‘Can language police shut up?!’: theorizing anti-language policing across Chinese social media

The empirical turn in language policy research has established social media as a vital site for language policing, where digital actors regulate linguistic behavior to enforce standard language ideologies. However, a predominant focus on how standard norms are reproduced leaves an incomplete view of verbal hygiene and linguistic authority. This study investigates the counter-discursive phenomenon of ‘anti-language policing,’ examining how Chinese netizens use short videos on Bilibili, Douyin, and Xiaohongshu to contest the authority of the ‘language police.’ Drawing on a purposive, two-tiered sample of 60 videos and employing multimodal discourse analysis, it identifies three ideological critiques, namely challenging raciolinguistic double standards, asserting communicative pragmatism, and exposing the vitality paradox of linguistic purism. These critiques are realized through three registers of resistance – affective counter-attack, psychological reframing, and epistemic defense – each occurring across all three platforms with differing salience. The study theorizes anti-language policing as a second-order metapragmatic practice that dismantles the authority of the standard and re-enregisters stigmatized accents, and it terms restorative language policy the condition this practice pursues, in which stigmatized varieties are reclaimed as workable means of communication and their speakers regain legitimacy. Implications are discussed for bottom-up language policy and digital language governance.