Chen-Yu Chester Hsieh 謝承諭 & Hsi-Yao Su 蘇席瑤

Rye Field Publishing Co. 麥田出版社, 2024.

Reviewed by: Saloni Sharma (PhD Candidate, Jawaharlal Nehru University, HYI Visiting Fellow)

Exclusivity shaped by deeply ingrained language attitudes remains a largely overlooked phenomenon within academia and society at large. Although many governments have recognized linguistic diversity and responded through compulsory bilingual or multilingual education initiatives, the global hegemony of English persists remarkably. Narrowing our lens to Taiwan, an island historically home to a rich tapestry of languages including Taiwanese Hokkien, Hakka, Indigenous languages, and Mandarin, it is Standard Mandarin that occupies an especially privileged status. This dominance has been fortified through deliberate educational policies that often leaned toward didacticism or even punitive enforcement. More subtly, Mandarin’s supremacy is perpetuated socially, culturally, and politically, embedding a narrative of linguistic superiority that leaves speakers of other languages feeling marginalized, undervalued, and systematically excluded. Addressing these entrenched attitudes requires not only academic scrutiny but also broader societal awareness, precisely the type that popular media, as explored in the book 《語言學家看劇時在想什麼？》 (What do the Linguists Think About While Watching Drama?), is uniquely positioned to foster.

“From current trends and popular Taiwanese and Korean dramas to cinematic classics, discover linguistics integrated in everyday life, and explore the mysteries behind human thoughts and interactions”, reads the cover. True to its intent, the authors aim to introduce linguistics as a way to look at the world and demonstrate that it is all around us. Using popular media as a tool to educate general people about linguistics and provide fundamental conceptual, theoretical and critical tools, is both enlightening and engaging. From My Fair Lady to Extraordinary Attorney Woo, Xie and Su explore and interrogate language attitudes, pragmatic interpretation, and linguistic relativity, alongside the relationship between language and identity, cognition, and emotion, as well as specific phenomena like code-switching, loanwords, along with Taiwan’s linguistic diversity.

The book consists of eighteen chapters spread across four themes: “Language and Society”, “Language and Interpersonal Relationships”, “The Past and Present of Language in Taiwan”, and “Language and Emotion, the Perception of Time, and Our Lives”. While the book is aimed at general readers, and Xie clearly indicates to not take the book as a textbook on linguistics, it can serve as a delightful reading for Linguistics 101. This pedagogical transparency is both a virtue and an occasional source of discursiveness, which most readers would find approachable. The book recreates the cadence of a live classroom discussion: each chapter opens with a memorable clip, pivots to a key concept, and closes with reflection questions that invite the reader to keep “watching with linguists’ eyes”. The thoughtfully compiled further readings and references section at the end of each chapter is a great resource for curious readers to venture deeper.
Part I, “Language and Society,” tackles the classical terrain of accent prestige, language attitudes, and teenage peer groups. The authors resurrect William Labov’s department-store study via Eliza Doolittle’s Cockney makeover, then turn to English Vinglish and The Making of an Ordinary Woman to illustrate nuanced language attitudes that reveal anxieties around linguistic competence, cultural belonging, and the symbolic prestige of speaking particular languages or dialects. They subsequently jump to Mean Girls and application of linguistics in high school settings. Triangulating research from US, UK, and Taiwan, the authors illustrate how teen language behaviours signal different social positions in the campus. Part II, “Language and Interpersonal Relationships,” sharpens the lens on pragmatics. Chapters on address terms (“ni” vs. “nin”) and implicature demonstrate how politeness and sarcasm glide beneath literal words, while an “amazing” reading of Cape No. 7 reframes code-switching as aesthetic choice rather than lexical deficiency. Linguistic choices often index subtle hierarchies of power and belonging. Part III shifts to Taiwan’s own multilingual past and present. Here the authors’ archival depth shines. Essays on Taiwan Mandarin’s hybrid genesis, Hokkien’s layered pronunciations, and the endangered voices of Seediq tribes sheds light on the complex interplay of historical, cultural and sociopolitical factors that form the multilingual terrain of Taiwan. Xie and Su expose how its borders, both political and linguistic, have never been static. Part IV connects language to emotion, cognition, and time. A chapter on Inside Out dissects metaphorical “explosions” of anger; another on Arrival revisits the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis with a sober neo-Whorfian update.《語言學家看劇時在想什麼？》 (What do the Linguists Think About While Watching Drama? ) excels by layering sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, pragmatics, and cognitive science into a seamless narrative. The result is a methodological kaleidoscope that resists the neat textbook compartmentalization still common in introductory linguistics.

Overall, the reading was highly accessible, inclusive and engaging. Given the scope, the book is not just unique in the selection of diverse dramas but is also adequately backed by seminal studies. Bringing topics central to our academic study to the general public is something that academics all over the world need to do more of. In that sense, the book is not just an entertaining read, but also inspires to take up projects as such. As a fan of Asian dramas myself, the book provides an excellent and thoughtfully selected assortment of titles and topics that educators can incorporate in their classroom for discussions, but also discussions with family, friends, neighbors, and the world unrestrained by academic boundaries.