Taiwan/PRC Divide and the Linguistic Consequences

Fang-long Shih, Stuart Thompson & Paul-François Tremlett (eds.), Re-writing culture in Taiwan. London: Routledge, 102–122, 2009

The Oxford Handbook of Language Policy and Planning, 2018

Virtually all Hong Kong Cantonese speakers know of 'lazy pronunciation,' which refers to colloquial pronunciation of Cantonese differ from prescribed dictionary pronunciation, and its speakers are essentialized as " lazy " and the culprit of " destroying Chinese culture ". These language ideologies about the aesthetics and cultural qualities of Cantonese are part of a process of differentiation associated with the renegotiation of local Hong Kong identity in the period of political change around the handover. The standardization of Cantonese is at the very centre of social, cultural, and political negotiation with regards to community boundaries and identities. The changes in Hong Kong's political sovereignty, from its position as a Chinese Qing dynasty-ruled rural island, to a British crown colony, and then to a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, make a unique and interesting study for language standardization processes and shifts in language ideologies.

rcsd.soc.cmu.ac.th

Language reform movements in China over the last hundred years have found both their motivations and limitations in divergent socio-political objectives. Language has been seen as a vehicle of social change, actual or potential, by reformers and conservatives alike. The apparent success of language reform programs has been closely tied to the fluctuating political fortunes of their protagonists. Pragmatic outcomes however have also been constrained by the fragmented nature of Chinese languages (plural) and dialects. To this day, an inconvenient reality is that a significant proportion of Chinese citizens cannot use standard Chinese (普通話), especially as spoken, while many others struggle with the standard form as a second language.

The Palgrave Handbook of Chinese Language Studies,, 2022

The studies of language strategy emerged as a new area of research in China in the twenty-first century. At the beginning, the studies were generally driven by the problem-solving needs of the country that was going through a fast process of modernization. Under such conditions, the application of the established theories in language policy and planning (LPP) was frequently implicit and unreflective while the pragmatic approach integrating knowledge from various sources seemed to be effective. The present chapter summarizes the studies of language strategies with their social effects in the theoretic perspective of LPP. The studies are seen to be outgrowth of the twentieth-century scholarship in LPP but seem to have elevated to a new level of multidisciplinary and cross-disciplinary development. The major issues the studies attempt to deal with are seen to be both theoretically important and broadly relevant beyond the Chinese situation. The economic approach by some of the language strategy studies is evaluated of their innovativeness in theoretic development and practical application.

Lingua Posnaniensis

As with most fields of life, China can trace its history of word standardization back to ancient times, when the first dictionaries (such as Erya, ca. 3rd century B.C.) appeared. Modern Standard Chinese used in Mainland China – Putonghua – has been subject to standardization since its proclamation as the official national language of China in 1956. The definition states quite clearly that its base is formed by the Northern dialects. This statement concerns also vocabulary. However, it is not a simple matter to make a choice of words which are to be used throughout the country. On the one hand, the so-called “Northern dialects” are spoken by almost 70% of the Han Chinese population, i.e. by about 800 million people. Although the Northern dialects are said to be quite uniform, the vast area that they cover must bring diversity in vocabulary. On the other hand, the remaining 30% of the Han Chinese speak a range of mutually unintelligible tongues, which are bound to penetrate the Northe...

Lingua Posnaniensis, 2020

As with most fields of life, China can trace its history of word standardization back to ancient times, when the first dictionaries (such as Erya, ca. 3 rd century B.C.) appeared. Modern Standard Chinese used in Mainland China-Putonghua-has been subject to standardization since its proclamation as the official national language of China in 1956. The definition states quite clearly that its base is formed by the Northern dialects. This statement concerns also vocabulary. However, it is not a simple matter to make a choice of words which are to be used throughout the country. On the one hand, the so-called "Northern dialects" are spoken by almost 70% of the Han Chinese population, i.e. by about 800 million people. Although the Northern dialects are said to be quite uniform, the vast area that they cover must bring diversity in vocabulary. On the other hand, the remaining 30% of the Han Chinese speak a range of mutually unintelligible tongues, which are bound to penetrate the Northern dialects. The aim of this paper is to show how the lexicon of Putonghua is being codified. An attempt will be made to reveal how the basic vocabulary was selected during the forming of Putonghua in the 1950s. Some of the tools used by the State Language Commission in order to control the process of vocabulary standardization will be described. Moreover, the paper intends to describe the ongoing changes in the Chinese lexicon. It will show the sources of new words that are gradually accepted into the authoritative dictionaries of modern Chinese.

Hong Kong ceased to be a colony of Britain on June 30 th , 1997, thus entering a new stage of its development and evolution as a uniquely-constituted city state and urban metropolis. The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China (HKSAR) inherited a linguistic ecology that owed much to its previous existence as a British colony, where the Chinese language had had no de jure status until 1974. From 1995, the stated policy of government has been to promote a "biliterate" (Chinese and English) and "trilingual" (Cantonese, Putonghua and English) society, and various measures have also been taken to promote the use of Chinese as a medium of instruction in schools. Immediately after the change in sovereignty, Putonghua became a compulsory school subject for the first time. This paper will examine the issue of language planning and policies partly from an historical perspective, but also through a consideration of current policies and practices across a range of domains, including government, law and education. One major conclusion that emerges from this discussion is that, from a language policy perspective, the relationship between Chinese and English in the Hong Kong context is potentially far less contentious than that between Cantonese and Putonghua.

Roczniki Humanistyczne, 2019

The process of creating a modern national standard language for the whole of China has been long. It started in the beginning of the 20 th century, when it became clear that a common spoken tongue was needed to unite the Chinese people. Thus the concept of Guóyǔ-'national language'-was created. After the founding of People's Republic of China, the work was taken up anew, the standard was renamed Pŭtōnghuà-'common speech.' Its pronunciation is based on the dialect of Beijing, the Mandarin dialects have been the source of lexicon, and grammar has been founded on "model works in báihuà." But how exactly did the work on creating the new standard look like? This paper intends to show the process of codification of the pronunciation of what we now know as Pŭtōnghuà. How it was decided to choose the speech of Beijing as the starting point, how the work was carried out, and also how the standard is changing.