Linguistic Hauntings at the Margins of China

This study examines emotional and material traces lingering in the aftermath of forced linguistic landscape transformations in Inner Mongolia following the implementation of a new assimilationist national language policy in 2022. Drawing on ethnographic and linguistic landscape data, the study specifically examines how the multilingual signs that have undergone invisibilization or changes in their layouts are accompanied by marginalized senses and excluded voices—linguistic hauntings—in the multilingual Mongolian borderlands. In this study, linguistic hauntings are animated by Mongolian linguistic anxiety and conditioned by the Chinese state's intensified language oppression in transitioning from a multinational and multilingual state to a unified Chinese nation with one singular language. The article suggests that linguistic haunting is a powerful lens for analysing the interlinked political, affective and temporal dimensions in drastically reconfiguring landscapes. The study contributes to the sociolinguistics of the specters, borderlands multilingualism, nationalism and its linguistic entailments.