English as Eastern: Zhuang, Mongolian, Mandarin, and English in the linguistic orders of globalized China

Abstract

Socially constructed and globally propagated East-West binaries have influenced language ideologies about English in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), but they are not hegemonic. This essay explores how East-West language ideologies are reformed in mergers with Mandarin-minority language ideologies. It discusses two separate but similar recent studies of minority language speakers and language ideologies in the PRC, respectively by Grey and Baioud. Each study reveals aspects of how Mandarin and English are being socially constructed as on the same side of a dichotomous and hierarchic linguistic and social order, in contradistinction to minority languages. The essay thus problematizes the construction of English as a Western language and Mandarin as an Eastern language; both in academic discourses and in wider social and political discourses. The essay uses Asif Agha’s theory of “enregisterment” to unify the points drawn from each study. It concludes that the language ideologies and practices/discourses under examination reproduce the displacement of a subaltern status; we describe this process as dynamic, internal Orientalism and “recursive” Orientalism, drawing on foundational theory of language ideologies. This essay paves the way for further studies of recursive Orientalism.

Linguistic purism as resistance to colonization

“…The new era of reform and opening up of the 1980s, in particular, ushered in dominant neoliberal ideology in the language education policy and public discourses in China. The policy with its focus on national unity, economic development, and globalization, as Zhou (2012, p. 26) argues, “treats Mandarin as the superlanguage and reserves for it most public functions and political, legal, financial, and human resources while politically and functionally marginalizing minority languages.” Further, the neoliberal ideological rhetoric, which has been fused seamlessly with long‐entrenched imperialistic Han Chinese‐supremacy and racial ideology (Leibold, 2006), reproduces the indexical dichotomy of minority languages as traditional/backward/subordinated and Mandarin as modern/advanced/dominant in the PRC—part of the doxa in Bourdieusian terms (Grey & Baioud, 2021b).…”