Language choice, language ideologies, and identity : a sociolinguistic study of mainland Chinese students in Hong Kong and Macao

Abstract

This sociolinguistic study examines how Mainland Chinese students construct and negotiate different identities through language choice and language ideologies during their sojourn in multilingual Hong Kong and Macao, two Special Administrative Regions of China, which have been closely connected with Mainland China in historical, political, and sociocultural terms. As former British and Portuguese colonies respectively, Hong Kong and Macao are the only regions in China where Cantonese is the predominant language enjoying the de facto official status, with English and Portuguese being the respective co-official languages besides Chinese. In these two SARs, language has become one of the important markers associated with the emergence of Hong Kong and Macao identities in contrast to the Mainland Chinese identity. Given that the Mainland students who are pursuing their tertiary studies in the SARs are mainly speakers of Putonghua, it is imperative to study how this group of students cope with the complex sociolinguistic situations during their sojourn in Hong Kong and Macao and how they enact and negotiate their Mainland Chinese identities through the interaction between language choice and language ideologies in the cross-border movement. This is a qualitative sociolinguistic study by nature, with a combination of both qualitative and quantitative research methods. The fieldwork was conducted at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and University of Macau (UM), whereby a total of 376 language surveys and 58 semi-structured interviews were conducted with Mainland students. Supplementary data, including talk recordings, field notes, and collection of relevant documents, were also gathered for the purposes of contextualization and triangulation. The findings and discussion of this study suggest that Mainland students’ choice of Putonghua, Cantonese, English, and code-switching in Hong Kong and Macao is closely related to two dominant language ideologies (i.e., linguistic nationalism and linguistic pragmatism) and one alternative language ideology (i.e., linguistic hybridism). These language ideologies have helped enact a Mainland Chinese identity through the use of Putonghua, a global identity through the use of English, and a hybrid identity through the mixed use of Chinese and English. Regarding the identity differences between the Mainland students at HKU and UM, it has been found that a strong Mainland identity is being constructed and negotiated by Mainland students in Hong Kong through the use of Putonghua in the face of an equally strong local identity indexed by Cantonese, which is contrary to the case of Macao where a relatively weak local identity exists. This study is one of the few systematic studies that investigate speakers’ language choice, language ideologies, and identity construction in Hong Kong and Macao, with a special focus on Mainland sojourner students. It has bridged the gap between the micro level of interaction and the broader political economic processes by giving the highly-educated sojourners from Mainland China a voice, while numerous contesting discourses in the SARs are deciphered against the background of cross-border movement in the era of globalization.