Abstract Summary
This talk draws on my research on the media coverage on the ‘dialect’ crisis in mainland China. While I applaud the initiatives to preserve different regional Chinese varieties, I am critically aware of the phenomenon that ‘non-locals’ are often blamed for the ‘dialect’ crisis in the relevant media coverage.
Abstract :
In this talk, I share the findings emerging from a series of research efforts to understand the coverage on the ‘dialect’ (or regional varieties of the Chinese language) crisis in mainland China. First, I draw on Ruiz’s (1984) metaphorical representations of language to outline the ideological and implementational spaces for language policymaking and contend that the ‘resource’ orientation propagated by the selected media texts defines the implementational space for protecting regional varieties of the Chinese language. Then I present on the coverage on the protecting Cantonese movement in the state print and social media. The relevant coverage shows that individuals can be highly vocal in asserting their entitlement to using Cantonese and the government appears to be highly reconciliatory in response to such assertion. In addition, the government wants to communicate to the public that it has been doing what it can do to preserve Cantonese as its regional lingua franca. Nevertheless, the study on the social media discussion about the promotion of Shanghainese reveals that non-local migrants are often blamed for the decline of Shanghainese and risk being marginalized in the promotion of Shanghainese. These findings draw attention to the fact that the promotion of particular regional Chinese varieties may undermine the interests of those who do not speak them. Unless all the Chinese varieties are valued in the efforts to preserve Chinese ‘dialects’, the promotion of one particular regional Chinese variety may help strengthen the status of the national standard, rather than preventing the regional Chinese variety from disappearance.
