This study examines how ordinary Taiwanese netizens perform their linguistic authority by policing others’ use of allegedly Mainland Chinese expressions and how such acts of policing could be resisted and delegitimized subsequently by drawing on different axes of differentiation against the backdrop of the complex Taiwan-China relations. In Taiwanese social media, there has been increasing prevalence in policing the use of Mainland Chinese expressions, to the extent that a metapragmatic label, zhīyǔ jǐngchá (literally “Chinese language police”) emerged to describe the netizens who comment on and correct others’ use of language. This study focuses on cases where mundane, non-political online posts were challenged by ordinary netizens as containing Mainland Chinese expressions, a clasping, enregistering moment (Gal 2019) where identities, the expressions in question, and Mainland Chinese Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin as two registers are connected. Such challenges, however, are sometimes delegitimized in the name of democracy, linguistic (in)accuracy, and the nature of language evolution, another enregistering process that discredits “zhīyǔ jǐngchá talk.” Unlike much research on linguistic authority that focuses on institutional power in regimenting language use, this study explores how ordinary netizens claim the authority to legitimize or delegitimize the linguistic policing acts and how it is simultaneously an enregistering process at a number of levels. The analysis reveals that what counts as “a Chinese expression” is often contested. Moreover, differentiations at the national (either in the ethnic or civic senses), cultural, and political levels are variously drawn in these seemingly linguistic debates. A full understanding of these ideological contestations needs to be situated in the current Taiwan-China relations and China’s increasing cultural influences, which some Taiwanese find threatening to their identity.

Reference

Gal, S. (2019). Making registers in politics: Circulation and ideologies of linguistic authority. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 23:450-466.