World Heritage Reimagined: Dialect as Heritage in a Global and Digital Era

This thesis investigates how Chongqing Dialect becomes recognizable as "heritage" through everyday digital interaction. Bridging linguistic anthropology and critical heritage studies, it advances the "language turn" in heritage studies by examining both language as heritage and heritage as a form of discursive practice. Taking Chongqing Dialect discourse on the media platform Xiaohongshu as a case study, this thesis analyzes a corpus of posts and comment threads in which users discuss, evaluate, and circulate dialectal forms. Drawing on the analytic concepts of indexicality, enregisterment, grafting, and interscaling, the analysis shows how participants use multimodal and metapragmatic resources to recognize one another, form participation alignments, and treat dialect as observable, discussable, and evaluable. The central argument is that the categories of dialect and heritage are mutually constituted through interaction rather than being pre-given. While institutional heritage frameworks provide a broader semiotic horizon within which this happens, they do not determine these meanings; instead, dialectal practices online partially resonate with and rework heritage narratives of preservation and revitalization. Social media thus provides a site where the cultural significance of dialect is actively negotiated and reproduced in real time. By bringing a linguistic anthropological perspective into heritage studies, the thesis contributes an empirical account of heritage as the outcome of interactional practice and argues that heritage can thereby function as a pragmatic register reorganizing how participants evaluate and position language.