Abstract
AbstractThis critical essay aims to assess the linguistic ideologies regarding the Chinese writing system by locating them in historical and diasporic contexts and the new digital communication space. Drawing data from a long‐term and ongoing digital ethnography of online communication and creative Sinographs in the global Chinese diaspora, it analyses how multilingual Chinese language users manipulate the affordances of the writing system in combination with the affordances of new, digital communication platforms to challenge the dominant language ideologies and policies, to articulate a new sense of transnationalism, and to participate in social activism. It argues that the diasporic perspective is not simply a context for the study of language variation and change but a crucial space for radical new thinking and actions that challenge orthodoxies of various kinds and enables cultural flow as well as social participation at a global scale.
Highlights
On 21st December 2020, the Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen tweeted Figure 1 to mark the winter solstice
This article has the dual aim of critically assessing the linguistic ideologies regarding the Chinese writing system by locating them in historical and diasporic context and analysing how multilingual Chinese language users manipulate the affordances of the writing system in combination with the affordances of new, digital communication platforms to challenge the dominant language ideologies and policies, to articulate a new sense of transnationalism, and to participate in social activism
Whilst the mainland China-initiated schemes, such as the Confucius Institutes, to promote Chinese as a global language have no explicit strategy regarding the overseas Chinese diaspora and the millions of Chinese-as-a-heritage-language users, the thinking behind these initiatives does seem to echo the traditional ideology about the Chinese writing system as a key unifying tool for the different groups of Chinese people across the globe, an ideology strongly held by the Chinese diasporas as we discussed earlier in this article
Summary
Any attempt at understanding the Chinese language ideology needs to get over the western linguistics obsession with phonology and syntax of the spoken language and shift the analytical attention to the complexity and symbolic power of the writing system Especially the writing system, gives the facade of unity whilst enabling the ruling class to exercise control It has played a crucial role in the construction of a national and racial identity and the political ideology of harmony. Having examined some of the historical dimensions of the diversity and complexity of the notion of the Chinese diaspora and the deep-rooted ideology and wide-spread discourses around the Chinese writing system as tool for national and ethnic unity, we turn to the present-day language practices amongst the diasporic Chinese, to demonstrate how the Chinese diaspora continues to be a radical space for new thinking and actions and how new digital technology mediated writing offers affordances to grassroots practices that continue to transform the written script to reflect more adequately speech sound and social changes whilst challenging the dominant ideology of a unified, elite writing system. We analyse a selection of representative examples of innovative Sinographs, created in the diasporic context and mediated by the digital media, that challenge the ideologies regarding the Chinese writing system and the Chinese diaspora as we have discussed above
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