Paper long abstract:

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.

Keywords: constructing ethnic boundaries, metadiscourse of linguistic purism, language ideology, Mongolian identity