Rising China and rising Chinese: An investigation into African international students’ language beliefs

Abstract

Chinese has been the fastest growing modern foreign language in African societies in the last decade, due largely to the perceived rise of China as a global superpower and its recent explosion in investment in Africa. This paper focuses on how African youths’ language beliefs and motivation to learn Chinese as a global language have been affected by an ever-increasing complicated nexus of political and economic engagement between Africa and China. Based on conversations with 59 African international students in Chinese higher education, I unpack and highlight the prevalence of beliefs that Chinese is a critical and global language. The instrumental value of Chinese, both to the continent, to nation-states and to individuals, is also found to be a common refrain among research participants, which motivates them to pursue Chinese as linguistic capital. This study contributes to the wider discussions of language ideology, motivations and aspirations of language learning, while encouraging us to reflect on the changing hierarchical ordering of languages in the world linguistic system. Pedagogical and curriculum design implications are discussed at the end of the article.