Mandarin – Educational Sociolinguistics

Findings during the trip in Toronto

Mengting Liu

I went to Toronto several days ago and I was so impressed by how modern and big Toronto is as an international metropolis (especially how wide and flat the road is). I was also shocked by how different it is compared to Montreal concerning not only the general vibes it gives, but also the language environment. If we say Montreal is a bilingual city where French and English are its official languages, Toronto can also be bilingual to some extent, especially in shopping malls, because Mandarin is EVERYWHERE! When I was walking on the street, I always thought, “Did I just took a 6 hour ride and got back to China?”

With a large amount of Chinese immigrants flooding in Toronto, the society exerts a profound influence on its language. There is no doubt that Chinese culture and language take an indispensable proportion in this multicultural and city. In Yorkdale shopping centre, it is not difficult to find signs written in Chinese. In the MAC cosmetic store, I saw a line of Chinese “魅可樱花全樱绽放系列” follows a line of English which said “MAC Boom Boom Bloom”. Every luxury store in the shopping centre is equipped with at least one shop assistant who is Chinese and provides Mandarin services. This phenomenon, to a large extent, can attribute to the enormous purchasing power of Chinese immigrants or travellers, among whom English may not be the language they are familiar with. I was told that in Vancouver which has more Chinese immigrants because of its more pleasant weather, Chinese people can totally live without using English.

I realize that the protection of French in Quebec is actually protecting the culture. Although I always feel struggled when learning French, I still find it is worthy to do, because it is an essential way to maintain the culture and the uniqueness of Montreal.

Hong Kong hotel life

Mela

A burst of blog posts blew into Educational Sociolinguistics in the brief time it took technology to blow me westward to the far East for a week of encounters with extraordinary scholars at the Education University of Hong Kong. A brief time by the calendar, but long in subjective time, measured by the innumerable back-and-forth fractions of an inch that make up all the movement possible in the cramped quarters one is confined to when flying for fifteen hours over the wide Pacific.

While I was uncramping over the weekend, the contributors to this blog were writing about sexism in Chinese and racism in English (the term “bootlicking bilingualism” particularly stood out for me as deserving of a wide public) and applying their knowledge of pragmatics across a range of tricky situations from snack ordering to sales pitching. The blog has been busy. Posts about poetry and how untranslatable it is—along with most of the really interesting language out there—have been flooding in.

Language vs Dialect

Kunyao Kuang

Inspired by the seminar and class discussion in class, I would like to share a similar case happened in China.

I was born in southern China, a city near Guangzhou, a Cantonese spoken area. All my family and neighborhoods speak Cantonese thus it seems that I was born to know it. Moreover, I grew up with the influential popular culture of Hong Kong since 1990s. Thus, the identity of Cantonese has rooted deeply in my mind.

When I was in primary school, Mandarin started to enter my life. The Mandarin promotion policy was carried out in 1980s, strictly adopted in 1990s among schools, administrations, transportations and all public areas. Since then, Mandarin became an official language and the others were all dialects. (An interesting point from my teammate is that she thought dialect is viewed as being subordinated to a language, containing the sense of discrimination to some extent. Language is regarded as paramount while dialects are secondary.)

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