‘Language and Symbolic Power’: The Friendships of Rural-Urban Migrant Children in China"

Over recent decades, the deep-rooted economic divide between rural and urban areas in China has led to large-scale family migration, with rural children moving to cities with their parents in search of better employment opportunities and improved living conditions.

Based on an eight-month ethnography conducted in a primary school containing both migrant and non-migrant children in China in 2023, this qualitative research employed observation, interviews with parents, teachers, and children, and an art-based method (children’s drawings) to explore children’s friendships.

Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts and tools of capital and ‘language and symbolic power,’ the study found that language, particularly accent, plays a key role in children’s integration. Firstly, echoing Bourdieu, language is an implicitly acknowledged legitimate form of culture that is part of a national ideology. This implicit legitimization operates as a form of symbolic dominance, ingrained in the daily operations of institutions and potentially leading to prejudice. Children speaking standard Mandarin are considered more legitimate and have a higher level of peer acceptance than children with accents. Secondly, apart from Mandarin, local accents in megacities can be a source of pride, as they carry significant cultural value and are often associated with property ownership and imply ancestral wealth passed down over generations. Thirdly, intersecting with economic capital, middle-class children use a more elaborated linguistic code, which is more aligned with the education system in China. This study uses Bourdieu’s concepts to examine how language can serve as an audible marker of social division for migrant children. The study also contributes to a reflection on Bourdieu’s theory by considering children's agency in how they perceive accents. While parents and educators often view accents as ‘gatekeeper’ that children must overcome to form friendships, children themselves perceive accents differently. For them, accent can sometimes serve as a positive resource in building friendships.