Global Virtual Speaker Series || Mediatized Taiwanese Mandarin Popular Culture, Masculinity and Social Perceptions - Chun-Yi Peng

This talk explores how language ideologies have emerged for "gangtaiqiang" (港台腔) through a combination of indexical and ideological processes in televised media. Gangtaiqiang (Hong Kong-Taiwan accent), a socially recognizable form of mediatized Taiwanese Mandarin, has become a stereotype for many Chinese mainlanders who have little real-life interaction with Taiwanese people. Using both qualitative and quantitative approaches, I examine how Chinese millennials perceive gangtaiqiang by focusing on the following questions: 1. the role of televised media in the formation of language attitudes, and 2. how shifting gender ideologies are performed and embodied such attitudes. I argue that gangtaiqiang should, in fact, be conceptualized as a mediatized variety of Mandarin, rather than the actual speech of people in Hong Kong or Taiwan. My analyses point to an emerging realignment among the Chinese towards gangtaiqiang, a variety traditionally associated with chic, urban television celebrities and young cosmopolitan types. In contrast to Beijing Mandarin, Taiwanese Mandarin is now perceived to be pretentious, babyish, and emasculated, mirroring the power dynamics between Taiwan and China.

Speaker: Chun-Yi Peng is an Associate Professor at Borough of Manhattan Community College- CUNY. His primary research interests are in the fields of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. His dissertation examines the ideological perception of Taiwanese Mandarin by Chinese Mainlanders, and how televised media and language attitudes play a role in shaping such perceptions. Chun-Yi is also interested in second language acquisition and dialect contact, especially syntactic variation in spoken Mandarin varieties.