Friday, January 31st @ 3 PM, Harper 150 (NOTE FRIDAY MEETING)

Notes from the field: language and Gender in Huangshan China

This Semiotics/LVC paper provides an ethnographic account on the current use of the Tunxi dialect in Huangshan City, Anhui, China. Tunxi dialect (Tunxi hua) is a member of the Xiuyi (Xiuning-Yi) subbranch of China’s smallest language family, the Huizhou language family. Huizhou is the smallest language family in China, and the group of mutually unintelligible languages characterized by their complex tonal systems. This paper examines on the impact of Mandarin promulgation on local dialect usage. The paper looks, broadly speaking, at language use in three sites: a yoga studio, a newsstand, and a nearby village. It presents less an sustained argument, systematic analysis of a data corpus so much as it provides a series of ethnographic vignettes, anecdotes and reports o on language and gender in this small city in contemporary China.