In the past two decades or so, the mutual constitution of language and identity has gained significant attention in sociolinguistics. Identity is increasingly seen as emergent, fluid, and often contested, and language is a... [ view full abstract ]
In the past two decades or so, the mutual constitution of language and identity has gained significant attention in sociolinguistics. Identity is increasingly seen as emergent, fluid, and often contested, and language is a major resource for speakers to construct identity. In this colloquium, we explore the co-constructing relationship between language and national/ethnic identities in a variety of contexts in Taiwan and Hong Kong: both are historically Chinese-speaking communities with a colonial past; both are multilingual and multi-ethnic communities due to migration; both are politically entangled with China and seeking their own identities, though to different extents. The central research questions of the colloquium are:
(1) How do language and national/ethnic identity co-construct each other?
(2) How does tension between China (as a political superpower) and peripheries (such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, etc.) play out linguistically in diverse contexts/communities/individuals in Taiwan and Hong Kong?
In this colloquium, Wei and Duann study how personal deictic choices were used by three past national leaders to index an imagined Chinese/Taiwanese community; Lin and Guo explore how Taiwanese youth construct their identities through online discussions concerning the 2016 presidential race in Taiwan; Su investigates meta-comments on (im)politeness by Taiwanese in China to demarcate self/other; Chun examines contested views concerning bilingual education among Taiwanese-Vietnamese children, their parents, and teachers; Loh et al. investigate identity formation and Chinese language acquisition among ethnic minority adolescents in Hong Kong. With data spanning from the 1950s to the present collected in both physical and virtual spaces, papers in the colloquium illustrate the ever-evolving nature of space- and ethnicity-related concepts such as “Chinese-ness”, "Taiwanese-ness”, “Hong-Kong-ness”, and “Vietnamese-ness”, revealing the interconnectedness between geographical spaces and cultural places, on the one hand, and that between centers and peripheries, on the other, in the formation and negotiation of identity. Drawing on diverse disciplinary frameworks (discourse analysis, pragmatics, politeness studies, corpus studies, language acquisition studies, etc.), the colloquium illustrates how language use and identity construction at the micro level constantly shape and are shaped by the macro-level social, historical, and political contexts.
