The texture of tongues: Languages and power in China

1998

Mandarin stands at the pinnacle of a metalinguistic hierarchy which mirrors the vertical basis of power in China today. State language policies have established official minority languages and Chinese ‘dialects’ under the arching umbrella of the Chinese state; yet their domain is strictly constrained through prescriptive standardization. The tension between this codifying imperative and the dynamic force of speaker identity is examined through the expressions of power through language use, inviting a re‐examination of assumptions about the static texture of language in a multilingual society.