Jia Li

China’s borderlands represent an ideal space for examining the ways in which multilingualism is socially experienced, enacted and exploited. This critical ethnography examines the lived experiences of five Vietnamese-Mandarin interpreters at a Chinese hospital bordering Vietnam. Drawing on the concept of alternative language regimes, we demonstrate that Vietnamese proficiency, while creating a crucial niche for employment and mobility, simultaneously functions as a mechanism for entrenching precarity. Specifically, Vietnamese proficiency provides interpreters with a competitive edge in securing a job and maximizing cross-border mobility. However, the convertibility of Vietnamese language remains largely speculative, which entails a high degree of self-investment and precarious forms of labor. We argue that Vietnamese as an alternative language regime relegates interpreters to a highly uneven distribution of symbolic and material precarity in the cross-border medical market. The study offers a nuanced understanding of how language functions as both a resource and a site of constraint within the geoeconomic dynamics of China’s evolving borderlands. It contributes to the emerging scholarship on alternative language regimes in regulating migrant labor and distributing medical resources in the China-Vietnam borderlands and beyond.

This study examines how English is semiotically represented in video games, an under–explored but promising virtualscape. Drawing on the concept of semiotic landscape, this study critically explores how English and other semiotic resources work together to create social meanings and what are the ideological forces governing the process of semiotic appropriation. Data were collected from the in–game English representation and other semiotic resources from two female–oriented Chinese video games. It is found that English embodies cosmopolitan and poetic dispositions in the romanticized virtual space. Such dispositions are made relevant to the globally consuming elite class who are assumed not only to have access to the world consumption opportunities but also to show literary appreciation with a sense of distinction. The paper highlights the implications of these findings for understanding romance–mediated English as classed and gendered ideologies in the context of the increasing popularity of female–oriented game sphere.

The borderland between China and Myanmar is a region marked by transnational aspirations and significant anxieties, including a heightened risk of contagious diseases. Notably, the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) epidemic has been intensifying, especially among linguistic minorities in this area. To ensure that public healthcare provisions are accessible for linguistic minorities living with HIV, we examine the communication experiences of HIV-infected Burmese wives in a Chinese border town. Drawing on a critical sociolinguistic ethnography conducted between May 2022 and December 2023, this study collected multiple types of data including: semi-structured interviews with two Burmese wives and four stakeholders including two Chinese healthcare providers and two Chinese husbands; participant observation; field notes; and China’s HIV healthcare policies and other relevant written documents. The findings reveal that HIV-infected Burmese wives are confronted with multiple linguistic and social vulnerabilities in their access to HIV healthcare services. Despite that, their Chinese husbands and healthcare providers developed a collective resilience to enhance the quality of HIV healthcare services. Our study demonstrates that language, intersected with other social factors, complicates the HIV communication disparity. Our study contributes to multilingual crisis communication by addressing the lived communication experiences of linguistic minorities at the intersections of language, gender, class and migration status.

Offering timely and effective bilingual services is a matter of social justice for linguistic minorities living in low-income contexts. Many previous studies demonstrate that bilingual services at hospitals constitute an important medium to overcome language barriers and create successful health communication between patients and doctors. However, modern health systems seem to overlook the diversity of multilingual patients whose access to public health services has been largely hindered by monolingual medical practices. It is critical to examine how linguistic minorities, particularly those from under-resourced medical contexts, seek their health-related resources in times of crisis. This study was conducted at an ethnic Zhuang-centered township health center between January 2023 and July 2023. Data were collected from field notes, semi-structured interviews with five Zhuang-speaking participants (two doctors, one vice director, one village chief and one patient), video/audio recordings of communication between patients and doctors, and relevant written documents. Findings demonstrate that Zhuang doctors acted as language and cultural brokers facilitating elderly Zhuang people’s access to health-related information and bridging their knowledge gap of public health policy. Zhuang doctors’ bilingual and affective repertoires provided an agentive space for Zhuang patients to navigate between monolingual medical policy and their linguistically marginalized status. This study contributes to multilingual crisis communication by revealing the complexity of health-seeking experiences of a linguistic minority and addressing the reciprocal responsibilities towards multilingual patients of vulnerable backgrounds. To achieve social justice for linguistic minorities in times of crisis, the study suggests that multilingual crisis communication take into consideration three intertwined dimensions of epistemic solidarity so as to overcome the current monolingual and market-driven healthcare system.

This chapter examines language barriers impacting Burmese migrants with limited proficiency in Chinese during the COVID-19 pandemic in China. From a critical sociolinguistics perspective, it approaches translation and interpreting as a site of inequality instead of a solution to language barriers (Angermeyer, 2023). Based on the semi-structured interviews with six volunteer translators and interpreters for Burmese migrants in Ruili, the largest border city with Burmese migrants in the Southwest of China, the study reveals three significant inequalities relating to crisis communication management for Burmese migrants. First, the lack of translators and interpreters proficient in minority languages was pointed out as a significant issue affecting ethnic minorities, particularly in times of crises. Second, the established practice of teaching a “standard” variety of language was found problematic and impacted the work of volunteer translators and interpreters, most of whom were only familiar with the “standard” Burmese. Finally, minority cultures tended to be overshadowed by mainstream cultures in translation practices, potentially affecting the rights and future mobility of ethnic minorities. By highlighting translation and interpreting as a site of inequality which disadvantages the already powerless, the chapter calls for actions to urgently address the language barriers encountered by linguistic minorities.

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised serious issues of equity and social justice for linguistic minorities whose access to healthcare, medication, vaccination, social welfare, and other critical information is hindered by language barriers and other social constraints. This volume aims to provide a holistic account of multilingual crisis communication experiences of minoritised populations by addressing three research questions: (1) what are the communication barriers confronting linguistic minority populations; (2) how do they mobilise their multilingual and multicultural resources to overcome their communication challenges; and (3) what can be done to achieve communication justice for these minorities. The studies included in this edited volume reveal new terrain in which the project’s goals of achieving epistemic engagement and interrogating structural intervention are being explored.

Parental agency of their children’s language learning is often determined by their perceptions of the significance of the language in both family and society levels. Based on a larger ethnography conducted in Sydney from 2017 to 2020, this study investigates the language ideologies of Chinese immigrant parents from the People’s Republic of China in the recent decades, regarding the maintenance of their children’s Chinese heritage language(s). Drawing on the concept of language as pride and profit shifting between communities across time and space, this study reveals that Chinese parents primarily emphasize the economic benefits associated with Chinese languages when it comes to preserving their heritage language(s). While the significance of cultural pride and identity remains evident, there is a notable shift where the concept of pride is merging with that of profit concerning the importance of Chinese heritage language. However, the commodification of Chinese and identity, privileging “national” mandarin while marginalizing “regional” others, impedes the transmission of diverse Chinese heritage languages other than Mandarin. Simultaneously, the value-laden calculation of language prioritizes the “most” prestigious English, often at the expense of “heritage” Mandarin, regardless of its acknowledged economic potential. The findings illustrate how language ideologies and practices within the Chinese diaspora are shaped by power conflicts between English and Mandarin Chinese, hierarchical distinctions between Mandarin and non-Mandarin Chinese, and subtle stratification within regional Chinese languages. The research underscores the challenges faced by minority communities in preserving their heritage languages, particularly those with limited economic capital or political influence.

The decolonization of knowledge is increasingly high on the agenda of applied and sociolinguistics. This article contributes to this agenda by examining how peripheral multilingual scholars confront their linguistic and epistemic exclusion from global knowledge production. Based on the product of such a challenge – a Chinese-centric special issue of Multilingua, a global academic Q1 journal, devoted to crisis communication during the COVID-19 pandemic and committed to furthering intercultural dialogue in research – we explore the decades-long knowledge production process behind that product and so provide a look into the “black box” of academic networking and publishing. Advocating for collaborative autoethnography as an inherently inclusive method, we focus on enabling academic and personal networks, textual scaffolding, and linguistic and epistemic brokerage. The article closes with three aspects of linguistic and epistemic citizenship that are central to inclusion, namely recognition of the value of peripheral knowledges, recognition of a collaborative ethics of care, and recognition of shared responsibility.

Drawn on the notion of linguistic entrepreneurship (De Costa, P., Park, J. S., & Wee, L. (2016). Language learning as linguistic entrepreneurship: Implications for language education. Asia-Pacific Education Research, 25(5–6), 695–702, De Costa, P., Park, J. S., & Wee, L. (2019). Linguistic entrepreneurship as affective regime: Organisations, audit culture, and second/foreign language education policy. Language Policy, 18(3), 387–406, De Costa, P., Park, J. S., & Wee, L. (2021). Why linguistic entrepreneurship? Multilingua), this study extends the field of inquiry of neoliberal language learning by exploring Chinese as an international language. Based on a large-scale ethnography of Myanmar university students in China conducted between September 2013 and July 2017, this paper reports on a qualitative inquiry on how the neoliberal discourse permeates Myanmar students’ language exploitation to enhance their worth and maximise their opportunities. Findings show that Chinese learning constitutes the formation of a neoliberal self through the valorisation of multilingual competence. However, the study demonstrates that the enactment of multilingual entrepreneurship only values certain languages, which aligns with the neoliberal logic of convertibility for the China-and-Myanmar communication market. The study also reveals that access to entrepreneurial ambitions through Chinese learning opportunities is largely constrained by citizenship status, socioeconomic conditions, and the fast-evolving demands of linguistic markets within and across national boundaries. The study concludes with some implications for language policy and language education.

While an increasing literature on multilingualism addresses the key role of language in access to social resources, including crisis communication, little attention has been paid to practices of English-mediated multilingualism. Based on semi-structured interviews with 10 international students from South Asia and Southeast Asia receiving their higher education in China, the study reveals what language-related challenges international students encounter, how they mobilize their multilingual resources to enhance their access to crisis communication and build a shared community, and how their multilingual competences are valorized and enacted in the shifting paradigm of the China-oriented new economy addressing mutual accountability in South-South cooperation. The study suggests that English-mediated multilingualism in China fails to bridge the needs of international students of diverse backgrounds. The study also calls attention to the shifting paradigm of multilingual studies and the necessity of addressing the real world problems of health communication in a diverse context.