Stylizing Taiwanese Stylizing Taiwanese

Professor Su His Yao’s Talk

From Reconstructing Taiwanese and Taiwan Guoyu on the Taiwan-based

Internet

Journal of Asican Pacific Communication 19:2 (2009), 323-335.

Professor Su His Yao’s Talk

From Reconstructing Taiwanese and Taiwan Guoyu on the Taiwan-based

Internet

Journal of Asican Pacific Communication 19:2 (2009), 323-335.

Objectives

The objectives of the paper are:

1) to investigate a type of online language play popularized on the Taiwan-based Internet;

2) to illustrate how stylized language play is used to mitigate potential tension, to show positive affect, and to regulate appropriate group behavior simultaneously.

Types of language variations discussed in the paper

The Two varieties that are under investigation:

1) stylized Taiwanese, using Chinese characters of the sounds of Taiwanese;

2) stylized Taiwanese-accented Mandarin, or Taiwan Guoyu.

Playfulness in the online language use

The playfulness inherent in these stylized practices has multiple sources.

First, they manipulate the Chinese writing system and create an incongruity between sound and meaning.

Second, they call attention simultaneously to a number of functions of language.

Third, the two stylized practices bring into play the respective social meanings and stereotypes associated with their spoken counterparts.

Theoretical concepts

What is a language play?

Sherzer (2002) relates language play with the larger socio-cultural contexts and defines speech play as “the manipulation of elements and components of language in relation to one another, in relation to the social and cultural contexts of language use, and against the backdrop of other verbal possibilities in which it is not foregrounded.

Politeness and Face

The concept of “face” plays a crucial role in Brown and Levinson’s theory of politeness (1987).

• Face refers to a person’s desire to be unimpeded (negative face) and to be approved of in certain respects (positive face).

Some acts are intrinsically face-threatening either to the speaker’s or hearer’s positive or negative faces.

When a speaker commits face-threatening act (FTA), he/she estimates the risks of face loss and the degree of efficiency of communication.

He/she then selects a strategy among a number of choices, ranging from the most efficient but least face-saving choice—boldly going on record to going off record, providing more than one interpretable intention so that the actor cannot be held to have committed him/herself to one particular intent.

Stylizing and Stylization

In the traditional variations paradigm of sociolinguistics, styles are defined as attention paid to speech (Labov, 1972). Style variation is taken as a direct behavioral manifestation of the linguistic system in a community.

Examples can be seen as speakers at the Martha Vineyard using centralized vowels to identify with the local residents.

A new tendency has emerged over time, which regards styles less as part of a fixed behavioral pattern and ore as strategic response to audience characteristics on the speaker’s part.

Giles and Powesland’s (1975) accommodation theory and Bell’s (1984) audience design are two examples of this point of view.

Accommodation and Audience Design

Audience design (Bell 1984) proposed that speakers derive their style shifts to an addressee from the characteristic that they associate with the speech of the group as a whole.

This presupposes that speakers perceive their interlocutors to be individual representatives of a group.

This presupposition can be traced back to social psychological theories that underlie audience design; namely, social identity theory (SIT) and communication accommodation theory (CAT).

Social Identity Theory

A social psychological theory holding that people identify with multiple identities, some of which are more personal and idiosyncratic and some of which are group identifications.

Experimental work in this framework suggests that people readily see contrasts between groups in terms of competition, and seek to find means of favoring the co-members of the group they identify with over others.

Social Identity Theory continued

Social identity theory (SIT) is a theory of intergroup relations in which language is one of many potent symbols that individuals can strategically use when testing or maintaining boundaries between groups.

The theory was proposed by social psychologist Henri Tajfel.

Tajfel on social identity

Tajfel’s interest in identity and prejudice grew out of his own personal experiences.

He was born in Poland in 1919, and moved to France in 1937 for university.

During the Second World War, he served in the French army and after being captured spent five years in German prisoner-of-war camps. He was able to survive the war by assuming a French identity, masking his Polishness and his Jewishness.

He would later point out that regardless of the interpersonal relationships he had developed within the German camps, if his Slavic and Jewish group identities had been discovered they would have completely and unquestionably determined his fate [Turner 1996].

Tajfel on Social Identity Continued

To this end, Tajfel (1978) distinguishes between identities which are principally personal and identities which are principally associated with a group.

SIT recognizes that we all identify with many personas at different times and places and in different contexts.

Nevertheless, it assumes that we simplify away from a lot of this complexity in any given interaction and perceive it as being a more or less inter group or inter personal exchange.

That is, we generally perceive a particular personal or group identity to be most salient at a particular stage in an interaction (where ‘salient’ here means the identity activated and oriented to by the immediate context of the interaction).

Accommodation Theory

The process by which speakers attune or adapt their linguistic behavior in light of their interlocutors’ behavior and their attitudes towards their interlocutors (may be a conscious or unconscious process).

These adjustments encompass both convergence with or divergence from interlocutors’ norms.

Examples of divergence

An example of divergence from the text is that Canadians and New Zealanders who are proud to play up the unique linguistic features to show that they are different from Americans or Australians respectively.

Implications for styling Taiwanese

Adopting the view that style can be considered strategic but departing in significant ways is more recent research on language styling and crossing.

This approach focuses on speakers’ creative deployment of linguistic resources and regards style as a form of discursive social action.

This approach views speakers as social agents whose language choice is motivated, although they are not necessarily conscious of their choices.

Styling and Crossing

Coupland (2001), building on Bakhtin (1981) and Rampton (1995), further theorizes the concept of stylization, a subset of general styling.

As Copland constructs, stylization reefers to a more specific set of discursive practices than language styling in general, operating “in a specific mode of social action, performance in the strong, theatrical or quasi-theatrical sense of that term” (Coupland, 2001, p. 346).

Stylized practices project personas, identities, and genres that involve known linguistic repertories and have well-formed socio-cultural profiles.

They often link a speaker or an utterance to a speech event other than what is conventionally considered the current one.

As Coupland himself puts it, “stylization is therefore fundamentally metaphorical; it brings into play stereotyped semiotic and ideological values associated with other groups, situations or times; it dislocates a speaker and utterances from the immediate speaking context” (p. 350).

Styling Taiwanese for Computer Mediated

Communication (CMC)Why stylization as defined by Coupland is useful for CMC in Taiwan internet settings?

Taiwanese and Taiwan Guoyu are marked choices on the Taiwan-based Internet, and their use carries a strong sense of playfulness and performs as an online persona.

The online practices they denote carry with them the social meanings of Taiwanese and Taiwan Guoyu from more familiar daily contexts. The everyday meanings of these languages and dialects are appropriated and reproduced through these practices, resulting in a unique mode of communication.

Language Policies in Taiwan revisited

Language policies in Taiwan

--Languages used in Taiwan: indigenous languages, southern varieties of Chinese such as Hakka, Cantonese, and Taiwanese, English, Japanese, etc.

--Twice in Taiwanese history a non-indigenous was chosen as the national language. The first time occurred during the Japanese occupation (1895-1945) where Japanese was chosen as the national language and the second time occurred during the KMT (Kuomintang) ruling (1945-1987) where Mandarin was chosen as the national language.

--The consequences of the twice national policies on local languages

--the current situation: language choices with multiple meanings and language play in CMC

Further Considerations for Taiwanese and Taiwan Guoyu

To understand language use in Taiwan, two salient factors have to be taken into consideration, namely generational language shift and differences in language use between rural and urban areas.

In rural areas, the use of Taiwanese prevails. Although members of the younger generation learn and use Mandarin at school, they remain fluent in Taiwanese.

In contrast, in urban areas, the use of Mandarin penetrates even informal settings. Generational language shift is particularly salient in cities like Taipei, where members of younger generations exhibit limited ability in their parents’ native languages, and consequently, speak Mandarin in most settings.

Mandarin, Taiwanese, Taiwanese-accented Mandarin

The co-existence of Mandarin and Taiwanese inevitably leads to mutual influences.

One example is Taiwanese-accented Mandarin (Taiwan Guoyu), which refers to Mandarin as spoken by speakers who have a strong Taiwanese accent, and is stereotypically associated with members of older generations and less educated rural residents.

Note that Taiwanese-accented Mandarin discussed here is a cultural stereotype; it does not refer to the national dialect of Mandarin spoken in Taiwan, which is termed “Taiwan Mandarin” in linguistic research.

Taiwanese –accented Mandarin shares with Taiwanese the sociolinguistic meanings of congeniality and backwardness, but lacks the purist value Taiwanese holds and thus is a highly stigmatized variety among Taiwanese speakers.

In sum, these three linguistic varieties—Mandarin, Taiwanese, and Taiwanese-accented Mandarin—enjoy different prestige.

In formal contexts, Mandarin holds the highest prestige, while Taiwan Guoyu is generally the most stigmatized. Taiwanese seems to be located in between, although, in Bourdieu’s (1991) terms,

it sometimes represents an alternative market and is gaining its symbolic dominance in particular fields.