Abstract :
This paper focuses upon the ideologies of authenticity and authority being constructed, mobilized and repackaged for purposes regarding social group differentiation in bilingual Guangzhou, where China’s state official language, Putonghua, and the local speech, Cantonese, are both commonly used. It questions social binaries produced within the academia as well as circulated by lay people (Gal, 2016), such as natives vs. non-natives/immigrants, mother-tongue users vs. non-mother-tongue users and authenticity vs. anonymity (Woolard & Gal 2001; Woolard, 2016). Based upon second generation internal immigrants’ narratives of language-use-related life experiences in Guangzhou, and their bilingual practices in service encounters inserted in their interview interactions situated in restaurants, this research takes a discursive analytical approach to investigate language beliefs and ideologies cast upon immigrants and reframed by them in their identity negotiation.
In this paper I display that the ideology of authenticity, based upon blood, unmediatedness, purity, standardness, serves to construct the ‘mother-tongue users of Cantonese’ and the authority of Cantonese, which then legitimizes the boundary making of Guangzhouers. Meanwhile, fractal recursions (Irvine and Gal, 2009) in terms of authentic vs. in-authentic Guangzhouers occur at different scales with regard to the degree of (un)mediatedness of the Cantonese and Putonghua one acquires and one’s (in)competence in vernacular written Cantonese. Despite the language-use-difference-based discrimination against immigrants, some of them draw upon the same ideology of differentiation in the way of switching codes between Putonghua and Cantonese to distinguish themselves from servers who are Putonghua monolinguals or cannot understand/speak Cantonese. Immigrants also employ the naturalism and anonymity of one’s physique built up in the climate of Guangzhou to justify the authenticity of one’s identity as a Guangzhouer. In short, this research examines how binary notions and ideological stances related to authenticity and mother-tongue users are (re)conceptualized and (re)contextualized in the constitution of social group differentiation.
