Language Contact as Bilingual Contrast among Bai Language Users in Jianchuan County, China.

Abstract

This dissertation explores Bái language use in Jiànchuān County, China. On the basis of interviews with 42 language users, transcripts of spontaneous conversation and elicited narratives, excerpts from Bái texts in an alphabetic orthography and Chinese characters, and six months of participant observation, I demonstrate how language users’ perceptions of Bái and Chinese as distinct languages emerge as the result of interactional and representational strategies that alternatively foreground and background bilingual contrast. I argue that these micro-level strategies exist in a dialectical relationship with macro-level governmental, academic, and lay discourses that represent the Bái and the Hàn as essentially different, ethnicity as isomorphic with language, and, consequently, diverse Bái linguistic practices as a distinct minority nationality language.

By demonstrating that borders of communities cannot be relied upon to describe consensus about linguistic structure, use, or ideologies, this dissertation contributes to more realistic descriptions of language; relatedly, by showing that language users’ perceptions of the elements in their repertoire as “Bái “ or “Chinese” vary not only across language users, but also situations of use, it challenges synchronic theories of language contact that invoke community consensus to distinguish between “borrowing” and “code switching.” More fundamentally, both lines of analysis entail that language users’ interactional and representational strategies do not merely reproduce pre-existing contrast between languages, but also actively produce and transform it.