This article examines the recontextualization of traditional Mongolian verbal art khuuriin ulger ('fiddle story') by Mongolian folk singers in the context of the spread of COVID-19 in Inner Mongolia, China. Drawing on the concept of intertextuality, I analyze the verbal and visual signs in 94 videos of Mongolian fiddle stories. The article argues that the minority Mongols participate in the dominant global and national discourses while at the same time creating a sense of Mongolian-ness by marrying Mongolian verbal art with public health messages related to COVID-19. The article also finds that the multivocal COVID-19 Mongolian fiddle stories are a medium to articulate the very heteroglot sense of the world in which minority Mongols dwell and to construct and reaffirm their multi-layered identities. The study contributes to our understanding of how traditional genres and symbols evolve in response to the pandemic.

This study examines the digital propaganda campaigns carried outby the Chinese Communist Party in Inner Mongolia followingMongols’ protest against the bilingual education reform in 2020.It analyses texts and images posted on WeChat official accountsof the Inner Mongolia Daily and Inner Mongolia EducationDepartment. Through a detailed discourse and semiotic analysesof propaganda texts we reveal that the national unity anddevelopment discourses are replete with Han-centricassimilationist ideology. In our analysis, by drawing on aBakhtinian chronotope, we foreground how the past, present andfuture are turned into a unified folkloric-cum-colonial space–time.This study also elucidates how the drastic policy shift and the rearticulation of national form in China is reflected in publiclycirculated words and images in Inner Mongolia.

This article analyzes the sociolinguistic construction of two gendered figures in multilingual performances, namely a category of young Mongol wives in rural societies who challenge patriarchal social order, and a group of young urban Mongol men whose dream is to be rich and indulge themselves in luxury. By drawing on the analytical framework of stance and stylization, the study analyzes how the performers’ multivalent stance-taking towards constructed personas and specific social-moral orders are communicated through their skillful stylization of multilingual resources in Inner Mongolia. It also points out that language stylization and stance-taking, taking place in reference to local cultural values and linguistic ideologies, are anchored in continually evolving ethnic, gender, and class relationships in a changing, minoritized Mongolian society in the context of Chinese modernization and capitalist marketization. (Stance-taking, language stylization, gendered discourses, Mongols, multilingualism)*

This article explores the shifting connotations of two key terms in propaganda texts on bilingual education policy in Inner Mongolia. The two terms are dumdadu-yin ündüsten (Ch.: Zhonghua minzu, Chinese nation) and ulus-un neidem hereglehü üge hel (Ch.: guojia tongyong yuyan, national common language). I examine how the meanings of these key terms have begun to shift as China strives to shed its multinational character and build a linguistically homogenous Chinese nation-state. The new prominence given to the term dumdadu-yin ündüsten (Chinese nation) and the gradual substitution of the terms neitelig hel (Ch.: putonghua) and khitad hel (Han language) with the term ulus-un neidem hereglehü üge hel (national common language) in propaganda texts in Inner Mongolia reflect and shape China’s changing policies on its borderlands. In this brief exploratory article, I underline how the Mongolian terms referring to the Chinese nation and national common language undergo shifts in their meanings as what sits at the very core of these terms – the Han – irrepressibly exposes itself and subsumes other meaning potentials.

This article examines multivocal Mongolian costumes to shed light on the performance and representation of Mongolian identities in China. In particular, it explores the promotion of Mongolian costumes in online media spaces, in commercial cultural studios, and at state-sponsored heritage events. The article argues that the discursive construction of authenticity and cultural hegemony overshadows and hierarchises heterogenous Mongolian cultures and identities. The article also finds that the meanings taken on by Mongolian costumes contest and go beyond those inscribed by the state. The study aims to improve our understanding of minority cultural transformation in post-Mao China and the agency of minority Mongols who reshape their evolving cultural forms.

In Mongolian culture, wedding speeches are a traditional component of a marriage celebration, but in bilingual, bicultural urban Inner Mongolia, China, two hybrid genres have emerged which reflect competing ideologies of languages and speakers. There can be a Mongolian performance with a commentary in Chinese, or a blended Mongolian and Chinese language performance. In these hybrids, Mongolian is often associated with a minority status but an authentic tradition, while Chinese seems to represent a modern majority, but alien, culture. By situating the hybrid and bilingual Mongolian wedding speech genre in the contexts of Mongolian cultural loss and revival, urbanization, and the increasing weight of the Chinese state's political discourse in public space, the study unravels the complexity and contestations inherent in a hybridized traditional Mongolian speech genre. Drawing on the inherent duality of genre, that is its boundedness/monology and its plasticity/heteroglossia, this paper presents ethnographic evidence of these sociolinguistic representations, and contributes to the understanding of hybrid genre, agency, and a transforming expressive culture in the context of social displacement, cultural shift, and internal colonization in China.

As the Mongolian language is equated with ethnic survival in Inner Mongolia, the metadiscourse of Mongolian linguistic purism has become a vital tactic for enacting Mongolian identity and creating a counterspace against Chinese linguistic and cultural hegemony. This paper analyses: (1) the process of establishing iconized links between language, culture, land and race on the second order of indexicalities; (2) the orthographic representation of mixed Mongolian and “pure” Mongolian in the Mongolian social media space Bainu. The study illuminates the interdiscursive processes of presuming and constructing linguistic, cultural, and ethnic boundaries by subaltern groups in an assimilationist nation state.

Socially constructed and globally propagated East-West binaries have influenced language ideologies about English in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), but they are not hegemonic. This essay explores how East-West language ideologies are reformed in mergers with Mandarin-minority language ideologies. It discusses two separate but similar recent studies of minority language speakers and language ideologies in the PRC, respectively by Grey and Baioud. Each study reveals aspects of how Mandarin and English are being socially constructed as on the same side of a dichotomous and hierarchic linguistic and social order, in contradistinction to minority languages. The essay thus problematizes the construction of English as a Western language and Mandarin as an Eastern language; both in academic discourses and in wider social and political discourses. The essay uses Asif Agha’s theory of “enregisterment” to unify the points drawn from each study. It concludes that the language ideologies and practices/discourses under examination reproduce the displacement of a subaltern status; we describe this process as dynamic, internal Orientalism and “recursive” Orientalism, drawing on foundational theory of language ideologies. This essay paves the way for further studies of recursive Orientalism.