Abstract

This talk derives from the speaker’s Ph.D. project which explores the language attitudes towards dialects in primary schools through looking at language choices in interaction from a language socialisation perspective. The setting of the project is the city of Guangzhou, a large urban centre in Southern China, where both individual and societal multidialectalism have undergone significant changes during the past decades of modernisation, migration, and language policy changes. Conducting an ethnographic language-attitude study in such a setting is both exciting and challenging. Using data from the study, this talk aims to unfold some of the important ideological, conceptual and methodological challenges in the process of collection, representation and analysis of rich ethnographic and multidialectal data. Main issues to be discussed include theoretical and ideological issues in choosing terminology and orthographies, practical difficulties in (re)presenting multidialectal data and the interpretation of such data. Theoretical implications of these challenges on the main study will be discussed.