Voice making in intercultural communication: the Chinese transcontinental ‘commuters’

ABSTRACT

This article investigates voice making of Chinese transcontinental emigrants in intercultural communication from a Chinese perspective. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Beijing, I study new Chinese emigrants who have moved upward to the middle layers of the Chinese society, and now move out of the country by mobilizing their economic, educational, linguistic, and cultural resources. I present two cases to demonstrate the new emigrants’ use of languages in voice making processes. The results indicate that the new Chinese emigrants are highly mobile, both geographically and socially; they display diverse kinds of voicing possibilities and align with different cultures through nuanced use of languages and language varieties; further, they exercise increasingly more influences both on the receiving society and on the sending society.

本文研究海外华人移民在跨文化交际中发出的“声音”。本研究使用Hymes的民族志理论, 着重探讨海外华人新移民充分利用其所拥有的经济、教育、语言、文化资本, 在中国国内实现社会上向移动、成为城市中产阶层, 并进一步实现海外移民, 进入当地主流社会。本文使用民族志研究方法, 并呈现三则语料, 以展示新移民的语言使用和他们在跨文化交际中发出的声音。研究结果显示, 海外华人新移民具有更强的社会上向移动能力和地域间流动性, 他们通过语言使用状况展现多种声音,他们在跨文化交际过程中不仅影响着移入社会, 也影响着移出社会。

KEYWORDS:

• Voice
• intercultural exchange
• space
• mobility
• ethnography
• Chinese new immigrants

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and the editor of this journal, Malcolm MacDonald, for their insightful suggestions, which have contributed to the shaping of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jie Dong is Associate Professor at Tsinghua University, China. Her research falls in the domains of sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, migration studies, identity studies, ethnography, language and education, and language in new media. She is the author of Discourse, identity, and China’s internal migration (2011, Multilingual Matters), The Sociolinguistics of voice in globalising China (2016, Routledge), and coauthor of Ethnographic fieldwork (with Jan Blommaert, 2010, Multilingual Matters).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Beijing Social Sciences Fund: [grant number 14WYC056].