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.