Language Attitudes, Cultural Identity, and Minority-Language Maintenance in Multilingual Contexts: A Systematic Thematic Review

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 16:22:31 +0000

Language attitudes and cultural identity are often discussed together in research on multilingual communities, but the relationship between them is not always explained clearly. Many studies focus on one part of the issue, such as language maintenance, identity, policy, or digital communication, while fewer bring these dimensions together in a more connected way. This review was carried out to examine how recent research has approached that relationship. It covers studies published between 2018 and 2025 and retrieved from Scopus, Google Scholar, and Web of Science by following PRISMA procedures. Fifteen peer-reviewed studies were included in the final sample. Across the studies, three issues appeared repeatedly: intergenerational language transmission, language policy, and the growing role of digital media. The evidence suggests that language attitudes matter in ways that are not always easy to see. Sometimes their effects appear in obvious forms, such as language choice or institutional support. Sometimes they work more quietly through prestige, social pressure, and speakers' own evaluations of language. Read in this way, language attitudes are better understood as part of the wider social and cultural conditions of multilingual life rather than as a separate individual factor. The review also shows that positive attitudes alone do not guarantee language maintenance. Their effects depend on whether they are supported by family practice, community use, and institutional space. Overall, the studies point to a need for research that follows change over time, compares contexts carefully, and pays closer attention to how language, identity, and inequality interact in multilingual communities.

Eating Bitterness at the Keyboard: Pedagogical Culture, Practice Intensity and Performance Health among Chinese Undergraduate Piano Students

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:27:45 +0000

Piano performance occupies a distinctive position in modern Chinese cultural history: introduced through missionary and treaty-port channels, institutionalised in twentieth-century conservatories, and popularised on an unprecedented scale during the post-1980 “piano fever” (gangqin re). Less examined is the pedagogical ethos that accompanied this expansion — an ethos in which the Confucian valorisation of chi ku (“eating bitterness”) converges with the imported athletic maxim “no pain, no gain” to frame bodily suffering as evidence of moral seriousness rather than as a clinical warning. This article examines how that cultural script is inscribed on the bodies and minds of contemporary Chinese undergraduate pianists. Drawing on a cross-sectional survey of 63 piano performance majors at a university in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, the study documents practice behaviour, self-reported playing-related musculoskeletal pain and music performance anxiety. Participants practised a mean of 16.22 hours per week; only 12.7% reported a habitual warm-up routine and 7.9% a habitual stretching routine. Mean peak pain was 6.41 on a 0–10 scale and mean music performance anxiety was 170.48 (K-MPAI, range 153–201), both in the moderate-to-severe band. Weekly practice hours and years of training correlated positively with peak pain (r = .309 and r = .326), and practice hours significantly predicted pain intensity, β = .309, p = .014. Pain severity, but not pain breadth, correlated with performance anxiety (r = .270, p = .032). The article argues that these patterns are best read not as isolated clinical facts but as the somatic residue of a historically constituted pedagogical culture, and that health education in Chinese music institutions therefore requires cultural reinterpretation — reframing endurance as skilled self-regulation — rather than technical instruction alone.

Asian Culture and History, Issue: Vol.18, No.2

Language Attitudes, Cultural Identity, and Minority-Language Maintenance in Multilingual Contexts: A Systematic Thematic Review

Eating Bitterness at the Keyboard: Pedagogical Culture, Practice Intensity and Performance Health among Chinese Undergraduate Piano Students