The Politics of Speaking in Hybrid Voices
Global Asian Studies Colloquium
March 11, 2019
11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Speaker:
Xuehua Xiang, Associate Professor of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and an affiliated faculty in GLAS at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Speaking in multiple codes and voices is one of the most common human practices and a hallmark of multilingualism. Globalization has intensified the scope and types of hybrid language practice. This presentation traces the origin and viral spread of a hybrid neologism in Mandarin Chinese, initially an English-coded cliché, “too young, too simple, sometimes naïve”, used by former Chinese President Jiang Zemin toward a Hong Kong reporter. Linguistic hybridity in this particular instance functions to veil power and control as ordinary morality. The phrase, “too young, too simple, sometimes naïve”, took on a virtual life on social media. A decade later, the expression re-emerged as a transliterated neologism. Some uses evince a reversed moral order from the phrase’s original context. Many uses are also “meme”-like, indexing the source’s pragmatic context (e.g., simultane-ity of comedy and seriousness, mockery and didactics).
The presentation concludes with discussions of the rising practices of “verbal hygiene” and linguistic purity on the Chinese Internet in relation to understanding the practice of translanguaging on a global scale.
Date posted
Jan 30, 2019
Date updated
Sep 7, 2022