Exploring Uyghur University students’ identities constructed through multilingual practices in China

ABSTRACT

This article explores how a cohort of tertiary-level Uyghur students contested and negotiated their identities through multilingual practices in the receiving community. Drawing upon interview data from fieldwork, this study indicates that these students experienced essentialist understandings and negative views in the host society. Participants symbolically struggled over the ethnicization process and contested stereotypical images by emphasizing the pure use of their mother language and resisting the use of Putonghua within the Uyghur community. However, the participants did not hold consistent and simplified views towards languages. In the host community, participants negotiated an elite identity as ‘Zhendan Uyghur,’ capitalizing on a repertoire of available resources including Putonghua and even local linguistic resources. Moreover, they developed awareness of and utilized the symbolic value of their ethnic resources, and learned and navigated highly valued Chinese knowledge. Despite the legitimate social positions they negotiated and imagined, due to their primordial community belongingness, minority elites faced potential challenges when translating symbolic resources into economic capital in a neo-liberal economy. Implications drawn from the findings are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnic minorities
• identity construction
• multilingual practices

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Xiaoyan (Grace) Guo is doctoral candidate in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction of Faculty of Education at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Mingyue (Michelle) Gu is Assistant Professor in the in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction of Faculty of Education at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Notes

1 ‘高大上’ – popular network catchwords, means ‘being superior’; ‘忘本’ – literally means hiding one’s (e.g. cultural, class) origins; ‘有素质’ – means ‘well educated’ .

2 This project selects a certain number of excellent graduates each year and aims at cultivating and training them to be future administrative staff, both for the university and for society.