When the linguistic market meets the tea business: language attitudes, ideologies and linguistic entrepreneurship in the Blang community in China

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the impact of the local tea industry on the language ecology of the geographically remote Blang community in China. The paper takes an ecology perspective in language planning where all languages in the locality are given equal attention. These languages in the context of this paper include Blang, Putonghua, and English as the leading global lingua franca of international trade. The study used a qualitative approach and reports findings from semi-structured interviews collected in Yunnan Province. The discursive approach allows for the analysis of participants’ attitudes and ideologies vis-à-vis the changing economic and linguistic ecology. The findings demonstrate that the local tea industry has increased the economic value of Putonghua and further marginalised Blang. Putonghua and English were ideated as capital in the domestic and global markets, while Blang was perceived as having no economic value. These findings point towards a weakening vitality of Blang and reflect the uneven power relations favouring Putonghua and English. While economic entrepreneurship was paired with linguistic entrepreneurship, this agentive behaviour was mainly directed towards learning the dominant languages by the Blang people, and it was related to the extent to which individuals themselves engaged with the tea business.

KEYWORDS:

• Language attitudes and ideologies
• linguistic entrepreneurship
• language maintenance and shift
• linguistic capital
• commodification of language
• the Blang group in China

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the participants in this research project for their time and contributions. We also appreciate the friends who helped us to build connections with the Blang community. The first author extends thanks for the University International Postgraduate Award scholarship provided by the University of New South Wales and the HDR research funding provided by the Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture at UNSW. Gratitude also goes to the Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship. We are tremendously grateful to Professor Xuesong (Andy) Gao for his academic support and valuable feedback on earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Due to the interviewer’s lack of Blang competence, Blang was not used as one of the interview languages. This contributes to one of the limitations of the current study. However, for the elderly participants who are not very proficient in the Yunnan dialect or Putonghua, their children or grandchildren were asked to help interpret some ideas.

2 Putonghua is a tone language (variety) that has four tones: high level, high rising, low falling and high falling. In Putonghua, tones serve to distinguish lexical meaning and a change in tone results in a different lexical meaning (Liddicoat & Curnow, 2004). ‘买’ (mǎi, buy) is in the low falling tone and ‘卖’ (mài, sell) is in the high falling tone.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sixuan Wang

Sixuan Wang is a PhD candidate in the School of Humanities and Languages, UNSW, Sydney. Her research interests include language maintenance and shift, language policy and planning.

Anikó Hatoss

Anikó Hatoss is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the School of Humanities and Languages, UNSW, Sydney. Her research is focused on language planning in minority contexts, diaspora and grassroot language planning, and language maintenance and shift.