My Gallatin concentration lands on the intersection between arts and sciences, using scientific theories and philosophies to guide my dramatic narrative. It only makes sense for me to begin my research with fundamentals in linguistics before I focus on the existing multilingual stories on stage or my own bilingual play. Since my play follows two Chinese adoptees’ first trip in China, I want to develop a better understanding of Chinese-English code-switching (CS).
An infographic of four different speakers code-switching between English and Chinese, Spanish, French, and German.
One of the first papers that I read, Liu’s 2019 study on listener’s attitude towards different type of code-switching, was stimulating, almost alarming. Liu focused on Chinese to English code-switching in native Chinese speakers in cities in China and overseas with different socioeconomic development. English proficiency is often associated with better education and employment. The study concluded that only intraclausal CS is associated with higher social status since it requires higher English proficiency, but both intraclausal and interclausal CS is associated with lower social likability. Liu’s study made me reflect on the engulfing cultural gap between bilingual community and monolingual community. I started to contemplate on whether monolingual Chinese speakers, who often associated mixed English words in Chinese with pretentiousness and hostility, will be my target audience. Liu’s literature review also mentioned some environment associate the minority language with lower social status, which raised the question of English monolingual speakers’ reception of my play.
My initial strategy was to investigate people’s perception of CS, treating my play as a bilingual speaker in conversation with the audience. However, as I keep reading literatures in CS studies, a paper on immigrant parents’ emotion and CS caught my attention. This 2018 paper, coauthored by scholars from UC Berkley and Penn State, supported the cognitive control and cultural framing theories of CS. The Chinese-English bilingual parents CS more frequently when displaying negative emotions, and the cultural difference resulted in praises being delivered in exclusively English. It inspired me to change one of the characters from monolingual to bilingual because she is a parent, and I want to create a bilingual dynamic between the generations.
A parent-child game similar to the puzzle box set up in the experiment from YouTube channel The Dad Lab.
My next part is a comparative study of precedences of theatrical multilingualism and their playwriting and production choices. The guiding question that I want to focus on is the issue of subtitling “foreign languages” into English and the paradox of accessibility versus authenticity. I will further explore different demographics’ reception of multilingual stories, subtitled or not.
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