The enregisterment of Putonghua in practice

Drawing on ethnographic research, this article explores how a once alien and unsophisticated language has enregistered as a national linguistic standard through the mediation of metadiscursive practices in everyday social life, and how its indexical values associated with speaker attributes and social personae are reproduced in mass circulation of metadiscursive standard. It shows that the standardization of Putonghua has been a deliberate institutional effort closely related to the making of the nation; it is however, part of a more general and more tacit ideological process – enregisterment – through which the symbolic dominance of Putonghua is accepted as natural and normative.