You Speak What They Wear

Abstract

Abstract We manipulated persona features characterising US and Taike subcultures, and examined its impact on preference toward Chinese-English alternated uses among Taiwanese youngsters. We conducted (i) a literature survey to identify the features iconic of US and Taike subcultures, (ii) a norming task to verify the subculture icons obtained, (iii) a multi-choice task to survey preference for six relevant non-/mixed forms of language, (iv) a forced-choice task to inspect “relative” code choices between Chinese versus its code-mix with English elements under the cues of the probe features. We found that visual cues and the stereotypical generalisations thereof play a role in language negotiation in first meeting contexts; cultural personae manifest themselves in the language alternation; with code mixing as an accommodative move, language users self-categorise themselves with the interlocutor that is stereotyped as having a linguistic preference associated to their persona character; linguistic convergence to stereotypes is driven by unconscious need.