Abstract

This talk explores the contested notion of Chineseness through an examination of the language ideologies and practices of those who are arguably on its margins. Ethnographic cases are presented which not only shed light on how language mediates the relationship between race, ethnicity, and nationality, but also reveal the myriad ways in which ideologies of language, race, and nation work together to produce a variety of racial and ethnic subject positions. Expanding the scope of raciolinguistics, they demonstrate why we cannot lose sight of China and Chineseness when studying the relations between language, race, and ethnicity.

Biography

Mie Hiramoto is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at NUS. She earned her PhD in linguistics from the University of Hawai’i (2006). She serves as co-editor-in-chief for Gender and Language and associate editor for Journal of Language and Sexuality among other journal-related services. She also serves as Deputy Principal Investigator of the FASS Gender and Sexuality Research Cluster (2020~).

Her research interests are sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, in particular, contact linguistics (e.g., Japanese spoken outside Japan and Singapore English) as well as language, gender, and sexuality (e.g., mediation and medialization; Asian masculinity). Some of her recent research papers appeared in World Englishes (2019), Language in Society (2019), Social Semiotics (2020), Language and Communication (2020)​, and Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages (2020)​.