Script choice among the Miao in China
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Joakim Enwall
Abstract
The present article aims at analyzing script choice among the Miao in China from the perspective of sociolinguistic aspects of script choice presented by Unseth (2005). The history of script choice among the Miao in China presents a microcosm encompassing most of the relevant factors for script choice listed by Unseth, and this gives ample opportunities for studying this phenomenon in settings that share some common traits including geography, ethnic composition, historical development, and a political system. Factors explaining the relative success of the many scripts devised for various varieties of Miao are explored. The general decreasing use of Miao scripts during the last decades must also be viewed within the context of increasing assimilation and China's rapid changes.
© 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
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Articles in the same Issue
- The sociolinguistics of script choice: an introduction
- Writing Tuareg — the three script options
- The Khom script of the Kommodam Rebellion
- A social orthography of identity: the N'ko literacy movement in West Africa
- The ascendancy of the Cham script: how a literacy workshop became the catalyst
- Missionary contributions toward the revaluation of Hangeul in late nineteenth-century Korea
- Choosing how to write sign language: a sociolinguistic perspective
- Indexicality, voice, and context in the distribution of Cherokee scripts
- Script change in Azerbaijan: acts of identity
- Script selection for Tibetan-related languages in multiscriptal environments
- Nonconventional script choice in Japan
- Script choice among the Miao in China
- Emblems of independence: script choice in post-Soviet Turkmenistan
- Margins of Writing, Origins of Cultures, edited by Seth L. Sanders
