Second generation internal immigrants' bilingual practices and
      identity construction in Guangzhou, China
Creators: name: Huang, Jing
Publisher: name: Lancaster University
Year: 2018
Subjects: Bilingualism
Identity
Language policy
Critical Discourse Studies
Conversation Analysis
Immigrants
Putonghua
Cantonese
Guangzhou
China

description: Since China’s Economic Reform in 1978, there has been huge internal
      population mobility. The setting of this research, Guangzhou, is one of
      the cities that host the largest number of immigrants, and the dominant
      local speech, Cantonese, is unintelligible to immigrants who speak other
      language varieties, including China’s official language Putonghua. Since
      2010 debates have arisen on the relationship between the state language
      policy of Putonghua Promotion which has been launched and implemented for
      sixty years and the narrower space for Cantonese use. A major discourse
      employed in the debates is concerned with immigrants associated with a
      Putonghua identity as a threat to Cantonese. There is little research on
      how the interaction between local language beliefs and the state language
      ideologies underlying Putonghua Promotion may influence immigrants’ life
      experiences and identities.
      
      
      This study investigates second generation immigrants’ bilingual practices
      and identity construction in individual and small-group interviews
      conducted in restaurants or cafes. I drew on critical discourse studies
      (Reisigl and Wodak, 2016) to examine participants’ use of discursive
      strategies in narratives of language-use-related life stories to construct
      social identities. I also use a framework integrating a sequential
      approach to conversation analysis (Auer, 1995) and membership
      categorisation analysis (Sacks, 1986b) to explore the role of code choices
      in accomplishing linguistic identities in interview conversations and
      naturally occurring service encounters.
      
      
      Adopting Jenkins’s (2008) notion of internal-external dialectics of
      identification, I found that immigrant participants’ identities can be
      understood as constantly negotiating categories imposed or assigned by
      others and managing diverse self-identifications in interactions. They
      resisted, challenged or re-defined an imposed derogatory category, laau,
      which was connected to their use of Putonghua in schools, workplaces, and
      other situations and to discrimination against them. They claimed their
      competence in using Cantonese for the negotiation of the categorization.
      They aligned with hybrid and complex social groups, and celebrated the
      seemingly contradictory but unique self-identifications. Meanwhile, they
      used Cantonese to align themselves with Cantonese speakers and distanced
      themselves from Putonghua speakers in group interview conversations, while
      in individual interviews they used Putonghua to highlight the most
      important information and Cantonese was used for less important topics.
      And in service encounters they used code-switching for ‘doing being’
      Cantonese speakers or bilinguals. The discourse analysis and conversation
      analysis show the consistency in their assigning value to Cantonese as
      well as acknowledging the prestigious status and the practicality of
      Putonghua.
      
      
      In summary, this thesis is a contribution to studies of bilingualism and
      de facto language policies in urban China. It reveals that individuals and
      social groups of a language community can negotiate the Putonghua Policy
      through imposing the use of Cantonese and Cantonese-related categories to
      others in mundane talk and institutional interactions. It also contributes
      to studies of China’s internal immigrants in terms of exploring how
      immigrants’ life experiences are affected by conflicting language
      ideologies, and how immigrants can employ bilingual repertoires to
      negotiate problematic but taken-for-granted discrimination and manage to
      be at ease with their unique self-identifications.