Language, Gender, and Ideology: Media-induced Linguistic Innovation in Female Address Terms in China

Abstract

As we enter the 21st century, we find ourselves living in intensified globalization, characterized by global cultural flows of people, technologies, money, images, and ideas (Appadurai 2020). Language is evolving in response to socio-cultural changes. As such, linguistic innovations via mass media offer a particularly interesting locus to track such global flows. This paper aims to study how popular lexicons in female address terms have emerged out of digital communication and have been widely used and interpreted by different communities interacting with mass media in contemporary China. As China is increasingly integrated into the global economy, the widespread of media networks, such as WeChat, QQ and Microblogs, has increasingly provided Chinese citizens with access to new words and new ways of using old forms. The study thus enquires as to the origin of these linguistic innovations, the linguistic resources required to bring about such changes, the motives for developing such online resources, and the responses by Chinese citizens to these media-induced language changes. By addressing these issues, this paper is oriented toward exploring the role of mass media in language change as well as the relationship between language, identity and ideology, in China, in the context of globalization. Our findings suggest that Chinese female address terms have emerged via mass media, by coining, borrowing, reapprorpiating older forms for new meanings, and by employing multimodality. These media-induced language innovations are not simple responses to the broader socio-cultural changes occurring inside and outside of China. Instead, Chinese citizens, through creating, using, or promulgating new popular lexicons, are able to construct, negotiate, and make sense of multiple selves across those digital spaces. Therefore, Chinese mass media has generated a network of “figured worlds”, within which individuals' identities and agencies form dialectically and dialogically in global cultural processes (Holland et al. 1998). In particular, the circulation of certain female address terms across digital spaces involves the enregisterment of words as part of a sexist register, which has perpetuated the ideologies of male dominance in contemporary China. Both individual and institutional efforts have been made to respond to such sexism and reconstruct gender images and identities.