Proceedings of the - British Association for Applied Linguistics

23
Naxi, Chinese, English or ASEAN Languages: A Study of Language Policies of Naxi Community in Lijiang, China
Hongyan Yang
Naxi, Chinese, English or ASEAN
Languages: A Study of Language Policies of
Naxi Community in Lijiang, China
Hongyan Yang
Macquarie University, Australia
Yunnan Nationalities University, China
hongyan.yang@mq.edu.au or yhyxhw@hotmail.com
Among 56 officially-recognized nationalities in China, the dominant Han
comprises about 92% of the total population while the other 55 minority
groups represent about 110 million people with about 120 mother tongues
and only 30 minority languages have written scripts. The Naxi ethnic
minority in Lijiang, a tourist area of Yunnan in Southwest China, are of
particular interest as an ethnic minority due to their unique culture and
diverse forms of written language including the unique pictographic
Dongba script. Naxi speak Naxi, local Chinese variety, mandarin Chinese
and learn English or ASEAN languages as foreign languages. Having been
recognized by UNESCO as the World Heritage site destinations, Lijiang
has experienced a booming tourism with tourists from both home and
abroad and has brought change to language policies and language practices
among Naxi.
There are several studies of Naxi on Naxi geography, culture and language,
bilingual and trilingual education policy (Blachford & Jones, 2011),
language transfer (Hong, 2005), schooling and identity (Hansen, 2011; Yu,
2010). However, there is paucity of research that investigates the interplay
of Naxi, Chinese and English/foreign languages policies and interrelation
of language policies with linguistic power in a complicated multiethnic and
multilingual context. Language policy is “another mechanism through
which ideology is meant to turn into practice or practice into ideology”
(Shohamy, 2006, p. 76). This study aims to fill in this gap with the
theoretical frameworks of language policy to explore the hierarchical
relationship between language, power and inequality. I argue that language
policies of Naxi, Chinese, English and ASEAN languages and practices
need to be meditated and justified from the sociolinguistic perspective and
understood as local, national, social and political constructions in a
multilingual, multiethnic and multicultural context. Two general questions
guide this study. (1) What language policies have been implemented in
Lijiang? (2) What is the gap between rhetoric and the reality on the
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