Minority Language Revitalization and Social Media through the Lens of Covid-19 in Yunnan and Gansu, western China

ABSTRACT

The language vitality of non-dominant communities has gained increasing attention worldwide with international declarations and national legislation enacted to protect the right of non-dominant language use and development. As information and communication technology (ICT) has spread, extending ICT to ethnic or indigenous languages has lagged. Nevertheless, their use on social media and other platforms has been growing rapidly, raising the question of their role in supporting non-dominant language vitality. In 2020 in China, non-dominant languages were used on various social media platforms to communicate anti-COVID messages. Drawing on language revitalisation frameworks, the investigators explore how the global pandemic has provided minority nationalities in west China the opportunity to increase recognition of their cultures and languages. We explore how minority communities in Yunnan and Gansu provinces in western China participated in China’s anti-Covid-19 campaign through the creation and dissemination of multilingual materials of different forms, genres, and modes on ICT social media platforms. We argue that using multilingual and multimodal ICT platforms to publicise countermeasures against Covid-19 has the potential to contribute to recognition and use of languages of non-dominant ethnic communities and revitalisation of heritage languages and cultures.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• minority language revitalisation
• social media
• China
• multilingual
• language policy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In 2015, the Ministry of Education, PRC and the State Language Commission launched a national project to investigate, display and explore language resources and protect the endangered languages from extinction which involve 123 Chinese dialects and ethnic minority languages including Yugur, State Council (2020).