this is really long, part 2: a little code-switch sunburst
The point of light in this whole grey day of bureaucratic socializing had nothing to do with cross-anything cooperation. It was when our driver broke through his Taiwanese to say one phrase in Mandarin. I’ve been collecting tokens of Mandarin/Taiwanese code-switching, and although this technically didn’t fall within the parameters I’ve set myself (Taipei city bureaucrats), it was, nonetheless, totally awesome. My super-sophisticated notation system for keeping track of code-switching instances is writing down the words in romanized form with square brackets around the Taiwanese part. Then I write down the Mandarin translation for the Taiwanese (because the romanization system for Taiwanese is totally different from and yet overlapping with the Mandarin romanization system, so it’s very likely that I will either write it down wrong or get confused when I look at it again later on).[i]
Here’s the thing. A long time ago I noticed that people, bureaucrats, who were speaking to me or each other in Mandarin, would often switch to Taiwanese when they wanted to express some emotion or reaction in the voice of, for instance, the people in the neighborhood I study, who are pretty much all primarily Taiwanese-speaking. I always thought of this as ethnically specific—my bureaucrats know that my neighborhood residents are Taiwanese speakers and voice them accordingly.
But lately I’ve been trying to actually keep track of when people switch from one to the other in the office, and it turns out that it’s much more general than this: people will consistently switch to Taiwanese to voice the supposed feelings or reactions of, for instance, city councilmembers (who do not predictably prefer to speak either one) and even other bureaucrats. Recently I heard a coworker describe a long, frustrating phone conversation he’d just had. His end of the conversation had been entirely in Mandarin. I have no way of knowing what the person on the other end of the phone was speaking, but given that I’ve never heard this coworker respond in Mandarin when addressed in Taiwanese, I strongly suspect that the person on the other end of the phone was also speaking Mandarin. But when my friend recounted this conversation to another coworker, he expressed his own part in Mandarin, his interlocutor’s in Taiwanese. So I suspect that there is something going on with code-switching that is not about which language was or might be used to express the reported speech.
Our driver that day had been speaking Taiwanese for the entire time that we’d been with him—well over an hour going from Taipei to Xinzhu and, now, on the way back, another twenty minutes or so. So I think we can safely say that this is a man who habitually prefers Taiwanese, even though he is clearly perfectly competent in Mandarin when he needs to be. My boss, sitting up front with him, asked him where he’d gone off to while we were all having lunch. He explained how he'd never been to Xinzhu before, and so he’d gone wandering about to get a look at it. Then he described coming upon the wall of a famous building, a wall that he recognized from some city publicity photo.
People often preface real or hypothetical reported speech or reactions (their own and others’) with an exclamation of eh!, rising in pitch a bit. It’s a bit like the American, “I was like,…” prefacing something that sounds like direct reported speech but is clearly not claiming to be a real quotation. Here’s how the driver described his experience, with the Taiwanese in brackets: “[(So I was) Walking along, walking along, and (I) saw this wall] -- eh! I think I’ve seen this wall before!”
The really cool thing about this, in case you missed it, is that this is a person clearly prefers Taiwanese to Mandarin. His own quotation of himself thinking, expressed in Mandarin, can’t possibly have anything to do with his opinion of himself as a speaker of Mandarin, rather than Taiwanese. And while my bureaucrats usually start out in Mandarin and then switch to Taiwanese to voice internal diaologue or hypothetical reported speech, this guy does the same contrast in the opposite direction. In other words, this switch is not about an ideology of ‘what kind of person speaks what kind of language.’ It’s about information structuring: a way to mark, to highlight, certain kinds of information. And I suspect (but don’t have the materials to show yet) that it may have something to do with highlighting the hypothetical status and the second-hand sources of the information (even if one is citing oneself). But this bit will take a little more thought and more sitting around in the office writing down what people say, so I think I will leave it here for now, assuming you even made it to the end of this post, which is pretty unlikely.
[i] What I mean by different and overlapping is, e.g.: ch in the hanyu pinyin transliteration system that we Americans use is a romanization of the English ch as in chortle (more or less). In the Taiwanese language transliteration system that I use (there are two or three out there, each one associated with a political stance: unification, independence, and something in between. I use the unificationist one, because that’s what I was taught), ch renders the English dz or ds as in mounds. Chh renders the unvoiced version, ts as in its. There is no chortle-type ch sound in Taiwanese. You try keeping it straight while paying attention to what people are actually talking about.
Here’s the thing. A long time ago I noticed that people, bureaucrats, who were speaking to me or each other in Mandarin, would often switch to Taiwanese when they wanted to express some emotion or reaction in the voice of, for instance, the people in the neighborhood I study, who are pretty much all primarily Taiwanese-speaking. I always thought of this as ethnically specific—my bureaucrats know that my neighborhood residents are Taiwanese speakers and voice them accordingly.
But lately I’ve been trying to actually keep track of when people switch from one to the other in the office, and it turns out that it’s much more general than this: people will consistently switch to Taiwanese to voice the supposed feelings or reactions of, for instance, city councilmembers (who do not predictably prefer to speak either one) and even other bureaucrats. Recently I heard a coworker describe a long, frustrating phone conversation he’d just had. His end of the conversation had been entirely in Mandarin. I have no way of knowing what the person on the other end of the phone was speaking, but given that I’ve never heard this coworker respond in Mandarin when addressed in Taiwanese, I strongly suspect that the person on the other end of the phone was also speaking Mandarin. But when my friend recounted this conversation to another coworker, he expressed his own part in Mandarin, his interlocutor’s in Taiwanese. So I suspect that there is something going on with code-switching that is not about which language was or might be used to express the reported speech.
Our driver that day had been speaking Taiwanese for the entire time that we’d been with him—well over an hour going from Taipei to Xinzhu and, now, on the way back, another twenty minutes or so. So I think we can safely say that this is a man who habitually prefers Taiwanese, even though he is clearly perfectly competent in Mandarin when he needs to be. My boss, sitting up front with him, asked him where he’d gone off to while we were all having lunch. He explained how he'd never been to Xinzhu before, and so he’d gone wandering about to get a look at it. Then he described coming upon the wall of a famous building, a wall that he recognized from some city publicity photo.
People often preface real or hypothetical reported speech or reactions (their own and others’) with an exclamation of eh!, rising in pitch a bit. It’s a bit like the American, “I was like,…” prefacing something that sounds like direct reported speech but is clearly not claiming to be a real quotation. Here’s how the driver described his experience, with the Taiwanese in brackets: “[(So I was) Walking along, walking along, and (I) saw this wall] -- eh! I think I’ve seen this wall before!”
The really cool thing about this, in case you missed it, is that this is a person clearly prefers Taiwanese to Mandarin. His own quotation of himself thinking, expressed in Mandarin, can’t possibly have anything to do with his opinion of himself as a speaker of Mandarin, rather than Taiwanese. And while my bureaucrats usually start out in Mandarin and then switch to Taiwanese to voice internal diaologue or hypothetical reported speech, this guy does the same contrast in the opposite direction. In other words, this switch is not about an ideology of ‘what kind of person speaks what kind of language.’ It’s about information structuring: a way to mark, to highlight, certain kinds of information. And I suspect (but don’t have the materials to show yet) that it may have something to do with highlighting the hypothetical status and the second-hand sources of the information (even if one is citing oneself). But this bit will take a little more thought and more sitting around in the office writing down what people say, so I think I will leave it here for now, assuming you even made it to the end of this post, which is pretty unlikely.
[i] What I mean by different and overlapping is, e.g.: ch in the hanyu pinyin transliteration system that we Americans use is a romanization of the English ch as in chortle (more or less). In the Taiwanese language transliteration system that I use (there are two or three out there, each one associated with a political stance: unification, independence, and something in between. I use the unificationist one, because that’s what I was taught), ch renders the English dz or ds as in mounds. Chh renders the unvoiced version, ts as in its. There is no chortle-type ch sound in Taiwanese. You try keeping it straight while paying attention to what people are actually talking about.
posted by blahgstein at 12:13 AM
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