated language learning with the example of the Thai language learning by two groups of people marginalized in China: international students from Laos and ethnic minority youths with a Zhuang background. Both Lao and Zhuang are minor peripheral languages in the global linguistic order. And both are closely related to the Thai language.

My account here draws on the work of my students Tingjiang Ge (葛婷江), Yifan Man (满怡帆), and Xinyao Li (李欣瑶).

Students from Laos learning Chinese through Thai

Some of Van’s favorite Thai-medium Chinese dramas on her mobile

Laos is a land-locked country surrounded by China, Myanmar, Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia. The recently opened railway from its capital, Vientiane, to Kunming in China will transform it from land-locked to land-linked, as part of China’s ambitious 5,500-km trans-Asia railway. This material link between Laos and China is further reinforced by an increasing number of scholarships awarded to students from Laos to study in China.

However, despite needing to achieve Chinese language proficiency at HSK-4 level for admission, many students from Laos still lack the Chinese proficiency needed to thrive in their subject learning.

To overcome these difficulties, many of them turn to Thai for their Chinese language learning. Sounds counterintuitive? Well, it is not.

To begin with, Thai is an easy language for Lao students because the two languages are mutually intelligible, there are only slight differences in the scripts of the two languages, and Thai media play a prominent role in Laos.

Second, there are many Chinese language learning resources for Thai speakers but few for Lao speakers.

Combine these two facts and it is obvious how Thai can facilitate Chinese language learning for students from Laos. Thai allows them to use translation apps to check the meaning of Chinese vocabulary, to use textbooks aimed at Thai learners of Chinese, and – the most popular option – to watch Chinese dramas with Thai subtitles.

Becoming a producer of Chinese-themed Thai language content

The story of Van is particularly impressive. Like many of her Lao peers, Van gave up her university study in Laos and came to China to seek a more profitable future. The aspiration of most international students from Laos is to return to Laos after their studies in China, and to find a steady job in a Chinese company there.

One of the main characters in Van’s Chinese-themed Thai-language novel

Van’s aspiration is different: she wants to become an entrepreneurial writer producing Chinese-themed novels for the Thai market.

Since she was very young, Van has loved reading Thai novels and watching Thai dramas. This also exposed her to many novels and dramas translated from Chinese into Thai, long before she even started to learn Chinese.

As her knowledge of Chinese language and culture has blossomed, she has started to write her own fiction. Van’s writing has strong elements of Chinese fantasy and romance but is written in Thai. The reason she has chosen Thai instead of Lao as the medium of her writing lies in the larger size of the Thai-language market and the greater technological sophistication of the Thai-medium online space.

Through her years of exposure to different transnational social media, Van today markets her writing on all major Thai-medium reading apps and has already gained a loyal following of over 2,000 Thai readers.

Chinese students learning Thai through Zhuang

Thai media content is not only attractive to youths from Laos but also those from China. It is particularly the Boys’ Love genre that is hugely popular. While negative attitudes towards same-sex relationships and queer identities persist in China, the opposite is true in Thailand. The Boys’ Love genre centers on romantic relationships between male characters. Thai media thus introduce Chinese youths to a broader range of gender and sexual identities and help to promote gender and sexual diversity. A good example for the popularity of the genre comes from the Boys’ Love actor Suppapong Udomkaewkanjana, also known as Saint, who has over 1.1 million Chinese followers on Weibo,

A scene from “I told sunset about you” – its potential as a language learning resource is obvious

Ban, a Zhuang minority student from Funing, a border town in Yunnan between China and Vietnam, is one of those Chinese fans of Thai dramas. When she started to watch Thai dramas as a teenager out of curiosity for the “exotic” culture of Thailand, she was surprised to discover that the Thai language is quite similar to Zhuang.

This similarity – coupled with the informal exposure through her prolific drama watching – led her to quickly develop proficiency in Thai.

Her proficiency in Thai proved a huge asset when Ban graduated from university and could not find a job suited to her degree in business administration. It was her Thai that helped her secure a position and she now works as a business translator for an international company in Guangzhou.

Transnational Thai media

The popularity of Thai dramas in China has not been lost on Thai producers. Boys’ Love dramas increasingly include Chinese content to reach further into the huge and profitable Chinese market.

A student from the China-Laos Friendship Nongping Primary School on the Lane Xang EMU train of the China-Laos Railway (Source: Xinhuanet)

The drama “I Told Sunset about You” is a case in point. The plot centers on the romance between two boys preparing for university admission by taking Chinese language classes. The story is driven by their joint language learning focusing on key words all involving the Chinese word 心 (xin; “heart”).

This plot is not particularly far-fetched as the Chinese language has indeed become a commodity in Thailand that may help individuals to gain upward mobility in study and at work. Aspects of Thai culture and Chinese language meld to produce a new form of consumer product that may generate profit.

Strengthening transnational relationships

The opening of the Laos-China segment of the trans-Asian railroad constitutes a major milestone for transnational connections between China, Laos, Thailand, and, eventually, beyond. These connections are mostly seen in economic and geopolitical terms. The links that individuals build through linguistic and cultural consumption are too often overlooked.

The concept of language learning for academic or employment advance is no longer sufficient to understand young language learners’ learning experiences. The language desire that is evident in the research presented here deserves further attention to capture how young and marginalized people without much linguistic capital in valuable languages like English and Chinese might be included in the regional integration between China and ASEAN.

*** 

The Hani are one of the officially recognized ethnic minorities in China, and can also be found across the border in Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand. Like other ethnic minorities in China, Hani people need to become bilingual in Putonghua proficiency for educational and social mobility. At the same time, ethnic minority languages are increasingly valorized in tourism and for China’s soft power project in its borderlands. Even so, the linguistic and social experiences of China’s minority speakers remain poorly understood. How do their linguistic proficiencies and life trajectories intersect? What are the affordances and constraints of using the minority language, the national language Chinese, and the global language English? Here, we examine the experiences of three Chinese Hani women from three different generations to explore these questions.

Hani folksongs bring comfort to older generation facing poverty and hardship

Hani woman singing Haba while weaving

Haba is a Hani folksong genre that was included by UNESCO in the world intangible cultural heritage in 2013. Official reports describe Haba as a men’s tradition. It is commonly assumed that only Hani men may sing Haba and win the respect and reputation it brings. This is not entirely true, as our research has found. Hani women sing Haba, too, as a daily practice of self-comfort. However, they do so without an audience. This may be particularly true of poor older Hani women without formal education.

Let’s consider the example of the Haba singing of Fang (a pseudonym). Fang is the aunt of the second author, Yongzhen. Yongzhen often hears her aunt singing Haba in private spaces. Fang’s Haba singing is full of lament and sorrow featuring narratives of the hardships and misfortunes of her life.

Born in 1966, as the oldest daughter in her poverty-stricken family, Fang’s life has been overshadowed by the pressure to bear a son. As a child, she did not have a chance to receive any formal education and so she remains monolingual in Hani and illiterate. At the age of 16, she was forced to marry a man who she had never met and who lived in an even more remote village. Shortly after, she gave birth to her first daughter. Over the next 20 years, she bore 13 daughters before the desired son was born when she was 40 years old.

Today, that son is her only surviving child, and Fang suffers from poor physical and mental health. Singing Haba is a way for her to digest her bitterness, to reduce her sorrow, and to comfort herself, as in this song (our translation):

I married you because I used to think that you would treat me well and live with me.
Now you don’t care for me and don’t even bother to talk to me.
However, I have delivered these children for you in your home.
How come you don’t talk to me properly?
I plant the land on my own.
Our children are born, and the land is planted.
I gave birth to our children. I don’ t want to leave them or abandon them.
The land is planted. I don’t want to leave it.
You often beat me, hit me with your fists and kick me with your legs.
I don’t want to stay here any longer.
I don’t want to eat at all. Neither do I want to drink.
I can only worry, about these children, this land.
I choose to endure the sufferings and stay.
But still you don’t treat me well, don’t talk to me properly.
In this house, I want to cry every time I pick my bowl and take my chopsticks.
This is not my home, but the home of others, your home.
I eat two meals a day, yet my belly is still empty.
The water I drink is never gulped down.
The threshold of this house is like a python by the river, lying in my way.
I dare not take a step in.
I don’t want to stay any longer.
I don’t want to eat another meal here.
A day here feels as long as a life time.
But I don’t want to abandon these children here and leave them once and for all.
I have no idea why you don’t care for me.
I can’t make up my mind just to leave.
My desire to leave has led my feet two steps forward.
But I still can’t leave.
But then you don’t care for me at all.
My desire to leave has taken three steps away from this home.
But I still can’t leave.
The dog never changes its heart to stay and guard the home.
It is the same with me and my children.
The deer in the wild does not wish to stay, either.
Upon consideration, I also decide to hold back and stay.

Hani becomes glamorous

In contrast to Fang’s mournful Haba, which can only be found in personal and private spaces, Hani pop music has been promoted by government institutions to enhance local tourism. Hani pop music is bouncy, joyful, and optimistic, and the famous Hani singer Mixian (米线) is one of its most famous exponents.

Mixian was also born into a poor Hani farming family in 1983. Her educational opportunities were slightly better than those of Fang and she received a primary education but had to stop school because her parents need her help with farm work (China’s nine-year-compulsory education was not implemented nationwide until 2001).

Like Fang, Mixian’s life was also transformed at the age of 16. However, in her case, she did not have to leave her family for marriage but for work, when she moved to a tourist-centered city and became a waitress. Soon, she combined waitressing with singing for tourists. During one of her restaurant performances, Mixian was discovered by Beijing Dazang Record Company.

Since then, Mixian’s has become a national celebrity. She has released several popular albums, which brought her much profit and fame. One of her most popular songs is “My Hani (Honey) Baby”, which is performed in three languages and combines ethnic and global elements.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h8PXgZUdec

The song “My Hani Baby” distinguishes itself from other Chinese pop songs through the use of Hani language, English, and Putonghua, and the integration of ethnic and modern music styles. Although there are four singers who all identify themselves as ethnic minorities (Hani, Wa, Hui, and Yao), only Hani language appears in the text and is performed by Mixian. Mixian thus becomes a symbol of local ethnic identity while the three male singers perform the cool aspect of modernity by switching between English and Putonghua.

The theme of the song is one frequently found in pop music: romantic love. What is challenged is the traditional identity imposed upon Hani women who are not expected to marry for love, as exemplified in Fang’s story. The lyrics form a dialogue between Mixian and the three male singers, where the female character boldly expresses her romantic love, and the male character reciprocates.

Choosing the romantic theme and combining the ethnic language (Hani) with modern languages (English and Putonghua) have served to increase the popularity of this song. Whether it contributes to the emancipation of Hani women is another matter.

It is also worth noting that the commodification of the Hani language apparent in this successful pop song has not only helped Mixian establish her reputation but has also drawn public attention to the Hani language in China and beyond. One Chinese netizen liked “Hani Baby” so much that he started to learn the Hani language by searching for relevant materials and posting Hani scripts online. His posts in turn have become a learning resource for Hani people to acquire Hani literacy.

A new generation of educated multilingual Hani women

Yongzhen is both the second author and the third Hani woman we will now turn to. Born in 1999, receiving a 9-year-compulsory education was normal for Yongzhen, as it is for women of her generation from all over China. Her childhood was also shaped by rural poverty but in a way that is very different from previous generations. Like hundreds of millions of rural people from China’s underdeveloped western regions migrate, both her parents migrated to work in factories in Zhejiang and Guangdong.

Yongzhen introducing her bilingual translation project to university professors

As a result, Yongzhen became a left-behind child at an early age and was raised in a boarding school. Yongzhen distinguished herself by excelling in school and pursued her university dream. Her parents’ migration and labor experiences in developed cities were crucial in forming her ambition to pursue higher education and her parents have been unconditionally supportive of Yongzhen’s ambition.

Choosing English as her major was mainly driven by her parents’ aspiration to get a stable job working as an English teacher in the future. Now that she has been exposed to the Course of Language and Society with a particular focus on linguistic diversity, Yongzhen is motivated to become a new broker for Hani language and cultural heritage.

New Hani voices

When the Covid-19 pandemic was still prevalent last year, Yongzhen organized a team with three other ethnic minority female students to conduct a small project in their communities. They investigated how ethnic minority people in their hometowns might understand Putonghua-mediated public health information. Their findings are very similar to others conducted in minority-centered regions in China and featured in the Language on the Move Covid-19 archives.

Based on their research, Yongzhen and her teammates designed a bilingual app inspired by the national emergency language services. Their bilingual translation product has been recommended by the College of Foreign Languages at Yunnan University to participate in the national project targeting Chinese university students’ innovation and entrepreneurship.

Through the multilingual translation project, Yongzhen and her teammates developed their empathy towards their ethnic minority communities and learned of the importance of providing language service to linguistically diverse populations. Additionally, the have felt it their duty to become a voice for their peoples, especially ethnic minority women.

While writing up this study and having access to knowledge about linguistic diversity via Dr Li Jia’s course and the learning materials on Language on the Move, Yongzhen has come to understand how her aunt and other female Haba singers have been linguistically, economically, and culturally marginalized, and how the official and commercial discourses about the Hani people only reveal a partial truth while sometimes simultaneously erasing minority voices. As a multilingual and educated Hani woman, Yongzhen has developed a new faith devoting herself to the sociolinguistics of gendered trajectories of Chinese ethnic minority women for equal social participation.

The phenomenal expansion in English language learning among China’s growing middle classes has been so intense during the past three decades to warrant the label “English fever.” As a result, China today has more English speakers than the United Kingdom, and – after USA, India, Nigeria, and Pakistan – China is home to the fifth-largest national population of English speakers on earth.

How did this paradox of the connected rise of China and English come about?

A new book by our executive board member Dr Zhang Jie traces the complexities of this paradox: its history, its lived experience, and its future. Published by de Gruyter under the title Language Policy and Planning for the Modern Olympic Games, the book takes the 2008 Beijing Olympics as its focal point to show how English became central to this mega-event, which also constituted a key plank in China’s efforts to showcase its national progress to the world.

Based on a wealth of data including policy documents, media reports, English language learning textbooks, signage in Beijing’s linguistic landscape, and interviews with policy makers and Olympic volunteers, the book meticulously traces the complex intersections between Chinese national ambition and English language learning. In the process, the author also brings Chinese sociolinguistics to an English language audience in an illuminating overview of “language services” research.

Jie Zhang, Language Policy and Planning for the Modern Olympic Games

The modern Olympic Games as national investment

To regain its rightful place among the great civilizations and powers had been China’s aspiration ever since the humiliations of the 19th and early 20th century. The 2008 Beijing Olympics provided the perfect opportunity to showcase what had been achieved. Therefore, China invested significant resources into its Olympic bid. This included linguistic resources, and Zhang Jie shows how the country went about making that investment: by ramping up English language capacity on all levels of society.

Beijing 2008: Showcasing China (Image credit: IOC)

Once the 2008 Olympics had been awarded to Beijing, the ambition was to make it not only perfect but spectacular. In addition to getting the games themselves right, this meant getting the environment right by transforming Beijing into a global city.

The meticulous planning and immense resources that went into that transformation are staggering. Zhang Jie shows how the language capacities of a population of many millions were carefully assessed and improved. Between 2002 and 2007, the percentage of Beijing residents with foreign language proficiency – mostly in English – rose from 22 percent to 35 per cent. In absolute numbers these are well over five million people whose language capabilities were systematically upgraded.

The lived experience of linguistic transformation

However, Zhang Jie digs deeper. She not only shows language planning and management for the Beijing Olympics in exquisite detail but also how individuals experienced their transformation into English speakers and global citizens. Most threw themselves dutifully into the effort to improve their English but they were not motivated by a desire for English and the Western cultural values associated with it, as much previous research has found. Rather, they were motivated by a desire for the rewards associated with passing English language tests: university admissions and job prospects.

Not everyone could compete on equal terms, though, and turning performance on English language tests into a gatekeeper for social advancement brought existing inequalities to the fore. Outside of China’s metropolises, the material conditions to do well on English language tests – qualified teachers, up-to-date textbooks, or media libraries – simply were not available in many cases.

2022 Winter Olympics logo (Image credit: Wikipedia)

The single-minded pursuit of English also led to the devaluation of other languages, as Zhang Jie shows with reference to Russian. Russian, which had been learned to high levels, particularly in the northern border provinces, and was of high practical value there in trans-border exchanges, became worthless almost overnight, as university admission was tied to English. As one Olympic volunteer, who had studied Russian throughout her secondary education mournfully complained to the researcher: “There were a great number of Russian people in our county, thus I had never thought of learning English. I didn’t realize English is so important elsewhere until I left my hometown. Now, learning Russian has become such a disadvantage!”

That was in 2008. But that is not where this study ends.

Having successfully conducted the Beijing Olympics and continuing its economic and geopolitical rise, language policy and planning have been reevaluated. As China now gets ready to host the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, the COVID-19 pandemic has forever changed the meaning of “globalisation,” as we have traced here in the Language on the Move COVID-19 archives. This time, China follows a comprehensive language action plan that is quite different to the one for the 2008 Summer Games: there is now a recognition of an oversupply of English language capabilities and the focus is on strengthening language service provision in other languages. Beyond English, China has embraced a truly multilingual vision. There are now programs at Chinese universities in 101 languages – the official languages of all countries that have established diplomatic relations with China. Capacities in most of these languages may still be limited but, as this book amply documents, China has a track record of turning its dream into a reality.

The concomitant rise of China and English may well have come to an end.

Jie Zhang, Language Policy and Planning for the Modern Olympic Games

To find out more about Jie Zhang’s new book Language Policy and Planning for the Modern Olympic Games head over to the publisher’s website. To order the book and receive a 20% discount, click on the De Gruyter order page.

This blog post is a slightly revised version of the book’s preface: Piller, Ingrid. (2021). Preface: The paradox of the concomitant rise of China and English. In Jie Zhang (Ed.), Language Policy and Planning for the Modern Olympic Games (pp. V-VIII). Berlin and New York: De Gruyter Mouton.

Diversity of international students is celebrated through images that map students onto nations represented by their flags

International education is often touted as a golden road to fluency in another language and the development of a global vision. However, ethnographic research into the language learning and settlement experiences of international students in a variety of national contexts has painted a less rosy picture, as the Language-on-Move archives devoted to international education show.

Such research has found many discontinuities between the promises of international education and students’ actual experiences.

One of the problems in the existing system of international education is the nation-based categorization of seeing international students of diverse backgrounds as a homogeneous group (Piller, 2017).

This categorization is further complicated when international students return to their ancestral homelands for their international education. Such “return migrants” may be positioned in often conflicting ways on the continuum of local and migrant, native and foreigner, as our recent research explores (Li & Han, 2020).

Ethnic Chinese students migrating to China for their international education

As one of the largest diasporas, ethnic Chinese constitute a population of over 50 million. The great majority of them live in Southeast Asia. Ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia have been perceived as a powerful nexus between China and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries, mostly due to their remarkable economic performance and their historical contribution to China’s nationalist movement in the early twentieth century. As China is emerging as one of the largest receiving countries for international education, ethnic Chinese may get the first admission ticket to higher education institutions in China.

However, the prioritization of ethnic Chinese migrating to China for their international education is not without problems. These students are confronted with several linguistic and cultural challenges.

Some of these challenges are similar to what has been reported in previous studies, and others are specific to this group and have to date mostly been overlooked in the existing literature on international education.

One big challenge relates to a conflict between students’ self-perceptions of their identities and the ways in which others perceive them. An ethnic Chinese student from Myanmar, for instance, expressed her shock and confusion since coming to China: “我以为我的根在中国，来中国我发现我没根了！” (“I used to think that my roots are in China. However, coming to China has made me rootless.”)

Like this female student, ethnic Chinese students from Myanmar used to be oriented towards China. Learning Putonghua in Myanmar was a top priority for their transnational empowerment (Li, 2017; Li, 2020; Li, Ai, & Zhang, 2020). However, once they move to China for their studies, their trajectories gradually gear them to identify Myanmar as their true homeland and as their land of opportunity. How is this possible?

Linguistic and cultural essentialism

To find out, we (Li & Han 2020) examined the learning experiences of 14 ethnic Chinese from Myanmar who were enrolled in Putonghua-medium degree programs at a Chinese university. We found that the language ideologies of speaking standard Putonghua and writing simplified Chinese characters challenged these students’ sense of being authentically Chinese. In the process, they were turned from proficient Chinese speakers in Myanmar to deficient Putonghua speakers in China.

Ethnic Chinese students from Myanmar are often made to feel weird for engaging in practices that are considered “Burmese”, such as putting on thanaka, a protective white-paste face mask

National essentialism was another ideological force that challenged their Chinese identity. In their classrooms and everyday interactions, the students found themselves positioned not as ethnic Chinese but as Burmese nationals. This “one nation, one culture, one language” mindset not only erased our participants’ Chinese identity but also reinforced an essentialist view of Myanmar as the country of the Burmese, the dominant ethnic group in that highly diverse country.

Neo-essentialist curriculum

Most research into international education is based in Anglophone countries, where a monolingual mindset prevails and exclusive use of English is promoted while languages other than English are devalued.

This is not the case in China. China’s promotion of Putonghua as an international language follows a reciprocal approach that also values the languages international students bring. Their bilingualism is regarded as an asset. In our case, both Burmese and Putonghua constitute desired linguistic capital to achieve mutual cooperation and promote the regional economy and integration between China and ASEAN.

However, this promotion of bilingualism is not unproblematic, either. Linguistic diversity is not unconditionally valued but rests on its convertibility in an international communication market – between the Chinese and Burmese state in this context.

This orientation to the nation as a market applauds bilingualism in Burmese and Putonghua but marginalizes bilingualism in non-standard Chinese varieties and languages that are not official to a nation.

In short, our research demonstrates that the neoliberal valorization of bilingualism is not in and of itself better than the monolingual mindset: it only reproduces the cultural superiority of essentialized linguistic icons while devaluing and erasing non-privileged cultural forms and identities.

The future of Chinese international education

While the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the language challenges confronting diverse populations worldwide (Piller, 2020; Piller, Zhang, & Li, 2020), it has also reconfigured the global economic and political order.

Since the outbreak of Covid-19 early last year, China has shifted its global strategy by strengthening its regional connectivity with Asian countries. In 2020, ASEAN replaced the USA and EU to become China’s largest trading partner. A recent trade agreement, Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) has reinforced the regional integration between China and its region. As the largest free trading zone covering 30% of the global populations and 30% of global GDP, RCEP will mark a new era for Asia-Pacific cooperation in various social dimensions.

Will the free movement of goods and people in this vast zone also lead us to a greater valorization of linguistic and cultural diversity? Will it open a space for embracing diversity and bringing greater equity and social justice?

Our research suggests that, as long as the ideological foundations of linguistic and cultural essentialism stay in place, the international education in RCEP may just be old wine in a new bottle.

References

Li, J. (2017). Social Reproduction and Migrant Education: A Critical Sociolinguistic Ethnography of Burmese Students’ Learning Experiences at a Border High School in China. (PhD). Macquarie University.
Li, J. (2020). Transnational migrant students between inclusive discourses and exclusionary practices. Multilingua, 39(2), 193-212. https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2019-0125
Li, J., Ai, B., & Zhang, J. (2020). Negotiating language ideologies in learning Putonghua: Myanmar ethnic minority students’ perspectives on multilingual practices in a borderland school. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 41(7), 633-646. doi:10.1080/01434632.2019.1678628
Li, J., & Han, H. (2020). Learning to orient toward Myanmar: ethnic Chinese students from Myanmar at a university in China. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 1-19. doi:10.1080/07908318.2020.1858095
Piller, I. (2017). Intercultural communication. Edinburgh University Press.
Piller, I. (Ed.) (2020). Language-on-the-Move COVID-19 Archives.
Piller, I., Zhang, J., & Li, J. (2020). Linguistic diversity in a time of crisis: Language challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Multilingua, 39(5), 503-515. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/multi-2020-0136/html