Transforming Mongolian Wedding Speech Genres in Bilingual Bicultural Urban Inner Mongolia

Abstract

In Mongolian culture, wedding speeches are a traditional component of a marriage celebration, but in bilingual, bicultural urban Inner Mongolia, China, two hybrid genres have emerged which reflect competing ideologies of languages and speakers. There can be a Mongolian performance with a commentary in Chinese, or a blended Mongolian and Chinese language performance. In these hybrids, Mongolian is often associated with a minority status but an authentic tradition, while Chinese seems to represent a modern majority, but alien, culture. By situating the hybrid and bilingual Mongolian wedding speech genre in the contexts of Mongolian cultural loss and revival, urbanization, and the increasing weight of the Chinese state’s political discourse in public space, the study unravels the complexity and contestations inherent in a hybridized traditional Mongolian speech genre. Drawing on the inherent duality of genre, that is its boundedness/monology and its plasticity/heteroglossia, this paper presents ethnographic evidence of these sociolinguistic representations, and contributes to the understanding of hybrid genre, agency, and a transforming expressive culture in the context of social displacement, cultural shift, and internal colonization in China.

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

“…Baioud's Mongolian study asks what semiotic ideologies are produced in the performance of bilingual and bicultural weddings of Mongols in the PRC and how the indexical relation of Mongolian as traditional and Chinese/English as modern are reproduced and contested in the performance. The study draws on data collected during 2016 in Inner Mongolia where Baioud participated in weddings, collected wedding videos and interviewed a range of wedding participants including wedding ceremony speakers, wedding costume studios owners, photographers, wedding guests, and couples (Baioud 2018;Baioud 2021aBaioud , 2021b). Baioud's study finds that the performance of bilingual and bicultural weddings of Mongols expands and reproduces the orthodox representation of Mongolian culture as traditional while representing Chinese culture and the Sinicized Western culture as modern.…”

“…Both studies are rooted in social constructionist, Bourdieusian critical sociolinguistics. The aspect of that school of theory on which we center this combined analysis is Agha's theory of enregisterment, thereby offering a new perspective on Grey's study and extending Baioud's (2021aBaioud's ( , 2021b prior use of Agha's theory. Agha's theory builds upon contemporary sociolinguistic research on the social and ideological aspects of linguistic representation, which have been examined extensively (e.g.…”

A discursive study of parents’ identity construction in Chinese wedding ceremony

“…Dunn's (2005a) analysis reveals that the wedding speech genre provides speakers with a spectrum of performance possibilities linked to different speaking roles and social identities. Besides, Baioud (2022) has explored that two hybrid genres of wedding speeches have emerged in bilingual, bicultural urban Inner Mongolia, China, reflecting competing ideologies of languages and speakers. Through wedding speeches, the identity of speech makers is constructed.…”

“…Previous studies on wedding speeches in different languages have primarily focused on discursive practices and folk culture (Baioud, 2022;Dunn, 2004Dunn, , 2005aDunn, , 2005bJiang, 2011). It is revealed that these speeches vary in terms of their performances.…”

Linguistic purism as resistance to colonization

“…The second factor explaining why metalinguistic discussions proliferate on Bainu is that there is a porous boundary between Bainu and other discursive contexts saturated with purist ideologies including traditional rituals (Baioud, 2021), cultural festivals, newsroom interviews, Mongolian speech contests, language classrooms, and other Mongolian digital media spaces. Folk linguists, including those purist stancetakers, move between various virtual and nonvirtual spaces freely, and surely Bainu , as the most popular Mongolian virtual space, naturally attracts them and serves as a convenient venue to disseminate purist discourses.…”