Mainland Chinese students’ multilingual experiences during cross-border studies in a Hong Kong university: from a language ideological perspective

ABSTRACT

This paper reports the findings of a qualitative study on a group of mainland Chinese students’ multilingual experiences during their cross-border studies in a Hong Kong university from a language ideological perspective. Drawing on in-depth interviews as the primary dataset, the study investigated the language ideologies held by the participants about Cantonese, Putonghua and English. Findings indicated that while the participants espoused a distinct set of language ideologies about Cantonese, Putonghua and English underlying their multilingual experiences in the university, the ideology of language as identity and the ideology of language as commodity emerged as the two major language ideologies. It was also revealed that the ideological tensions arising from the co-existence of the multiple and competing language ideologies resulted in the participants’ ambivalences in their use of, and/or investment in, particular languages. Findings also point to the role of the participants’ language ideologies in maintaining the social hierarchy of languages within the local language ecology and reproducing the group boundaries between local and mainland Chinese students.

KEYWORDS:

• Language ideology
• language and identity
• language as commodity
• multilingualism
• power relations

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Although Hong Kong is now part of China since its return to China in 1997, it still enjoys a certain degree of autonomy as a special administrative region under the ‘one country, two systems’ principle.

2 Putonghua and Cantonese are regarded as dialects of Chinese based on political and ethnocentric grounds. Meanwhile, they are sometimes seen by scholars as different languages based on the criterion of mutual intelligibility. As Bauer and Benedict (1997, xxxiv) note, the phonological differences between Putonghua and Cantonese render the two varieties mutually unintelligible.

3 English plays a significant role in different sectors of Hong Kong society, including higher education, the government, the mass media, and the professional workplace (Kirkpatrick 2007; Li 2017).

4 As Putonghua is often used as the language of instruction in most secondary schools in mainland China, mainland Chinese students could face difficulties in undertaking their academic studies through English as the medium of instruction in Hong Kong. Moreover, since Cantonese is the dominant spoken medium in everyday communication in Hong Kong society, mainland Chinese students could encounter difficulties in acquiring and speaking Cantonese in order to integrate into the local community (Cheung 2013).

5 Different ‘named’ languages are considered ideological constructs.

6 While separate multilingualism presents a monolingual view of multilingualism and sees languages as discrete entities, flexible multilingualism views language as a social resource without clear boundaries (Creese and Blackledge 2011).

7 Apart from one participant who reported to be a native speaker of Cantonese, 5 participants reported to possess a high proficiency level of Cantonese, 13 a moderate proficiency level of Cantonese, and 3 a low proficiency level of Cantonese.

8 Metalinguistic discourse not only refers to beliefs and attitudes about language but also involves ‘linguistic representations and evaluations’ (Jaworski, Coupland, and Galasiñski 2004, 4).

9 Exchange students only constitute a minority in the university.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council, University Grants Committee [project number 23600416].