Language ideologies are beliefs, feelings, and conceptions held by individuals toward language structure and language use (Kroskrity, 2010). Particularly, educators' language ideologies play a critical role in shaping language practice at schools and language education (Cai, 2021; Gu, Kou & Guo, 2019).
As China grows in economic and political power internationally, its cultural influence is also expanding. In Southeast Asia, the emerging influence of the Chinese language is shifting the regional linguistic hierarchy (Li, Ai & Zhang, 2019; Li & Zheng, 2021). This expanding linguistic influence has given rise to debates on its political and cultural implications on the rest of the world, similar to how the hegemonic status of English has aroused concerns of linguistic dominance and imperialism (Phillipson, 1992). Local Chinese language educators act as key practitioners of Chinese language education in Myanmar, so their conceptions about the status, value, and complications of Chinese language education in Myanmar merit close examination.
Data for this study were collected from semi-structured interviews with 12 Chinese educators in Myanmar. Through talking about the trajectory of personal careers situated in the social, political, and historical background of Chinese language education in Myanmar, the participants expressed their ideological views toward Chinese and Chinese language education. After an inductive analysis process, three types of language ideologies were identified representing the educator's positive attitude toward viewing Chinese and Chinese language education.
The first type of language ideology captures that the Chinese language was perceived as a marker of Chinese ethnicity. Despite perceiving their national identity differently, all the participants claimed the identity of overseas Chinese. Teaching Chinese thus was regarded as a mission of passing down the Chinese identity and culture across generations. The second type describes participants' perception of Chinese as an important social resource for helping learners gain access to better professional and educational opportunities inside and outside Myanmar. Another type of language ideology captures the perceived value of Chinese and Chinese language education for enhancing mutual understanding both interculturally and internationally in and beyond Myanmar, leading to regional cooperation and development.
Identifying the disparity of ideological orientations between the local language policy (language as problem) and that of Chinese educators and learners (language as resources), the study suggests the remedy that the centralized language policy be more inclusive of minority languages. On the other hand, language as right (Ruiz, 1984) has not been much reflected in this group of educators' discourse, although the obstacles of teaching and learning the Chinese language imposed by the local government were obvious in history and still exist nowadays. This divergence suggests a need for the Chinese/Kokang community members and concerned Chinese language educators to understand that the right to indigenous/heritage language education is more of a legal and political issue than just a cultural issue. Finally, the study shed light on the need for teacher education to support recognizing and harnessing the potential of learners' multilingual backgrounds to even value linguistic varieties of Chinese.
