Same World, Different Minds: The Conceptualization of Animals in Bunun and Mandarin Chinese

This study examines the conceptualization of animals between the Austronesian language, Bunun, and the Sino-Tibetan language, Mandarin Chinese. Bunun and Han Chinese people have co-existed in Taiwan for several hundred years but within the last 60 years, Mandarin Chinese has had a dominating effect on the Bunun people, with the younger generations of Bunun speaking and writing Mandarin Chinese far more fluently than their own mother tongue. This study thus explores how modern Bunun people conceptualize animals in their worldview under the dominance of Mandarin Chinese. Data for the study was derived from a triangulation of surveys, interviews, and linguistic corpora. After analyzing these datasets, wild animals were found to be more salient to the Bunun, while livestock animals were more so to Han Chinese participants. A slight linguistic relativity effect was detected among Han Chinese participants, since some of the judgments elicited from this cohort conformed to the animal categories encoded in the Chinese writing system. This was found to be less likely among Bunun speakers despite the fact that most participants, particularly those belonging to the younger generation, possess high proficiency in written Mandarin Chinese. This finding may thus be due to Bunun cultural practices and the fact that the Bunun language only started using Roman script for writing starting in the late nineteenth century.