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 ]

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.

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.

Related posts

Grey, A. 2018. The triumph of completing a PhD
Grey, A. 2017. How do language rights affect minority languages in China?
In interview: Alex Grey with Melanie Fernando

The conference was funded by the Research Office of UNNC and the “Multilingualism: Empowering Individuals, Transforming Societies” (MEITS) project. MEITS is an enviably enormous research project funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Council drawing together researchers from the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Nottingham and the Queen’s University, led by Prof Wendy Ayres-Bennett. It seeks to establish the value of multilingualism and language learning, as part of government efforts to stimulate language learning within the British education system. One of the project’s six strands focuses on language standardization, led by Prof McLelland (cf. her earlier co-edited volume Standardization: Studies from the Germanic Languages, 2002). This conference offered MEITS researchers a window into experiences of language standardization across many multilingual contexts in Asia. It also offered researchers from different disciplines a rare chance to come together and talk about overlapping research questions, methods and findings. The conference consisted of four keynotes and nineteen presentations (abstracts here). The scheduling allowed all participants to hear all the presentations, leading to a high degree of engagement and building good foundations for future collaborations.

One key theme was the multiplication of standards of a language, as opposed to standardization resulting in just one monolithic standard. Our first keynote, by Prof Anvita Abbi, described Standard Hindi as “not a point but a range”; there are many regional Hindis which are treated by speakers as the standard. She explained how this fits within a society where multilingualism is both normal and valued. Another keynote, by Chinese language policy expert Prof Minglang Zhou, explained how Standard Mandarin (i.e. Putonghua), like Hindi, has developed into clear regional varieties, and asked how the standardization process, which is aimed at reducing linguistic diversity, can in fact reduplicate it. Prof Feng’s speech also dealt with regional variation in Putonghua; he framed this diversity within 《大华语》(The Big Sinitic Language Group) a concept which accepts the existence of local Putonghua varieties, as well as other Mandarin topolects, within a hierarchical linguistic order topped by the national standard.

Prof Abbi’s keynote introduced a second key theme: the problem of “excessive standardization”, where attempts to disassociate the standard from any particular dialect may lead to an official variety that nobody can understand, and which is therefore rarely used. Through various presenters we heard illustrative examples, including in my own presentation, which showed how standardization marginalizes the Zhuang minority language in China, especially under conditions of marketization. Prof Feng’s presentation put this kind of standardization policy in context, explaining that minority language standardization itself follows a standard (and not necessarily responsive) procedure in China. It is a three-step process of standardising literacy/script, vocabulary, and then digital rendering (i.e. creating a type-able Unicode).

How it is that top-down policies can reach this extreme, where standardization becomes the end in itself, rather than a means to create a useful lingua franca (or other goals), can be explained by recalling how ideological language standardization is, as Prof Imtiaz Hasnain reminded us in another keynote. He presented South Asia as a place where language is just one way by which social information is conveyed, and where both societal and individual multilingualism are not chaotic socio-cultural accidents but intended and desired. He contrasted this to the monolingual and colonial mindset of top-down measures to define and promote one standard language.

Developing a standard language is often intertwined with developing language examination regimes, and the fourth keynote speaker, Dr Luo Lian, gave a insight into these dual processes in China. She compared the two official streams for testing Putonghua, the 民族汉语考试 (Ethnic Groups Han Language Exam: “MHK”) by which the Putonghua of first-language speakers of China’s official minority languages is assessed, and the 汉语水平考试 (Han Language Level Exam: “HSK”), by which the Putonghua of foreign learners is assessed. She found not only that the standard of literacy expected of minorities was much higher than that expected of foreigners, but also that using non-standard albeit popular expressions in these exams could be treated as evidence of language proficiency rather than as mistakes, especially by HSK markers. Kerim Friedman discussed the last decade’s elaborate testing regime for indigenous language proficiency in Taiwan – there are now 168 tests – and the mismatch between “teaching to the test” and teaching useful, living Pangcah, one of the most widely spoken of these languages. We were reminded that standard-setting, and testing against official standards, are key means by which states are able to “see” language diversity (following Scott 1998).

Another key theme across the conference was standardising orthography and script. Prof Abbi explained how many Indian language groups have considered the development of a standard written form of their as language empowering and crucial for schooling, which is in turn crucial for language maintenance. Another senior researcher, Prof Premsrirat, explained her group’s efforts to facilitate communities across Thailand developing their own standard orthographies and scripts, and the enormous pride and expressive facility that can result from such efforts. However, we did not shy away from discussing potentially deleterious impacts of standardization, including orthographic standardization erasing language variety, the politicization of orthography and script choices and how prioritising written standards can exhaust funding at the expense of supporting spoken language. Nor did we shy from discussing the factors that can restrict the enduring impact of standardization policies, such as creating a written standard but not creating avenues for it to be learnt.

In this vein, the theme of standardization as a process that minoritizes languages was explored. For example, Hiroyuki Suzuki and Gerald Roche each talked us through the top-down and grassroots processes of creating a Standard Tibetan. Their research shows these processes are leading to discursive invisibility for many languages in the Tibetic group, as well as many non-Tibetic languages with long histories of being spoken across the Tibetan Plateau, as well as contributing to actual language shift for many of these languages. These and other presentations – including Nick Palfreyman on sign language varieties in Indonesia and Ying Ding on Shibe in North-West China – noted the dynamics amongst speakers themselves, where participation in formal processes of standardization can empower certain speakers, certain varieties and certain imagined communities over others.

Finally, we also considered that various identities may not be readily performed in a standard language, instead utilising features associated with other language varieties and registers. Hui Zhao and Xiaomei Wang explored China’s Beijing and Tianjin dialects, respectively, from identity construction perspectives, Hideko Abe explained the deliberate, context-sensitive use of features associated with Japanese language’s gendered registers in transgender speakers’ identity constructions, and Patrick Heinrich introduced us to “dialect cosplay” by young Japanese who use features mined from previously stigmatized dialects to stylize their “boring” standard speech.

In sum, this was a stimulating conference program and those embarking on any standardization policies have a feast of food for thought! I encourage you to read the conference abstracts, as not all presenters are mentioned by name above, and share your thoughts in the comments section below. Stay tuned in 2018 for details of an edited publication based on this conference.

References:

Linn, A. R. and McLelland, N. (2002) Standardization: Studies from the Germanic Languages. Amsterdam; Philadelphia, PA, Benjamins.

Scott, J. C. (1998). Authoritarian High Modernism. Seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed (pp. 87-102). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Alexandra Grey proudly holding the physical product of her PhD research

My university will shortly require only a digital copy of each PhD after it has been examined and awarded, but luckily I snuck into the tail-end of the hard copy era. I say ‘lucky’ because my hard copy of my own hard work is a lovely, and hefty, thing to hold. And I’m not the only one who wants to hold it; having a physical final product has been meaningful to friends and family who buoyed me through the last four years.

When I collected the hard-bound copies I thought, ‘my work is complete’. Complete enough to celebrate, at any rate! My Language on the Move colleagues have warmly marked the milestone. But while the PhD is over the research doesn’t feel finished. I am still drawn to the subject of my thesis – how China’s minority languages policies operate today – because of (rather than despite) my years researching it. For the thesis, I chose a quote from Heller as my opening epigraph:

The globalised new economy is bound up with transformations of language and identity in many different ways … Ethnolinguistic minorities provide a particularly revealing window into these processes. (Heller, 2003, p. 473)

These different transformations are ongoing; this window remains. So, I remain curious about sociolinguistics in the Sinosphere (and much else in the Sinosphere besides). Every time I write up a paper from the thesis I think up further questions to investigate. I’m working out how to share the findings with my generous participants and collaborators. And I’m preparing to return to China later in 2017 for a different project (on English and the globalisation of university education).

The thesis is not only relevant to linguists but also to Sinologists and political scientists. It’s an ethnography of language policy; that is, it’s about the lived experiences of state practices regarding a minority language. Rather than merely analysing what the minority language polices say, or what language practices everyday people have, it combines these angles. This makes for a lot of ground to cover, so I took a case study of just one language, Zhuang, the language of China’s largest official minority group, a group who have autonomous sub-national government over the Guangxi Zhuangzu Autonomous Region. The thesis investigates what language ideologies are produced and reproduced in official language rights discourses and policies, and how social actors receive, resist or reproduce these.

Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region (Source: Encyclopedia Britannica)

The research takes an ethnographic approach and draws on interviews with over sixty participants, texts collected from public linguistic landscapes, fieldwork observations and a corpus of Chinese laws, policies and official policy commentaries.

The analysis commences with a critical examination of the procedures of Zhuang language governance, finding that the language policy framework neither empowers Zhuang speakers nor the institutions tasked with governing Zhuang because authority for language governance is fractured and responsiveness to changing conditions is limited. Furthermore, the Zhuang language governance framework entrenches the normative position of a ‘developmentalist’ ideology under which Zhuang is constructed as of low value. Next, the analysis follows Zhuang language policy along its trajectory into practice. The thesis examines how language policy is implemented at different levels of government, and how Zhuang language governance is understood and experienced by social actors, concentrating on two key mechanisms of language policy: first, the regulation of language displayed in public space; and, second, the regulation of language in education.

With regard to public space, the thesis examines a municipal legislative intervention under which Zhuang has been added to public signage. It finds that Zhuang language is rarely displayed outside areas under Zhuang autonomous regional government, and that even within these areas Zhuang is almost exclusively displayed on government signage. The thesis then extends the linguistic landscape approach, analysing the various ‘readings’ of Zhuang landscape texts by viewers, including some who negatively evaluate the signage as tokenistic and many who simply do not ‘see’ the displays of Zhuang. This is one of the more surprising findings: it’s so easy to assume (as a policy-maker, an academic or a passer-by) that a bilingual street sign will be read and used by bilingual viewers who speak that language, that it will be seen as bilingual, that it will be seen at all. As my research discovered, these are not well founded assumptions.

Bilingual and triscriptual street sign in Nanning, GZAR

Finally, the thesis examines education policy under which Zhuang is introduced as a study subject at a limited number of universities after its near-total exclusion from primary and particularly secondary schooling. It finds that students who – against social norms and values – choose to study Zhuang at university nevertheless largely adopt the language ideologies of the pre-tertiary schooling system, namely the belief that Zhuang is not an educated person’s language and not useful for socio-economic mobility.

Overall, the study finds that Zhuang language rights and policies, despite being powerful official discourses, do not challenge the ascendant marketised and mobility-focused language ideologies which ascribe low value to Zhuang. Moreover, although language rights and policies create an ethno-linguistically divided and hierarchic social order seemingly against the interests of Zhuang speakers, Zhuang speakers may nevertheless value the Zhuang identity discursively created and invested with authority by this framework.

I’m now looking forward to reworking my doctoral research for publication, touching base with Zhuang participants, and getting started on my post-doctoral journey.

Alexandra Grey’s PhD thesis, “How do language rights affect minority languages in China? An ethnographic investigation of the Zhuang minority language under conditions of rapid social change” (Macquarie University, 2017) can be accessed through our PhD Hall of Fame.

Reference

Heller, M. (2003). Globalization, the new economy, and the commodification of language and identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7(4), 473-492.

Voice of China Sydney 2015, Program Booklet

It’s a weeknight at the Sydney Town Hall, an ornate 19^th century building in the city centre. Almost everyone bustling in the entryway is of Chinese extraction, except the ushers (and me). They’re all ages, and as I pour inside with them I hear Cantonese, Mandarin, Hakka, and a little English. There are posters and flyers using simplified and traditional Chinese characters alongside English text. These scripts are not in-text translations but code-switching sentences working together within each ad to sell Australian Ugg boots or New Zealand throat lozenges. The ticket I hold and the banners on stage are also multilingual. They read “The Voice of China 中国好声音 澳大利亚招募站 Season 4 Australia Audition”. The tickets were free and ‘sold out’ days before this event. It’s the final audition – in a live concert format – for the upcoming season of a popular reality TV franchise, based on ‘Voice of Holland’, and available on a subscription channel in Australia. This is the first season of ‘Voice of China’ in which ‘Overseas Chinese’ can compete for the chance to be ‘The Australian Contender’ and flown to mainland China to film the series.

In-Group, Ethnicity and Language

The Town Hall this night is clearly a space where people operate within “multi-sited transnational social fields encompassing those who leave and those who stay behind”, as Peggy Levitt and Nina Glick Schiller (2004, p. 1003) have put it. These sociologists posit that migrants may simultaneously assimilate into a host society and maintain enduring ties to those sharing their ethnic identity, “pivoting” between the two. This is a useful lens through which to regard the event. What is most interesting with ‘Voice of China’ is the use of language to extend who counts as “those who leave”. The contestants have not necessarily actually left China, many are originally from Australia. Maybe their parents, or even their grandparents, once migrated. The audition’s winner [SPOILER ALERT!] is one of the few contestants without a Chinese first name: Leon Lee, a university music student from Sydney.

As these contestants pivot towards China – particularly through their use of Putonghua-Mandarin – so too does the Chinese community pivot towards the diaspora through the vehicle of this show, both by holding these Australian auditions at all and by incorporating Cantonese and Australian English. Together, the singers, hosts, judges and audience are constructing a transnational social field that incorporates both Australia and China; Sydney is not simply a city in Australia but an Asian migration hub located in reference to Beijing. All the fans sitting around me, who might watch other ‘Voice of China’ events in virtual spaces – online and on international pay TV – while living in Sydney, demonstrate the layers of place in one geographic space.

The use of language also reveals interesting dynamics in who counts as having a shared ethnic identity. In an adjustment invisible to the audience, one contestant did not perform in his first language, the Kam-Tai language Zhuang, which is an official ethnic minority language in China. The show’s producers had said he could choose only English, Mandarin or Cantonese songs.

There is a normative equivalence of language and ethnicity being reproduced here. The way in which language features associated with Mandarin, Cantonese and Chinese minority languages “index” (Blommaert and Rampton 2011) Chinese-ness (or do not index it) is shown to be more complicated as the auditions unfurl. It is a linguistic manifestation of a recurrent normative tension over what features are identified with the Zhonghua Minzu. On one hand, Chinese minority languages and common Chinese-heritage dialects in Australia such as Hokkien and Hakka are totally absent from stage. On the other, Cantonese, although it is officially deemed a dialect not a minority language, is used by the hosts, contestants and judges. Despite Cantonese’s status, until recently it, rather than Mandarin, was the language identified as “Chinese” in Australia. Cantonese is also the Chinese language historically strongest in Hong Kong, and after all it’s a Hong Kong station (TVB) organising and presenting these auditions. Cantonese is given equivalent official status in the Town Hall show, with hosting duties meticulously shared between a Mandarin speaking man and a Cantonese-speaking woman.

But there’s still an observable norm of language dominance. When Jessica and Deborah Kwong, two Melbourne sisters, use Cantonese to introduce themselves in their pre-recorded video, then sing a live duet in English, a judge doesn’t hesitate to give all his feedback in Mandarin. They nod as he speaks. It’s only when the next judge takes his turn that the girls ask to switch to “Guangdonghua” (Guangdong Speech, a colloquial name for Cantonese) that we all realise the sisters didn’t understand the first judge. There’s laughter all round, and the judges pledge to ask all future contestants which language they’d prefer. For all the deliberate announcements in Cantonese, not being fluent in Mandarin is not ‘normal’ in this context.

Leon Lee sings a lovely, English-language mash-up of rap, R&B and John Lennon’s Yesterday, ending with a modest xiexie (‘thank you’ in Mandarin). True to their recent pledge, the judges ask if they can comment in Mandarin. Leon explains – in Mandarin – that he speaks it imperfectly but understands it, and the judges proceed.

Only one contestant sings in Cantonese in the round, although many more speak Cantonese in their videos. Their practice again reveals the language expected by ‘Voice of China’s mainland producers and viewers. (While a Hong Kong station produces the auditions, it’s a mainland Chinese station, ZJTV, that produces and airs the series.) Sydney, being oriented to China but not actually in China, is a space where different linguistic norms can apply and so we get a slightly uncomfortable, simultaneous centralization and marginalization of Cantonese.

Translocal and Global

In addition to the associations between language and Chinese identity, tonight’s language practices happen under conditions of globalization. The singers at once use features associated with American English to link to the global scripts of reality TV song contests, and Australian-accented English to localize themselves. Their use of Mandarin can be understood as an additional attempt to localize, to differentiate from the global English language, global pop culture and global TV media.

Some contestants take on American accents in singing English-language songs, including Gaga’s Paparazzi, or employ the style of Anglo Pop music by inserting “yeah yeah yeah” into Mandarin songs. The judges also use features associated with American English – “Dude, your range is incredible,” says one judge – which functions to harmonise the show with the “international” American style of reality TV. However, when the contestants speak English to thank the crowd, they have unabashed Australian accents.

The contestant I’ve come to support, Wei Baocheng, linguistically localises in a different way. He makes his rendition of ‘The Sound of Silence’ more Australian than the American original not through accent but through prosody in his laconic rendition. The judges employ some translanguaging to describe it as “hen[很] laid back” and “hen[很] ’Strayan”. Hen is the Mandarin word for ‘very’, and ’Strayan is a jocular, colloquial term for “Australian”.

Localization is also achieved through song choice, amongst other things. For example, contestant Wang Chen sings the yearning rock ballad “Beijing, Beijing”, popular in China in recent years (and already on Voice of China in 2012). The pathos with which he performs it reinforces that, for him, Sydney Town Hall is oriented to China. Wang is singing about a city at the imagined heart of the community he (and the producers) imagine the audience to be.

Blommaert, J., & Rampton, B. (2011). Language and Superdiversity. Diversities, 13(2), 1-22.

Levitt, P., & Schiller, N. (2006). Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society1 International Migration Review, 38 (3), 1002-1039 DOI: 10.1111/j.1747-7379.2004.tb00227.x

The researcher wearing a Zhuang employee’s work uniform at the Black Clothes Zhuang House in the Ethnic Minorities Village, Nanning, China, 2014

I was surprised, frankly, during my recent fieldwork to find Zhuang language being used in a QQ chatroom in China. Surprised because Zhuang text is absent from the linguistic landscape. Surprised because many of my interview participants reported they had no Zhuang literacy practices: some young Zhuang people had not even realised local street names and a line on the every Chinese bank note were in Zhuang; it’s written in the Latin alphabet, so they had assumed it was English. But on social media, there it was.

Zhuang is the name of a minority ‘ethnic nationality’ originally from Southern China, and Zhuang is also the name of their language. There are about 18 million Zhuang people, but the proportion who are of native, fluent or partial speakers of Zhuang is hard to pinpoint. Certainly, there is a trend away from using Zhuang at home, in public and in traditional media, especially in cities. I’m currently investigating Zhuang language use, with a focus on the ways that legally enshrined language rights do (or do not) affect the maintenance of a minority language in China. Around the time I was on QQ, various other data were also suggesting to me that online there is more space for Zhuang than there is offline, and definitely more space for Zhuang activism. Some of the online Zhuang language use is organised and some dissipated and impromptu; some is deliberately activist and some seems a less conscious promotion of Zhuang. But all of it is grassroots – or bottom-up – language revitalisation, an approach very different to the top-down language rights and minority language policies existing in China. Looking at my QQ screenshots, I began asking myself what special opportunities social media is providing Zhuang language but also whether using Zhuang on social media has any special impact on offline. In what climate do the grassroots grow into something bigger?

Snippet of QQ chatroom screenshot, June 2014

There’s a crop of grassroots language initiatives springing up on online platforms, for all languages all over the world. For example, during my fieldwork, I was asked by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences to present on Australian Indigenous language maintenance and in preparing I came across this Yugambeh indigenous language app developed by a local museum-cum-research-centre in Queensland, north-eastern Australia. The app’s effect is amplified through the local primary schools’ Write into Art competition, in which kids use the app to compose poetry. This example, even more than Zhuang use in QQ chatrooms, raised for me the question of how to get grassroots revitalisation which sprouts online to flourish offline.

Transplanting grassroots activity

The link between online language activism and offline language revitalisation movements is a subject Josep Cru (2014) deals with in his recent article. Cru’s case study of grassroots, social-media-enabled language revival follows Mexican university students – Yucatec Maya speakers and would-be-speakers – chatting together on Facebook. Cru (2014 p3) argues that “social media are being appropriated by Maya speakers as a catalyst for language advocacy and activism”. He suggests that part of the impact social media is having on Maya revitalisation stems from the fact that, on Facebook, “Maya can be used on par with dominant languages” (p. 7). But are online platforms always such a level field? They have the potential to be.

Potential online language use

Cru (2014, p. 10) suggests that social media is “a potential catalyst among some youngsters for ethnolinguistic awareness and even political positioning, which is an essential aspect of language revitalisation.” In this way, social media is more than just a “productive new space” for writing down a language typically marginalised in literacy practices. That is, online spaces have a special potential that other media and other domains lack.

But where does this potential come from? I suggest the potential comes from the normative micro-climate of online communication. While Cru’s Facebookers, the kids using the Yugambeh app and my QQ chatters probably have differing levels of social organisation, differing political views about revitalisation, different audiences, and different impacts, one commonality is that online, and especially online on social media, they can all use language in less formal and less standardised ways than they can offline. I’m not arguing online communication has no rules and no norms, simply that they are different from – and often less constraining – than norms in other forms of communication.

Part of the fun, informal, flexible nature of online communication, especially on social media, is that the “fuzziness and the arbitrariness of language boundaries” (Cru 2014, p. 7) is not problematized to the same extent as it is offline in formal use, and especially in offline written forms. Because the integration of different languages and of non-standard spelling and grammar is less remarkable and less of a (socially-constructed) problem in online communication, linguistic features associated with a minority language can be employed online in ways that may not be available in offline, or which may be penalised offline rather than receiving a “valuation-enhancing effect” (Eisenlohr 2004). So this is, arguably, an inherent property of online communication which creates the potential for a minority language to be used on par with a dominant language.

But that potential is not always going to be realised.

Online communication, when it integrates linguistic features associated with minority languages, has the potential to challenge norms of offline minority language (dis)use. But it also has the potential to reproduce those very language norms through which the minority language is dominated.

Actual online language use

It may well be that for Yucatec Maya, the level playing field of Facebook is fertile soil for grassroots language revitalisation. Unfortunately, for many other minority languages, dominance creeps in to online spaces. My own data, while still in the process of analysis, is already suggesting that Zhuang cannot be used on par with dominant languages online.

Social and power structures which minimise Zhuang speech are reproduced online in many ways. For starters, many young Zhuang people have no literacy in Zhuang and almost all non-Zhuang people have no Zhuang language competence whatsoever, so the informational utility of sending an Instant Message in Zhuang is severely restricted. The symbolic and/or phatic use of Zhuang on QQ is sometimes policed by other young Zhuang people: in one instance of my QQ data, a university student uses the Zhuang “haep bak” [‘shut up’] and another student responds “他不是有意的，不理那些话” [‘It has no meaning, ignore those words’]. Even if not receiving a scolding, using some Zhuang language does not import the value of ‘cool-ness’ into communications, largely because minority culture – Zhuang in particular – is still evaluated as ‘backwards’ rather than ‘cool’ in the offline sociolinguistic environment. This perception of low “social capital” is reinforced by the low capital of Zhuang language in both education and employment. This means young people have less reason to use Zhuang online (unless they are deliberately trying to make it cool). Zhuang seems to be rarely used as a resource to create a “we-code” because there is not a wide consciousness of We amongst Zhuang young people.

All this happens with a banality characteristic of linguistic hegemony. In other, less banal circumstances around the world, minority language speakers whose language is associated with civil disobedience, separatism or terrorism may find their online use is policed not just by subtle social processes and throw-away online rebukes, but by state security forces. Online, language choice may be easier, but language choice is also easily monitored.

Becoming a grassroots Green Thumb

My point is that while online minority language use can catalyse grassroots language revitalisation, it can also reproduce processes of minoritisation. What makes a grassroots movement flourish?

Does it depend on how organised the online users are in networks or communities of practice? Does it depend on the form of online media? Does it depend on grassroots activity happening at the same time but offline? In regards to Zhuang in China, the development of one or two shoots to a grassroots movement to a broader change is likely to depend on all three, and more. Certainly, whether online activity in China is actually a hothouse of grassroots political change generally – not just in regards to language revitalisation – is the subject of an ongoing debate (e.g., contrast Yang 2011 and Leibold 2011).

There is still a lot more research to be done on how grassroots politics of language revitalisation develop, online and offline, and how online grassroots activity adds to (or challenges) both top-down policies of language revitalisation and offline grassroots activities.

References

Cru, Josep (2014). Language Revitalisation from the Ground Up: Promoting Yucatec Maya on Facebook Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 1-13 : 10.1080/01434632.2014.921184

Eisenlohr, Patrick (2004). Language Revitalization and New Technologies: Cultures of Electronic Mediation and the Refiguring of Communities. Annual Review of Anthropology, 33 (1): 21–45.

Leibold, James (2011). Blogging Alone: China, the Internet, and the Democratic Illusion? The Journal of Asian Studies, 70 (4): 1023-1041.

Yang, Guobin (2011). Technology and Its Contents: Issues in the Study of the Chinese Internet. The Journal of Asian Studies, 70 (4): 1043-1050.

Yangshuo’s West Street (Source: chinatravelca)

Tourism has been found to be beneficial for minority language maintenance in a number of contexts from around the world. For instance, Anand Torrents Alcaraz has recently shown here on Language on the Move that the growing tourism industry in the Pallars Sobirà region of the Spanish Pyrenees extends the range of uses of Pallarès, the local dialect of Catalan, beyond its traditional rural-agricultural domains. Similarly, PhD research by Yang Hongyan has demonstrated that the award of World Heritage status to the city of Lijiang in Yunnan province in China has provided a significant boost for the maintenance of the Naxi language (Yang 2013). However, it is not always the case that the local minority language benefits from the development of tourism in a minority area, as a fascinating case study of West Street in Yangshuo Town in the Guilin district of Guangxi Province in China demonstrates (Gao 2012).

Yangshuo was one of the first backpacker destinations to emerge in China and the frequency with which Yangshuo is featured in English-language travel reports is out of all proportion to its small size, as Xiaoxiao Chen found in her study of representations of Chinese people and languages in English-language newspaper travel writing (Chen 2013). Yangshuo is typically represented as “easy,” “accessible” and “English-speaking” to English-language audiences, as in the following example (quoted in Chen 2013, p. 207):

[Yangshuo] is the most accessible destination in China for independent foreign travelers, offering accommodation across all ranges, an eclectic array of restaurants with English menus and English-speaking tourism service providers.

However, catering to the international tourist market through the provision of English-language services is only one part of the success story of Yangshuo. Capitalising on its popularity with international tourists, Yangshuo began to strategically associate itself with English-speaking visitors in its marketing efforts directed at domestic tourists, as in the following strategy paper (quoted in Gao 2012, p. 343):

We should fully explore the opportunities of mixing Chinese with western cultures by strategically integrating more western elements into local Yangshuo culture.

As a consequence of this branding strategy, part of the attraction of Yangshuo for domestic tourists now is the presence of English in the linguistic landscape, as a tourism site points out (quoted in Gao 2012, p. 336f.):

Yangshuo has picturesque scenery and rich cultural heritage. The most famous is the ancient stone street, West Street, which has many craft shops, calligraphy and painting shops, hostels, cafés, bars, and Chinese kung fu houses. It is also the gathering place for the largest number of foreigners – more than twenty businesses are owned by foreigners. So the place is called the ‘Foreigner Street’. And since all the locals can speak foreign languages, it is also called the ‘Global Village’. Another attraction is the study and exchange of Chinese and foreign languages and cultures. Chinese people teach their foreign friends Chinese cultures including its language, calligraphy, taiji, cooking, chess; at the same time foreigners teach Chinese people their languages and cultures, so that both finish their ‘study abroad’ within a short time.

The presence of English in the local linguistic landscape is continuously stressed in marketing materials, such as this one from the Yangshuo Tourism Bureau (quoted in Gao 2012, p. 345f.):

Yangshuo is a good place to cure your ‘dumb English’ and ‘deaf English’. At West Street, you can always see West Street people talking in fluent English with western travelers for business or just having small talk. Even old grannies in their 70s or teenage kids can chat [Chinese original: 拉呱 lā guǎ] with ‘laowai’ [foreigners] in English. Many western travelers say they just feel no foreignness here. West Street is the largest ‘English Corner’ in China now.

One could assume that in this ‘culture- and language-rich’ tourist destination, local languages are also being strategically incorporated, particularly as Yangshuo is located in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, the home of the Zhuang ethnic minority. However, this is not the case. In contrast to the ubiquitous focus on English, the local language, Zhuang, the local dialect of Chinese, and other local minority languages present in Yangshuo (Yao, Hui, Miao, Tibetan, Dong and others) are systematically erased: their existence is simply never even mentioned in tourism materials about the area.

Even if the local dialect is mentioned, as in this blog post by a visitor to Yangshuo (quoted in Gao 2012, p. 348f.), it is to be denigrated as not locally appropriate:

You must hold a CET-4 certificate, with relatively fluent spoken English, because at West Street, or just at countryside farmhouses of Yangshuo, even an old grandma or an egg-seller from a rural family could surprise you with their amazing English and at least another foreign language. Next of course you should know Cantonese, kind of an official language here, ‘cause more than half of the xiăozī [=cool person; yuppie] are from Guangdong. The third comes Putonghua, better with Beijing accent. The local dialect just does not work there.

In contrast to Pallars Sobirà or Lijiang, in Yangshuo tourism has done nothing to improve the status of local minority languages. On the contrary, as English takes on the function of indexing not only the global but also the local identity of Yangshuo, it is English that becomes a marker of local authenticity in the global village.

References

Chen, Xiaoxiao. (2013). Opening China to the Tourist Gaze: Representations of Chinese People and Languages in Newspaper Travel Writing since the 1980s. PhD, Macquarie University.

Gao, Shuang (2012). Commodification of place, consumption of identity: The sociolinguistic construction of a ‘global village’ in rural China Journal of Sociolinguistics, 16 (3), 336-357 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9841.2012.00534.x

Yang, Hongyan. (2012). Naxi, Chinese and English: Multilingualism in Lijiang. PhD, Macquarie University.