Evolution of Heritage Language Resources on the Chinese-language Enclave: A Case Study of a Town in Southern Thailand

Abstract

The process by which overseas Chinese shifts from a native language to a heritage language, referred to in this study as heritagization, has rarely been examined from a diachronic perspective or documented through empirical case studies. Taking Chandee, a town in southern Thailand and a long-established Chinese-speaking enclave, as a case study, this study investigates diachronic patterns of heritage-language replacement across regional and domain-specific dimensions through a systematic survey of multilingual linguistic landscapes, intergenerational language use in the community, and heritage-language conversations within families. The findings reveal that the evolution of heritage-language resources follows a clear stratified replacement. At the regional level, heritage-language replacement proceeds from the community to the family. Two subsidiary replacement sequences are also identified: Chinese dialects gradually give way to Mandarin and subsequently to local lingua franca, while Chinese monolingualism is first replaced by bilingualism before returning to local-lingua-franca monolingualism. The family constitutes the final stronghold for heritage-language maintenance, and the re-monolingualization of family language use may be regarded as an indicator that heritagization has been completed. At the domain level, heritage-language replacement unfolds across the political, public service, commercial, and cultural and religious domains. Within the educational domain, Traditional Chinese is gradually replaced by Simplified Chinese. Among these domains, the cultural and religious domain retains the last remaining heritage-language resources and therefore demonstrates the greatest resilience. This case study identifies a typical trajectory through which Chinese in overseas Chinese communities shifts from a native language to a heritage language, providing empirical evidence for understanding the dynamic process of heritagization.