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 shaming – what happened?

Shaming comments (Source: Sharma, 2014, p. 24)

On June 10, 2011, the then Minister for Health and Population of Nepal, the Honorable Dharma Shila Chapagain, addressed the UN High-Level Meeting on AIDS in New York. The 7-minute speech was live-streamed on the UN’s multimedia channel and an excerpt was then shown on Kathmandu-based TV station Kantipur. From there a 4-minute clip made its way onto Youtube, where it was titled “Nepali Stupid Speech at UN”. This prompted many Internet users to comment: the sociolinguist Krishna Bal Sharma, in whose 2014 article I first learned about the incident, counted 603 comments in April 2013.

The comments heaped scorn on the way the speech was delivered, as in the following examples:

• in that forum u are allowed to speak any language not just english but she choose to disgrace our country
• Wtf bitch… A kid from primary level has a better English than u.
• Fuck this is why i’m not proud to say i’m nepali
• Its like letting a nursery kid to read those paragraphs..shame on you…
• very shameful speech.
• what’s this? it is just a shame for all nepalese
• really fucking speech shame on

From these few examples, it is obvious that the comments are vile and constitute an example of language shaming par excellence.

The shamed speech – what was the content?

Shaming comments (Source: Sharma, 2014, p. 26)

From the comments it seems hardly anyone chose to pay attention to the actual content of the speech. Those who did pedantically pointed out non-standard pronunciations (and thereby clearly demonstrated that Capagain’s pronunciation did not actually impede comprehension of the speech), as in this example:

“She is reading totally different words with different meanings, for example she read “republic health” instead of reproductive health. What a funny! Don’t pretend, if you can’t do it. You are embarrassing Nepalese, your party, and making a fool yourself…”

The speech presented an outline of the HIV situation in Nepal, including public health measures and challenges related to the disease. The Minister used the opportunity to particularly highlight gender inequality as a key issue in HIV transmission and sexual and reproductive health more generally:

Women and girls are still the most affected group. In this context, there is a need to fight against gender inequalities, insufficient access to healthcare and services, and all forms of discrimination and violence, including sexual and gender based violence and exploitation. We must ensure their sexual and reproductive health. (Quoted from the official transcript of the speech available from the UN website)

The shamee – who was shamed?

Dharmashila Chapagain (Source: “Women behind Nepal’s constitution – a personal story”)

When Minister Chapagain spoke about gender inequality, she knew what she was talking about from personal experience. Her personal story can be traced from The Nepal Papers edited by Mandira Sharma and Seira Tamang.

Chapagain was born in the late 1970s in a village in Jhapa District in eastern Nepal and discovered from a young age that women and girls were not valued: one of four girls, her father divorced her mother when she failed to bear him a son; and although her mother made sure she could attend school, her education remained patchy and came to an end in her teens. Unsurprising, given that Nepal’s large gender literacy gap has only started to close in the 2000s. This is the lesson about women’s status that Chapagain learned in childhood:

It was tiring and painful to be a woman in the village and I was looking for a way out. […] I felt that as women, my mother, my sisters and I were not wanted. That kind of torture haunt you at night, makes you want to take revenge. (quoted from Sharma & Tamang, 2016)

As a way out, Chapagain joined Nepal’s Maoist insurgency (1996-2006) in her late teens and became a guerilla fighter. By her mid-20s she had distinguished herself and risen to the rank of district-in-charge for Morang District in southeast Nepal. In 2002 she was arrested together with her six-month-old baby. The following five years in prison left their mark on Chapagain: as a consequence of the torture she suffered, she developed chronic health problems, including breathing difficulties and inability to stand and walk for extended periods.

During her five long years in various Nepali prisons, Chapagain was yet again confronted with gender inequality in the form of sexual violence against women.

‘The security forces didn’t care if they were old or young, they even raped a 64-year-old woman after killing her son,’ says Chapagain. ‘What kind of rules of war was the state following?’ She says that the then government saw the Maoists as enemies and wanted to destroy them, and sexual torture was one of the tools they used. (Sharma & Tamang, 2016)

When a Comprehensive Peace Accord was signed with the rebels in 2006, the Maoists became part of the government. In the elections of 2008, Chapagain was elected to parliament and served as Minister for Health and Population. And that’s how she came to deliver that speech at the UN in 2011.

The shamers – who did the shaming?

Locations of the commenters (Source: Sharma, 2014, p. 22)

The shamers are an anonymous mass who individually hide behind their Youtube handles and social media pseudonyms. Sharma (2014) shows that most of them are Nepalis who are, however, not based in Nepal but outside the country. Because of the dire economic situation in Nepal – partly a result of the decade-long Maoist insurgency – Nepalis have been leaving their country in large numbers, and Sharma identifies two distinct streams of emigrants: low-skilled migrant workers whose preferred destinations are the Gulf countries, on the one hand, and tertiary students on the other. The top destinations of the latter include other South-East Asian and Anglophone western countries.

On the basis of their location, commenters mostly seem to belong to the latter group. Shamers and shamee thus share the same nationality but differ on other dimensions:

• Location: based inside or outside Nepal
• Education: barely high-school educated vs tertiary educated
• Gender: to the degree that it is possible to tell, the majority of commenters seem to be male
• Political orientation: the Maoists’ socialist ideology is an explicit target of criticism and many commenters present it as the underlying cause of Chapagain’s poor English pronunciation.

The commonalities and differences between Chapagain and the commenters mean the delivery of the speech is not only represented as a cause of a shame for the speaker but also for the nation – a shame that the commenters themselves partly share (“it is just a shame for all nepalese”).

Consequences of language shaming

The consequences of a language shame campaign on the internet such as the one described here are twofold and affect both the shamee and the shamers.

To begin with, the shame campaign silences the actual content of the speech and suppresses political debate. Instead of engaging with the merits of the minister’s arguments and her politics, the focus is exclusively on the form in which her speech was delivered.

The fact that many of the comments take the form of specifically sexist insults (“Wtf bitch”) also demonstrates that linguistic shaming is not only about illegitimate speech but about illegitimate speakers. Language shaming is a way to keep people – here: rural women with little formal education – in their place; or to show them “their place” if they have risen above is, as Chapagain has.

Second, a shame campaign such as this one also serves to keep the overall hierarchy of global English in its place. While the commenters presumably believe themselves to speak better English than Chapagain, they do not set themselves up as model of “good English”. That model remains implicitly but firmly outside Nepal, presumably in Anglophone western countries (although some commenters also compare the English of Indian politicians favorably to that of Nepali politicians).

This means that the shame campaign ultimately is as harmful to the shamers as it is to the shamed person: it perpetuates the linguistic and cultural inferiority complex that Franz Fanon identified as an inevitable consequence of colonial international relations:

To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization. […] Every colonized people – in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality – finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, the culture of the mother country. (Fanon, 1967, p. 17f.)

References

Fanon, F. (1967). Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press.

Sharma, B. K. (2014). On High Horses: Transnational Nepalis and Language Ideologies on Youtube. Discourse, Context & Media, 4–5, 19-28. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2014.04.001

Sharma, M., & Tamang, S. (2016). A Difficult Transition: The Nepal Papers. New Delhi: Zubaan Publishers.

Fliers for Persian community events (Persian Library Parramatta, Nov 2010)

Editor’s note: In the second instalment in our series “Explorations in Language Shaming”, Dr Shiva Motaghi-Tabari examines children’s attitudes towards the perception of home languages other than English in Australia highlighting that home-language use may often be associated with a sense of embarrassment.

***

Home-language (HL) maintenance as a concern for many migrant families has recently gained prominence. Much of the research has focused mainly on the role of parents and HL educators in child HL learning processes, while the role of children in this effect remained almost invisible. In my doctoral research on “Bidirectional Language Learning in Migrant Families”, I demonstrated that children’s language attitudes, which in turn are influenced by language ideologies and wider social structures, can have significant impacts on their HL maintenance.

In fact, the broad impetus for my research germinated from my own observation of my child’s language learning and use, and my engagements with other parents in a similar situation since we came to Australia in 2008. Like many migrant parents coming from a non-English-speaking background, maintaining my child’s HL has been a concern in our new home in Australia. When we first came, my daughter was around seven years old. At the time, she knew some English, as we had sent her to language schools since she was four years old back in Iran. After arrival, I observed how quickly her English language, particularly her conversational skills, were progressing. As her English language progressed, I began to wonder if it might not be a good idea to use some English at home. After all, her father and I also needed to improve our English communication skills …

At the same time, we did not wish to put our daughter’s Persian at risk. Her Persian maintenance was not only important to us, but it was also a promise to her grandparents who relentlessly reminded us of the importance of preserving their grandchild’s Persian language. For this very reason, we also sent her to a Persian Saturday School in Sydney so that she would become literate in the language.

In our search for effective ways of managing the two languages, Persian and English, we heard many parents’ stories of success or failure related to their HL maintenance. For some of the parents, despite their investments of time and money, they found it challenging to get their children to learn and use their HL. Some of them blamed the Community Language School teachers for not being able to teach the HL properly, and some of them blamed themselves for not spending enough time to practice the language with their children. Some of them also seemed confused as they had been advised by their children’s mainstream teachers to speak English with their children.

Eventually, these observations shaped my interest in doing further research in the area, and that’s how my PhD research ‘Bidirectional Language Learning in Migrant Families’ came into existence. That my research struck a chord is obvious from the fact that it won the 2017 Michael Clyne Prize. The Michael Clyne Prize is awarded annually by the Australian Linguistics Society for the best postgraduate research thesis in immigrant bilingualism and language contact.

‘Bidirectionality’ in parent-child interactions is a notion that I have borrowed from family studies and extended to the field of second language learning. In a bidirectional model, the process of socialisation of a child into a set of language and cultural rules involves not only a parent-to-child direction of influence but also a child-to-parent direction. Central to the bidirectional model is the concept of agency. Agency in this framework means “considering individuals as actors with the ability to make sense of the environment, initiate change, and make choices” (Kuczynski, 2003, p. 9). The core assumption in this framework is that both parents and children as active agents interpret and thereby reconstruct social messages (Kuczynski, Parkin, & Pitman, 2014, p. 138). This means that, in the field of language learning, children, like adults, adopt a certain way of thinking about languages based on the language ideologies they encounter in their daily lives. Based on these social perceptions, they make choices about what languages to learn and use. Therefore, to find more effective ways of HL maintenance, it is essential to bring children’s language attitudes and practices to the forefront alongside parents’ language attitudes and investments, and HL teachers and their teaching methods.

Despite parents’ wishes and efforts, children often show a disinclination to learn and use the home language, the language of their family, relatives and loved ones. Instead, they often tend to prefer English, as one of my child participants said: ‘I mostly speak Iranian, but I prefer English’. Reasons for this preference that the children gave to me included the following: ‘Because Persian is so hard’ or ‘it is Australia!’

It is true that for many children, their limited HL skills could make it difficult for them to communicate in that language. However, the same child who felt that Persian was too hard also made the comment ‘it is Australia!’ This adds another dimension to children’s choice of English as their preferred language. In effect, in a process of linguistic and cultural mainstreaming through the educational system and social practices, the dominant language and culture are inscribed as legitimate while other languages are devalued. In circumstances where communicative norms are constituted into a homogenised form, it comes as no surprise that children who do care about belonging and acceptance, internalise and reproduce the underlying message that ‘to be an Australian, one must speak English’. For them, using their HL may be perceived as a marker of lack of belonging or difference, and ultimately, making them feel a sense of shame and embarrassment over different forms of language other than what is seen as ‘normal’, as in this example:

Child participant: I get embarrassed [laughs] to speak Persian.
Shiva: Why is that?
Child participant: Because I don’t want anybody to think I’m weird.

Under circumstances where children  feel that they may be viewed as ‘weird’ if they use their home language, it is obvious that they may not show much interest in practising that language; and so, they exert their agency in different ways to use their preferred language despite their parents’ wishes, as is evident from the following conversation I had with two children:

Shiva: Then you are asked at home to speak in Persian?
Child participant 1: Yeah.
Child participant 2: A lot.
Child participant 1: Yeah.
Child participant 2: A lot.
[Both laugh] Shiva: And then you don’t?
Both [giggling] No! [more laughter] Shiva: No?
Child participant 1: maybe for one second, but then after that [laughs]

In sum, raising a child bilingually can be a difficult task when the onus is only on the family, particularly in a context where the value of the HL is not tangible for the children and is not acknowledged by the wider society. So, before any language instructions can be successful, children need to truly feel and understand the importance of preserving their home language alongside learning the English language. To achieve this, it is essential that families, community languages schools and mainstream schools come together around the same positive message: English is not the only language of Australia and bilingualism is cool and worth encouraging.

References

Kuczynski, L. (2003). Beyond Bidirectionality: Bilateral Conceptual Frameworks for Understanding Dynamics in Parent-Child Relations. In L. Kuczynski (Ed.), Handbook of dynamics in parent-child relations (pp. 3-24). Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, Inc.

Kuczynski, L., Parkin, C. M., & Pitman, R. (2014). Socialization as Dynamic Process: A Dialectical, Transactional Perspective. In J. E. Grusec & P. D. Hastings (Eds.), Handbook of socialization: theory and research (2nd ed., pp. 135-157). New York; London: The Guilford Press.

Motaghi-Tabari, S. (2016). Bidirectional Language Learning in Migrant Families. (PhD), Macquarie University. Available from http://languageonthemove.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Thesis_Shiva_Motaghi-Tabari_BidirectionalLanguageLearning.pdf

My call to use language shaming as a lens through which to explore processes of language subordination, domination and (de)valorization struck a chord at the conference and I have since received a number of emails asking for the write-up of my lecture. The slides that accompanied the lecture can be downloaded here and conceptually the lecture was based on Chapters 3 and 7 of Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice. Additionally, I’ve decided to start a mini-series devoted to explorations in language shaming here on Language on the Move. What follows is the first entry in this series.

#ICMLXVI @rejadam Dr Robert Adam emphasising the concept of "language shaming" (re: Prof Ingrid Piller) pic.twitter.com/O5GOgQWDPP

— efsli (@efsli) August 29, 2017

A persistent theme in linguistic diversity is that some ways of using language are heard or seen as indices of laziness, stupidity and backwardness. Speakers of non-standard varieties and particularly migrant speakers are often denigrated in this way.

Teachers may well be amongst the worst offenders when it comes to making migrant students feel inferior. For instance, a sociolinguistic ethnography with Burmese migrant students in a high school in Southwest China by Li Jia provides numerous instances of language shaming. The focus of the research was on the language learning and educational experiences of students from Myanmar who had come to China for their high school education. Many of these students had a Chinese background and most had studied Chinese as an additional language for a number of years prior to coming to China. Even so, their Chinese was different from the Chinese of local students: there were the usual accent differences and additionally there were significant differences in literacy: the Burmese students had had far less opportunities to practice Chinese literacy than the students who had been educated in China throughout their entire school career. Furthermore, they had usually been instructed in traditional Chinese characters and they had learnt to use pinyin according to a different transliteration system.

Chemistry presentation by Year 11 student (Source: Li, 2017, p. 234)

These observable linguistic differences were mostly seen in terms of deficit and often became the focus of student-teacher interactions as in the following example, where a migrant Year 11 student was required to deliver an oral presentation in his Chemistry class. The topic of the presentation was about the weather and specifically temperature fluctuations and cold spells. When the student had finished his presentation and the teacher provided feedback, the feedback had nothing to do with the content of the presentation. Instead, the chemistry teacher focused on the student’s language. He pointed out some unfortunate vocabulary choices made by the students as well as spelling mistakes. The teacher summed up his assessment of the student’s Chemistry presentation as follows:

你看都是高二的学生了，寒潮的潮字都不会写。

Look, you are already a Year 11 student and how come you can’t even write the word “spell”? [as in “cold spell”; “tide”] (Quoted from Li, Jia. 2017, p. 234)

The comment focusses on the language of the presentation instead of the content and denigrates the student by linking the spelling mistake to his age – a typical example of language shaming.

This kind of language shaming is detrimental to the student in at least two ways: first, the student is obviously humiliated and his personal worth is being questioned in highlighting that his Chinese language proficiency is substandard for his age cohort (and ignoring that he is not a first language speaker of Chinese but a Chinese language learner). Second, the focus on language instead of content deprives the student of a learning opportunity.

That means that language shaming has the pernicious effect of not only denigrating students’ language proficiency but also jeopardizing their overall educational success, including achievement in the subject area. Language shaming thus serves to instill the very “stupidity” is claims to diagnose.

Poster with the school’s hair style regulations (Source: Li, 2017, p. 179)

Being scolded for the way they spoke Chinese was but one of the ways in which the students were subjected to a deficit discourse. It was also other aspects of their bodies and behaviors that were subject to criticism: they were often seen as not conforming to the strict dress code of the school or as lazy and careless with the tasks assigned to them. During classroom observations it became obvious that teachers sometimes spent up to half the lesson “criticizing Burmese students who did not obey the school rules” (Li, 2017, p. 248).

While one isolated incidence of the kind that occurred in the Chemistry lesson may be easy to write off, for the migrant students in the study such incidences of language shaming were regular occurrences; and it was their regularity that left deep psychological scars, as another student confided in the researcher:

我8岁来中国学习汉语，一开始什么都不明白, 真的很想回家，特别是老师骂，大姐姐欺负我的时候，感觉真的很无助。 […]

I came to China to learn Chinese at the age of 8. At the beginning, I didn’t understand anything, and I was missing home very much especially when I was scolded by my teachers and bullied by older students I really felt helpless. (Quoted from Li, Jia. 2017, p. 148)

Like all systems of oppression, language subordination has a psychological component, and shame is a key mechanism that leads oppressed people to accept their oppression: sociologists consider shame as a key aspect of poverty as it leads poor people to accept that their poverty is their own fault and to accept that the rich deserve to be rich. Similarly, theorists of racial and colonial oppression have long noted a psychological component where those who are subject to racism and colonialism may come to accept their oppression as justified because an inferiority complex has been instilled in them.

The examples of language shaming offered here come under the guise of teaching and must be considered a key tool in the arsenal of social reproduction. A first step in breaking their power is to call them out for what they are.

Make sure not to miss out on future installments in the series “Explorations in language shaming” and subscribe to our alerts in the bottom right corner of this page.

References

Kaufman, G. (1996). The Psychology of Shame: Theory and Treatment of Shame-Based Syndromes (2nd ed.). New York: Springer.

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. Retrieved from http://languageonthemove.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/LI_Jia_Social_reproduction_and_migrant_education.pdf

Piller, I. (2016). Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. [for your chance to win a copy, tweet about #linguisticdiversity by Oct 10; details of the draw here] ]]> https://languageonthemove.com/explorations-in-language-shaming/feed/ 36 20607