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ALC Seminar: Insights into Minority Language Display Policy from an Ethnography of Language Policy in China Combining Three Lenses

When: —
Venue: Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street

No booking required

In this seminar, Dr Alexandra Grey will present on a 2013-2017 doctoral ethnography of policy regarding the Zhuang minority language. Taking a Bourdieusian sociolinguistic approach, Dr Grey traces language policy’s trajectory from constitutional rights through their elaboration at various tiers of policy and into implementation (or obsolescence). This is combined with an examination of how Zhuang language policy is experienced.

This paper uses a municipal-level ordinance intervening to include Standard Zhuang on Mandarin-medium urban signage in the capital of China’s Zhuang region as an entry point. The findings show that the resulting signage contrasted with Zhuang-exclusive urban and commercial norms of language display, that public written Zhuang was often misrecognised by the participants as either Mandarin or English, and that Zhuang-inclusive signage was read critically and co-textually in reference to education policies. The paper argues that the studied streetscape “semiotic aggregates” (Scollon & Scollon 2003:23) and the habitus of viewers affected not only the symbolic meaning, but even the visibility of these Zhuang displays, whereas policy-making tends to assume policies work as posited, including that minority language displays increase the public presence of that language.

The intersubjective readings of the streetscape were investigated through commented walks and interviews with Zhuang-background university students and language leaders. The research combined complementary analytic lenses: legal, linguistic landscape and intersubjective.

The findings offer a springboard for discussing what ethnographically-oriented approaches can offer language policy research and policy-making. The paper calls into question the Zhuang-inclusive public signage as a means of achieving generic language policy goals (Hornberger 2006:29), and asks, more broadly, whether policy-makers should rely on publicly displaying minority language to improve language maintenance and valorisation.

Scollon & Scollon (2003). Discourses in place: language in the material world. Routledge.

Hornberger (2006). Frameworks and models in language planning. In Ricento (Ed.), An introduction to language policy: theory and methods (pp.24-41). Blackwell.

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