Language, identity, and rootedness: An ethnographic study of language adaptation among nonlocal teachers in border ethnic regions

This ethnographic study examines how language barriers shape the professional lives of 10 nonlocal secondary school teachers in J County, a border ethnic region of southwestern China. It shows that nonlocal teachers experience dual disembedding: they are simultaneously excluded from local social networks and detached from their professional field. Everyday mechanisms such as accommodating code-switching, translation filtering, and in-group/out-group drawing naturalize this exclusion through the ideology of Putonghua monolingualism, functioning as a subtle form of symbolic violence. Yet some teachers convert multilingual competence into affective, social, and symbolic capital, enabling partial re-embedding. This conversion depends on institutional position, critical moments, and agentive action, and remains bounded by the divide between instrumental inclusion and affective belonging. The article argues that language is not a peripheral difficulty but a structural force in teachers’ professional integration.