Multilingual Practices of Vietnamese Wives at a Chinese Border Town

Against the backdrop of cross-border regional integration between China and Southeast Asian neighbors, growing numbers of Vietnamese women migrate across the border to marry local Chinese men in pursuit of improved livelihoods, yet pervasive linguistic barriers severely restrict their access to local social resources. Focusing on nine Vietnamese cross-border migrant wives in Malipo, Yunnan Province, this study explores their Mandarin communication difficulties and the adaptive linguistic strategies they adopt to mitigate such obstacles through semi-structured interviews, participant observation and field notes. Analysis reveals that inadequate Mandarin proficiency creates multifaceted integration predicaments spanning family, economic and communal spheres- it hinders parent-child communication and children’s academic tutoring within households, restricts income growth in farming and small-scale commercial work, and impedes accurate symptom expression during medical consultations, slowing their assimilation into local border communities. To resolve these communicative obstacles, the women adopt multi-layered adaptive approaches- they acquire basic oral Mandarin via sustained linguistic support from family members, flexibly engage in language switching by drawing on their multilingual repertoires and local ethnic social networks to boost business communication and upgrade their Mandarin competence, and pursue gradual linguistic adaptation to independently access medical services and integrate into neighborhood life. Despite consistent efforts to advance their Chinese skills, structural social barriers including temporary residency restrictions, insufficient household income, entrenched domestic gendered labor divisions and the complex polyglot border environment prevent their full linguistic and social inclusion. This research fills gaps in sociolinguistic scholarship on multilingual practices of female cross-border migrants along the China-Vietnam frontier, and provides practical references for grassroots governments to formulate inclusive language support policies and advance the social integration of transnational migrant populations.