Language Attitudes and Gender in China: Perceptions and Reported Use of Putonghua and Cantonese in the Southern Province of Guangdong

Abstract

This paper is concerned with young people's perceptions and reported use of the two language varieties that co-exist in the urban centre of Guangzhou in southern China, Putonghua (P) and Cantonese (C). P is a typical H-variety, promoted by the government and used as a lingua franca throughout China; C is the local L-variety but it also has some prestige and is used in all domains. The focus of our questionnaire study was twofold: to analyse possible gender differences in perceptions and reported use, and to compare results from P-speaking newcomers, who have moved to Guangzhou from other parts of China, with responses from local C-speaking adolescents. Our results suggest that Guangzhou is a reasonably stable diglossia where P and C serve different functions, for newcomers as well as locals, and therefore both varieties appear to be indispensable. However, there are also indications that P promotion is beginning to have an effect in Guangzhou; our female participants seem to be leading on in a gradual change towards increased use of P. Thus our results support the trend reported in numerous sociolinguistic studies of a female preference for the prestige standard variety of a language.

Keywords:

• language attitudes
• perceptions
• reported language use
• language and gender
• Putonghua and Cantonese

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the China Scholarship Council for a scholarship awarded to Limei Wang, and a Visiting Research Fellowship, also awarded to Limei Wang, by the University of Southern Denmark, both of which made the research project reported in this paper possible. We also want to thank Brian Bekker Hansen who has been responsible for the statistical tests, and the editor and two anonymous reviewers of Language Awareness who provided constructive criticism and suggested improvements on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

**significant at the 95% level of significance

1. The linguistic and cultural situation in Hong Kong is relevant for our study for at least two reasons. First, Hong Kong and Guangzhou are geographically close and the economic and social advancement of Guangzhou is no doubt related to its proximity to Hong Kong. Second, the language situation in the two places is similar. Hong Kong was a British colony until 1997 when it was handed back to China. Prior to 1997, Cantonese and English were considered the two major languages in the colony with Putonghua playing a relatively minor role, but after the takeover, there is evidence that the use and importance of Putonghua are on the increase.

2. The Opening-up policy was introduced in 1979 when the Communist Party and the State Council declared that the provinces of Guangdong and Fujian, given their close proximity to Hong Kong and Macau, could enjoy certain privileges, including economic activities with foreign countries. The following year, the cities of Gurangdong-Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Shantou and Fujian-Xiamen were granted similar privileges, and these places were now called Special Economic Zones (SEZ). In the SEZ, compensatory trade, equity joint ventures and cooperative business operations were encouraged to attract foreign investment and technology, and free market economy was allowed. In 1984 another 14 coastal cities, including Tianjin, Shanghai and Fuzhou, were included in the SEZ, and later other areas, such as the province of Hainan, became SEZ. Today, the principles of free market economy apply to all of China.

3. The needs for a lingua franca in China are obvious. What is usually referred to as ‘Chinese language’ consists of eight main varieties of spoken Chinese, and these varieties are the native language of China's ethnic majority, the Hans. They are usually referred to as dialects of the same language but because they are mutually unintelligible, they might in fact best be thought of as different languages, at least from a linguistic perspective. This means, as Ettner (2002: 30) is arguing, that any ‘claims of a unified Chinese language are based on political and ethnocentric rather than on linguistic grounds’. However, the writing system, which is the same for all Chinese dialects, is sometimes used to justify the reference to one common language with numerous sub-dialects.

4. We did not ask the students about their perceived proficiency in Putonghua. Not because the information is not relevant, but to ask this question in a Guangzhou context is potentially face-threatening (cf. Goffman, 1971). Because Putonghua is the compulsory medium of instruction in the classroom, and consequently, all students are expected to be proficient speakers, we would probably not get any of these students to admit if they felt their proficiency in Putonghua was poor. Ultimately, this would suggest that they did not understand, or participate in, what happened in the classroom. We felt such a question would encourage the students to be dishonest, and therefore decided to leave it out.

5. A p-value in statistics is the smallest possible level of significance by means of which a hypothesis – for example whether or not there is an interrelationship between two variables – can be rejected.

6. The language situation in Shanghai is, in many ways, similar to the situation in Guangzhou. There is the local dialect, Shanghainese, which is used as a typical L variety and preferred in informal contexts, and there is Putonghua which serves the functions of an H variety and is the preferred variety in public life and other formal contexts. The difference between Cantonese and Shanghainese is that the latter is not used in all domains and for all functions, and it does not enjoy the same prestige as Cantonese in Guangzhou. Thus, the language of economic and technological advancement in Shanghai is Putonghua, not Shanghainese.