Chinese Sociolinguistics

Chinese Sociolinguistics examines the ways in which language contributes to shaping social, cultural, and ethnic identities in Greater China.

This book is the first textbook to be exclusively devoted to the issues of language, society, and identity in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and overseas Chinese communities (the Greater China). The book includes topics on the role of language in Chinese culture; the linguistic indexing of socioeconomic class; dialects and regional language variation; the impacts of state policies; linguistic borrowings; bilingualism and bicultural identity; and language shift and attrition. The emergence of new forms of language as influenced by modern technologies and possible future developments is also discussed in this book.

This book will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in Chinese sociolinguistics, particularly with a focus on language, identity, and society in Greater China. This book will also be of interest to members of the Chinese Language Teachers Association and the American Council of Teaching Foreign Languages (ACTFL).

Chunsheng Yang is an associate professor of Chinese and applied linguistics at the University of Connecticut, U.S.A. Chunsheng’s main research areas are Chinese phonetics, phonology, second-language acquisition, especially with respect to second language prosody, Chinese sociolinguistics, and Chinese pedagogy. Chunsheng has published widely on the acquisition of L2 Chinese prosody and other aspects of Chinese sounds.