1st Edition

Chinese Sociolinguistics Language and Identity in Greater China

By Chunsheng Yang Copyright 2024
    162 Pages 18 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    162 Pages 18 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Chinese Sociolinguistics examines the ways in which language contributes to shaping social, cultural, and ethnic identities in Greater China.

    This book is the first textbook to be exclusively devoted to the issues of language, society, and identity in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and overseas Chinese communities (the Greater China). The book includes topics on the role of language in Chinese culture; the linguistic indexing of socioeconomic class; dialects and regional language variation; the impacts of state policies; linguistic borrowings; bilingualism and bicultural identity; and language shift and attrition. The emergence of new forms of language as influenced by modern technologies and possible future developments is also discussed in this book.

    This book will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in Chinese sociolinguistics, particularly with a focus on language, identity, and society in Greater China. This book will also be of interest to members of the Chinese Language Teachers Association and the American Council of Teaching Foreign Languages (ACTFL).

    Acknowledgements

    Chapter 1 Laying the Foundation

    Chapter 2 Chinese Languages: Past, Present and Future

    Chapter 3 Naming and Proper Name Planning in China

    Chapter 4 Language Planning, Policy and Attitudes in China

    Chapter 5 Language Use, Policy, and Attitudes in Hong Kong and Macao

    Chapter 6 Language Policy, Use, and Attitudes in Taiwan and Singapore

    Chapter 7 Gender and Identity in Chinese Language

    Chapter 8 Language and Rural/Urban Identity

    Chapter 9 Identity and Language Maintenance among the Chinese Diaspora

    Chapter 10 The Linguistic Landscape of Greater China

    Chapter 11 Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language and its Role as a Lingua Franca

    Chapter 12 English Education in China

    Chapter 13 Emerging Chinese Language Forms

    Chapter 14 Face, Politeness, and Responses to Compliments in Chinese

    Biography

    Chunsheng Yang is an associate professor of Chinese and applied linguistics at the University of Connecticut, U.S.A. Chunsheng’s main research areas are Chinese phonetics, phonology, second-language acquisition, especially with respect to second language prosody, Chinese sociolinguistics, and Chinese pedagogy. Chunsheng has published widely on the acquisition of L2 Chinese prosody and other aspects of Chinese sounds.