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Re-exploring Language development and identity construction of Hui nationality in China: a sociosemiotic perspective

  • Xiaolin Yang and Jian Li EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: November 2, 2020

Abstract

The present study attempts to investigate and analyze the relationship between the language used by the Hui nationality, its social situation, and identity construction from a sociosemiotic perspective, and makes a further discussion on the process of identity construction via language convergence, divergence, and maintenance. It goes further to put forward the distinction between social identity/ethnic identity and group identity/personal identity as well as the roles that language convergence and divergence have played within these identity constructions, proposes that language convergence and divergence are the two crucial language strategies utilized by people in code switching, therefrom constructing a dynamic balanced identity system recursively.


Corresponding author: Jian Li, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou, China, E-mail:

Award Identifier / Grant number: 16YJC740078

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Youth Project of Humanities and Social Sciences: Intra-lingual Translation, Interpretation and Identity Construction: A Contrastive Study on Wang Daiyu and Liu Zhi’s Han Kitab (Project No. 16YJC740078).

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Published Online: 2020-11-02
Published in Print: 2020-12-16

© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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