The sociolinguistics of globalizing China

Abstract

The sociolinguistics of globalization has emerged as an important research paradigm in response to the challenges of global social change. As a country undergoing some of the most drastic changes during the past few decades, China provides a rich site for exploring the issue of language and globalization empirically and theoretically. This article seeks to map out the new socio-cultural values being produced or re-conceptualized in the process of China's transformation, with a view to understand the materiality of language use under the current conditions of global economy and geopolitics. It reviews recent research mainly from four perspectives: identity, social stratification and consumerism; English and neoliberal globalization; diversity, ethnicity and race; state and nationalism, and concludes with suggestions for future research. | INTRODUCTIONSince the turn of the century, there has been increasing reflection upon knowledge construction within sociolinguistics. This re-thinking and re-imagination of the discipline derives largely from the growing awareness that despite its claim to study language in society, sociolinguists have been confining themselves mostly to isolated speech communities in their search for uncontaminated authentic data (Bucholtz, 2003;Eckert, 2003;Rampton, 2010). Such disciplinary bias has become all the more alarming due to the social change we are witnessing during the past few decades in relation to globalization. This is because globalization has not brought about a more homogeneous or uniform society (Blommaert, 2010: 1); instead, as a historical process, it involves "complex flow of people, signs, sounds and images across multiple borders in multiple directions" (Pennycook, 2011: 513), resulting in complex social relations, increasing diversity, and unpredictable consequences (Blommaert &This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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