Complex Relationship Between Chinese and English Language

Often when science fiction writers or television producers make up a futuristic world, little to no thought is paid to the language the inhabitants of that world will be speaking. Usually language is never mentioned, or native tongues are translated to English through some form of external force, like the babel fish in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or C-3PO. The world of Joss Whedon's short lived television series, Firefly, and its follow-up movie, Serenity, is created with such attention to detail and creativity that its cult status is easily understandable. The back story of this space western is that the United States and China were the two superpowers that expanded into outer space to colonize terraformed planets, their influence over hundreds of years formed a combined culture containing characteristics of both. For example there is a scene at the dinner table during the pilot episode where people of the crew eat with chopsticks and drink from western style tin cups, and the Alliance flag is depicted as United States and Chinese flags overlaying each other. (1, 4) This combination of cultural and political artifacts is not the only result of this dual influence. One of the most pronounced aspects of Chinese influence is in the nearly universal bilingualism throughout the universe of Firefly, referred to in the show and by fans as simply the 'verse. The relationship between English and Chinese on the show demonstrates some aspects of the extended diglossia defined by Fishman as a single society uses two or more codes where each serve “functions distinct from those considered appropriate for the other” and both are “nonconflictual” in a stable environment. (2, 85)

Before looking more closely at how language is portray...

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...of both Chinese and English can be interpreted as a situation of diglossia with bilingualism, but as one where the H variety is not necessarily used in positions of authority, but is used for writing and indexing prestige. It makes sense that this dichotomy, where both English and Chinese are both high and low prestige at the same time, exist in a situation where the concept of language and its execution were carried out by writers and creators who may not be trained in linguistic theory, bu for whom the mixing of English and Chinese was used to signal the Sino-American hegemony, and where the dialogue had to be accessible to an English speaking audience. But then again, perhaps a language interaction similar to the one illustrated in Firefly might occur hundreds of years from now and a new category of diglossia will be added to the scholarly discourse of the future.