This study is situated in Guangzhou, a city of China, where both Chinese official language, Putonghua, and the local language variety, Cantonese, are commonly used. Guangzhou is one of the most popular destinations for... [ view full abstract ]
This study is situated in Guangzhou, a city of China, where both Chinese official language, Putonghua, and the local language variety, Cantonese, are commonly used. Guangzhou is one of the most popular destinations for immigrants since China started the Economic Reform and witnessed huge internal population mobility. While the migration contributes to the popularisation of Putonghua, Guangzhou people concern about the decline of Cantonese and ascribe the influx of immigrants to it. This research investigates second generation immigrants’ linguistic identities displayed in their code choices in conversations and language beliefs in Guangzhou that underlie their code choices.
I conducted interviews with 23 second generation immigrants set in restaurants or cafes, and use a sequential approach to conversation analysis (Auer, 1995) and membership categorisation analysis (Sacks, 1972) to look at their code choices in interviews and in service encounters inserted into interviews. The analyses reveal that whenever monolingual Putonghua speakers are present, including co-participants in interviews and servers in service encounters, my bilingual participants align with Cantonese speakers or self-categorise as Cantonese speakers. They show alignment with Cantonese speakers in interview conversations through switching to Cantonese to mark a dispreferred second pair part to the preceding turn in Putonghua. They self-categorise as Cantonese speakers in service encounters through resisting the identity category ascribed to them by servers and preferring using Cantonese. These display that they highlight their competence in speaking Cantonese compared to Putonghua monolinguals and see Cantonese as a highly-valued resource. However, some participants who self-categorise as Cantonese speakers use Putonghua to emphasise the theme of conversations and Cantonese to mark other content as less important. This way of using Putonghua and Cantonese as ‘we-code’ vs. ‘they-code’ indicates a higher status ascribed to Putonghua. These exemplify that Cantonese is valued and the prestige of Putonghua acknowledged.
References
Auer, P. (1995). The Pragmatics of Code-switching: A Sequential Approach. In Milroy, L. & Muysken, P.(eds).One Speaker, Two Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.115-135.
Sacks, H. (1972). An initial investigation of the usability of conversational data for doing sociology. In Studies in Social Interaction, ed. D.N. Sudnow, 31-74. New York: Free Press.
