Learning about Your Culture and Language Online: Sifting Langauge Ideologies of Hoisan-wa on the Internet ("I especially liked how you used the thl-sound.")

Working Papers in Educational Linguistics (WPEL) Volume 25 Number 1 Spring 2010 Article 3 4-1-2010 Learning about Your Culture and Language Online: Sifting Langauge Ideologies of Hoisan-wa on the Internet ("I especially liked how you used the thl-sound.") Genevieve Y. Leung University of Pennsylvania This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. http://repository.upenn.edu/wpel/vol25/iss1/3 For more information, please contact . Learning about Your Culture and Language Online: Sifting Langauge Ideologies of Hoisan-wa on the Internet ("I especially liked how you used the thl-sound.") This article is available in Working Papers in Educational Linguistics (WPEL): http://repository.upenn.edu/wpel/vol25/iss1/3 Learning about Your Culture and Language Online: Shifting Language Ideologies of Hoisan-wa on the Internet (“I especially liked how you used the thl- sound.”) Genevieve Y. Leung University of Pennsylvania This reflective paper explores some of the language ideologies on the Internet about Hoisan-wa, a variety of Cantonese. Through looking at three YouTube videos and users’ comments about them, findings demonstrate a shift in language beliefs about Hoisan-wa as being less of a “harsh-sounding language” to more of a public declaration of pride in being speakers or descendants of this language background. These findings have implications for community heritage language teaching as well as the teaching of different varieties of Chinese - not just standard varieties like Mandarin or Cantonese. The author shows why it is absolutely necessary to situate and recognize without erasure Hoisan-wa and other local languages within the arena of Chineses and how technology can aid in this process. Introduction Author’s Stance I am always taken aback when I tell people in the U.S. I speak Cantonese1 and it takes them several minutes to realize that Cantonese is not the same as Mandarin. Frankly, I do not know exactly why this misinformation exists in the age of supposed heightened awareness of multiculturalism and multilingualism, though it is very possible that the rise of Mandarin as a world language has started processes of leveling other varieties of Chinese for the up-and-coming variety (i.e., for now, Mandarin). While Mandarin might be China’s national language, the idea that all ethnically Chinese people speak one “Chinese” when multiple varieties of Chineses have existed for thousands of years is a fantasy of what people lump together as the “Chinese” language (DeFrancis, 1984; Hannas, 1997). “Chinese”-speaking people are immensely diverse even within communities in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and overseas Chinese diaspora communities all over the world. Most people nod in acknowledgment when I tell them this, but I am always left with a lingering feeling that they still do not fully understand the linguistic situation at hand. People in the U.S., ethnically Chinese or not and perhaps conflating language with Working Papers in Educational Linguistics 25/1: 37-55, 2010 37 WPEL Volume 25, Number 1 ethnicity, still use the term “Chinese” as if it refers to one monolithic item. A simple corpus survey of major U.S. newspapers in the last 20 years evidences public confusion of “Chinese,” revealing the one-sided collocation mapping of “Mandarin” with “Chinese” and “language” but all other Chinese languages with “dialect.” Clearly Mandarin and China have risen in esteem in the world, but too few scholars have brought to light the issues and tensions among Chineses if the overemphasis of Mandarin continues to be left unchecked. Since it sometimes feels like such an arduous process to explain the small sliver of my linguistic heritage that includes Cantonese, the linguistic bloodline passed down to me by my father, I do not usually mention that my linguistic repertoire also includes Hoisan-wa (㜞㓹㳸),2 generally regarded as a dialect or sub-variety of Cantonese. As explained by McCoy (1966), Hoisan-wa is recognized as being a language spoken in Taishan, China, which is part of the Szeyap (四邑) region, an area which also includes Kaiping (䱜㊿), Enping (恩平), and Xinhui (㨰፶). In English, Hoisan-wa is also known as “Toisanese” or “Toishanese,” as it is called in Standard Cantonese, and “Taishanese,” as it is called in Modern Standard Mandarin.2 Hoisan-wa is the language of my mother and maternal grandparents, the one language that my grandmother has been using for the last 92 years. A study by Szeto (2000) found that Cantonese and Hoisan-wa are around 70% mutually intelligible, but this statistic masks the stigma nearly all Hoisan-wa speakers have felt in their lifetime. The relationship between the two languages is described in William Poy Lee’s (2007) memoir of growing up as a Hoisan-wa speaker in San Francisco: Because of Toisanese reverse cachet as a hillbillyish, coarse, down-inthe-delta variation of Big City Cantonese, there are no Toisanese novels, poems, or operas. There is no legacy of Toisan royals with ornate Toisan summer palaces. The prolific Shaw Brothers Studio of Hong Kong did not make movies in Toisanese. Bruce Lee never slipped into Toisanese. There are no Toisanese television series, and no Toisanese pride movement is clamoring for one. (p. 70) The evaluative placement of Hoisan-wa as being linguistically less important than “Big City” Cantonese, spoken as an official language in Hong Kong, is one which deserves due consideration, since Hoisan-wa is actually a language variety very much entwined with U.S. history and immigration, a fact of which many are not aware. Theoretical Frameworks This paper is informed by a language ideology framework and how these thoughts about language shape how speakers and communities come to understand and value (or devalue) what they speak. Kroskrity (2000) defines language ideologies as the views about language which benefit a specific group. Negative esteem in one’s language may lend itself to language loss, which Zepeda and Hill (1991) call an “intellectual catastrophe” (p. 135). Groups that do not benefit from dominant language ideologies are never completely disenfranchised, as it is always possible to challenge and contest those in power through counter-hegemonic language ideologies (Achugar, 2008). 38 Learning About Your Language and Culture Online At the same time, it is often not until users of a language feel their language is truly threatened do they mobilize with language maintenance efforts. Fishman (1991) calls these efforts of reversing language shift (RLS), a process which “requires reversing the tenor, the focus, the qualitative emphases of daily informal life--always the most difficult arenas in which to intervene” (p. 8). As these efforts oftentimes run counter to popular ideologies undertaken by those in society that have less implementational power, RLSers face harsh criticisms of being “backward looking (‘past-oriented’), conservative, change-resistant dinosaurs” (Fishman, 1991, p.386). Fishma (...truncated)