THE EXPERIENCE OF CHINA IN DEVELOPING NATIONAL A LANGUAGE

By Prof. Shirley Sy
UP Asian Center

 
(1) Standard Mandarin refers to the official Chinese spoken language used by the People's Republic of China, Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore.
 (2) In mainland China it is officially known as Putonghua which literally means "ordinary speech", in Taiwan as Guoyu  which means national language, and in Malaysia and Singapore as Huayu meaning "the Chinese language". All three terms are used interchangeably in Chinese communities around the world where different groups have come into contact. Obviously, there are some slight deviations between the Mandarin variants spoken in Beijing, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong. These include deviations in grammar, vocabulary, stylistic aspects, and loan words. For example, there is a 23% discrepancy in standard pronunciation between the 3,500 most commonly used characters in the 'Xinhua dictionary' of the mainland and the ‘Guoyu dictionary' of Taiwan, but they do not create much confusion.

 (3) The English term Mandarin came from the Portuguese word mandarim  is a translation of the Chinese term Guānhuà (官話), which literally means the language of the mandarins (imperial magistrates). The term Guānhuà is often considered archaic by Chinese speakers of today, though it is used sometimes by linguists as a collective term to refer to all varieties and dialects of Mandarin, not just standard Mandarin. Another term commonly used to refer to all varieties of Mandarin is Běifānghuà or the dialect(s) of the North, which is a large and very diverse group of Chinese dialects spoken across northern and southwestern China inhabited by the prevalent ethnic group, the Hans.

(4)Among the 56 ethnic groups, the Han comprises 91.6% of the total population. Having been dominant in China since the founding of the Chinese Empire, the Mandarin class was completely made up of Han, as was the massive bureaucracy power base in the Chinese Empire, even during the periods when the Hans were not in direct control. The Han civilization originated in the Yellow River Valley and continued to spread through Southern China then into Northern China. The prevalence of Mandarin throughout northern China was largely the result of geography, namely the plains of north China, and their presence in other southeastern cities was mainly due to famine and wars. By contrast, the mountains and rivers of southern China have promoted linguistic diversity which brought about many regional and often mutually unintelligible variants. This group of people used various Mandarin dialects which I like to refer to as “Hanyu” as their home language to distinguish the majority from the various minorities in and around China. In the West, many people are familiar with the fact that the Romance languages all derive from Latin and so have many underlying features in common while being mutually unintelligible. The linguistic evolution of Chinese is similar, while the socio-political context is quite different.

(5) There are seven major Chinese dialects and many subdialects. Mandarin (or Putonghua), which is based on the Beijing Dialect is the predominant dialect and is spoken by over 60% of the population. It is taught in all schools and is the medium of government. Only about two-thirds of the Han ethnic group is native speakers of Mandarin; the rest, concentrated in southwest and southeast China, speak one of the six other major Chinese dialects such as Yue (Cantonese), Wu (Shanghaiese), Min (Hokkien-Taiwanese), Xiang, (Hunanese), Gan, and Hakka dialects. Non-Chinese languages spoken widely by ethnic minorities include Mongolian, Tibetan, Uygur and other Turkic languages (in Xinjiang), and Korean (in the Northeast).

(6) Chinese, together with many tribal languages of South and Southeast Asia, belongs to the family of Sino-Tibetan languages. Besides a core vocabulary and sounds, Chinese and most related languages share features that distinguish them from most Western languages:  there are no alphabets, each word is represented by a character, which may be composed of just one stroke or as many as several dozen, and because there are no alphabets, each character can be read in hundred different ways; they are morphologically monosyllabic, have little inflection, and are tonal. In order to indicate differences in meaning between words similar in sound, tone languages assign to words a distinctive relative pitch - high or low, or a distinctive pitch contour-level, rising, or falling.

 (7) Since ancient history, the Chinese language has always consisted of a wide variety of dialects; hence prestige dialects and lingua francas have always been needed. Confucius, for example, used yǎyán (雅言), or "elegant speech", rather than colloquial regional dialects; text during the Han Dynasty also referred to tōngyǔ (通語), or "common language". Rime books, which were written since the Southern and Northern Dynasties, may also have reflected one or more systems of standard pronunciation during those times. However, all of these standard dialects were probably unknown outside the educated elite; even among the elite, pronunciations may have been very different, as the unifying factor of all Chinese dialects, Classical Chinese, was a written standard, not a spoken one.

 (8). Since the 17th century, the Qing Empire had set up "correct pronunciation institutes" (zhengyin shuyuan) in an attempt to make pronunciation conform to the Beijing standard (Beijing being the capital of Qing), but these attempts had little success, until the last 50 years of the Qing Dynasty, in the late 19th century, when Beijing Mandarin was established as the language of the imperial court. For the general population, although variations of Mandarin were already widely spoken in China then, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their regional dialects for every aspect of life. The new Beijing Mandarin court standard was thus fairly limited.

 (9) The concept of a national language coalesced around 1910. In 1913, after the establishment of the Chinese republic, the Ministry of Education convened a Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation to establish a standard national tongue that would transcend locality and dialect. Due to the domination of the numerically superior Mandarin-speaking delegates, the Peking dialect was voted for the general foundation of the new national language 'guoyu' (national speech). It embodies the phonology or pronunciation of Beijing minus some pronounced regionalisms of Peking, the grammar of the Mandarin dialects, and the vocabulary of ‘paihua’ or modern vernacular Chinese literature, but features of various local dialects were also incorporated. Moreover, the vocabulary of all Chinese dialects, especially in more technical fields like science, law, and government, has been standardized. In 1956 some years after the establishment of the PROC, Modern Standard Chinese was introduced as part of a broad-sweeping reform to promote literacy and Guoyu was renamed to putonghua (common language) so as not to hurt the sensibility of the other ethnic groups. It became the medium of instruction in all schools nationwide and a policy of promoting its use began.

(10) Realizing that the traditional Chinese writing system hampers China's mass education, some scholars demanded total abolition of the Chinese script and to adopt Esperanto instead, while many Chinese intellectuals launched Chinese romanization movements which aimed to devise a new system of writing based on the Roman alphabet. The principle was to rely on the Roman alphabet as the basis of the new orthography, but with the addition of symbols borrowed from the Cyrillic alphabet or specially created to represent unusual Chinese sounds. One even introduced a whole new syllabic system called Guoyin Zimu "National Pronunciation Letters" later changed to Zhuyin Fuhao "Sound-annotating Symbols". The Zhuyin system better known as (Bopomofo) is still used in Taiwan up to now.  All these measures were intended to adopt one pronunciation as the standard for the whole country, as opposed to writing the dialects separately, in order to promote a ‘unified national language.’ Numerous designs were proposed until 1928, when the Education Ministry of the nationalist government announced the establishment of the standard for Chinese Romanization.

(11) Chinese Romanization refers to the phonetic representation of Chinese language material in the Roman alphabet. Sporadic Romanization of Chinese words started way before the Renaissance, when westerners like Marco Polo came into contact with the Chinese culture and brought back Chinese goods like silk, tea, porcelain, etc. as well as stories about China's people, places and natural wonders.

(12) Phonetic transcription system to record the pronunciation of Chinese characters started in the early 17th century by Jesuit priests like Matteo Ricci (1552-1610, Italian), Nicolas Trigault (1577-1628, French) and others as they came to China to learn the Chinese language and to promote Christianity. Their efforts were later joined by other westerners like Thomas F. Wade and H. A. Giles. This is how the famous Wade-Giles system came about.

 (13) There have been moves to reform the language from as early as the 2nd century BC, but there has been nothing to equal the complexity of the present-day program. The 20th-century movement for language reform in China has resulted in the most ambitious program of language planning the world has ever seen. The program has three aims: (i) to simplify the characters of classical written Chinese, by cutting down on their number, and reducing the number of strokes it takes to write a character in order to carve illiteracy. (ii) to provide a single means of spoken communication throughout the whole of China, by popularizing the Beijing-based variety, which has been chosen as a standard; (iii) to introduce a phonetic alphabet, which would gradually replace the Chinese characters in everyday use, this however, never gained quite as much popularity as the leftist had hoped.

 (14) After several previous attempts to write Chinese using the letters of the Roman alphabet, Pin yin ('phonetic spelling') was finally adopted in 1958. This system main aims are to facilitate the spread of Putonghua and the learning of Chinese characters. Pin-yin is now in widespread use. In the 1970s, for example, a new map of China was published using pinyin, and a list of standard spellings for Chinese placename was compiled. New codes were devised for such diverse uses as telegraphy, flag signals, Braille, and deaf finger-spelling.

(15) Most Chinese who sought to achieve national unity through uniformity in the script considered that it was only the ideographs which should be used to bind together all the millions of people in China. In the opinion of Ch`en Kuo-fu, one of the principal leaders of the Kuomintang who thought that "China's ability to achieve unity is entirely dependent on having a unified written language," it was wrong for Chinese to use a Western script even for signing their names.

(16) But all these disparate views on linguistic unification expressed differences more of means than of ends. The disagreement as to means went no further than debate on the relative merits of the National Phonetic Alphabet, the National Language Romanization, the interdialectical romanization, the ideographic script, and the innumerable minor variations on these forms of writing. The more important agreement as to ends revealed itself in the emphasis on the necessity for achieving linguistic unity. The latter was part of the wider tendency among the dominant political and intellectual circles of China -- originating in the period of the empire and growing in strength after the establishment of the republic -- in the direction of a kind of integral nationalism. Their goal might be summarized by the formula one state, one people, one language.

(17) From the earliest pictographic symbols carved on turtle bones to the current simplified scripts, Chinese characters have been in existence for over 4000 years. As one of the world's oldest writings still in use, Chinese characters represent pronunciation, form and meaning all in one, demonstrating richness and profundity of Chinese culture. But can this oneness survive the challenges of modern technology?

(18) The world's foremost linguists and sinologists, including Bernard Karlgren of Sweden and Zhao Yuanren of China, predicted that Chinese characters couldn’t be alphabetized without losing meaning and creating cultural discontinuity. In other words, it is not possible to render Chinese characters into a purely phonetic alphabet. It's too much like attempting to build a Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco to Shanghai over the Pacific Ocean. Then, can we really bridge over this language barrier? Yes, but a different strategy is needed: Transform the square Chinese characters into a linear computer-compatible script like English.

(19) In 1873, American inventor Sholes received a patent for the Remington typewriter. This American invention left China behind with her pen & brush. In the last 100 years, countless inventors attempted to adapt the Chinese ideographic script into a similar typewriter. None have really succeeded. In the computer world, Chinese script has found its place in the age of computers. There are many methods that allow Chinese script to be typed on the computer, either by shape, pronunciation or both. New technology, such as handwriting and voice input, facilitate and speed up the input of Chinese characters. This four thousand year old script has indeed found a bubbling new life in modern technology, unlike some of its descendents who once upon a time almost threw it away to be totally forgotten, Chinese script has vowed to stay on solid ground and make itself more accessible to anybody willing to let it in into their lives.

(20) The popularization of the users’ friendly pinyin coupled with modern teaching techniques and with the aid of technology, has made Chinese language learning more interesting, less intimidating and is now gaining unprecedented popularity, much to the delight of this sleeping lion as it wakes from its long slumber, roaring perhaps not for ferocity display, but to resonate with the rest of the world the cry for peace, friendship and progress as evidently shown in its Olympic slogan for 2008 which is “one world, one dream!”

The Experience of Russia in Developing a National Language

By V.F.Malyshev
Minister-Counsellor, Embassy of Russia

 
Introduction

Some expert say, there are up to 10.000 different languages left in the world; others put the estimate at thousands lower, depending on how many are characterized as dialects of another language. Every two weeks or so the last elderly man or woman with full command of a particular language dies. At that rate, as many as 2.500 native tongues will disappear forever by 2100.

This is the present day situation in the world. A language is a living creature, and as any living creature it lives and dies. Languages live with a society, serve the society, change and develop with the society and die with or within the society. Languages live as long as they are used by the society and individuals of that society, and die with the society or when they are rejected.

Some, very few, languages have become world-wide accepted as international tools of communication – the languages of international society. Mostly because of historical reasons, due to the expansion of the societies-nations-states that brought their mother tongues to other less developed and more dependent societies-nations-states. In some cases these languages were imposed on them for the benefit of colonial administration, in some cases these languages were gratefully accepted by recipient societies as sort of “humanitarian aid” that spurred their own cultural development. Today we have six languages formally reconfirmed as world languages – the official languages of the United Nations. Russian language is among the six, and as a Russian I am proud of it.

The present day situation with the Russian language

To have a full-size picture of the situation with the Russian language nowadays we must take into consideration three levels or three scales of its presence on the world: inside the boundaries of the Russian Federation, on the territories of the newly independent states, which formerly were the national republics of the Soviet Union (USSR), and in other countries of the world.

Starting with the largest circle and going into the center we will have the following. Sizeable Russian-speaking communities exist in North America (especially in large urban centers of the US and Canada such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto, Miami, and Chicago). In the first two of them, Russian-speaking groups total over half a million. In a number of locations they issue their own newspapers, live in their self-sufficient neighborhoods (especially the generation of immigrants who started arriving in the early sixties). It is important to note, however, that only about a quarter of them are ethnic Russians. Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union the overwhelming majority were Russian-speaking Jews. Afterwards the influx from the countries of the former Soviet Union changed the statistics somewhat. According to the United States 2000 Census, Russian was reported as language spoken at home by 1.50% of population, or about 4.2 mln, placing it as #10 language in the United States.

Russian is also spoken in Israel by at least 750,000 ethnic Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union (1999 census). The Israeli press and websites regularly publish material in Russian. For have a century by now generations of young Africans used the grants provided by the government of the Soviet Union, and now Russia, to get higher education in Russian universities and master Russian language.

Significant Russian-speaking groups also exist in Western Europe. These have been fed by several waves of immigrants since the beginning of the twentieth century, each with its own flavour of language. Germany, Britain, Spain, France, Italy, Belgium, and Greece have significant Russian-speaking communities totaling 3 million people. Two thirds of them are actually Russian-speaking descendants of Germans, Greeks, Jews, Armenians, or Ukrainians who either repatriated after the USSR collapsed or are just looking for temporary employment. But many are well-off Russian families acquiring property and getting education.

Sizable Russian-speaking communities existed even in China, up to now Russian is well-known language in the North-East region of the country. In nineteeen-fifties Russian was widely taught in the chinese schools due to the “socialist bonds” between the two countries. In Mongolia mastership of Russian language was a gate to brighter future and till now every educated citizen of this country speaks perfect Russian. The same was characteristic for the countries of East Europe - the members of the old Warsaw Pact and in other countries that used to be satellites of the USSR, especially in Poland, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. However, younger generations are usually not fluent in it, because Russian is no longer mandatory in the school system.

As to the countries that used to be part of the USSR and before that – of the  csarist Russia. Until 1917, Russian was the sole official language of the Russian Empire. During the Soviet period, the policy toward the languages of the various other ethnic groups fluctuated in practice. Though each of the constituent republics had its own official language, the unifying role and superior status was reserved for Russian. Following the break-up of 1991, several of the newly independent states have encouraged their native languages, which has partly reversed the privileged status of Russian, though its role as the language of post-Soviet national intercourse throughout the region has continued. In Latvia, notably, its official recognition and legality in the classroom have been a topic of considerable debate in a country where more than third of the population is Russian-speaking, consisting mostly of post-World War II immigrants from Russia and other parts of the former USSR (Belarus, Ukraine). Similarly, in Estonia, the Soviet-era immigrants and their Russian-speaking descendants constitute about one quarter of the country's current population. A much smaller Russian-speaking minority in Lithuania has largely been assimilated during the decade of independence and currently represent less than 1/10 of the country's overall population. Russian is the official language of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, the Autonomous Republic of Crimea (Ukraine) and Transdniestria region of  Moldova. Education in Russian is still a popular choice for many of the both native and RSL (Russian as a second language) speakers in many of the former Soviet republics. 75% of the public school students in Belarus, 41% in Kazakhstan, 24% in Ukraine, 23% in Kyrgyzstan, 21% in Moldova, 7% in Azerbaijan, 5% in Georgia received their education only or mostly in Russian, although the corresponding percentage of ethnic Russians was 10% in Belarus, 27% in Kazakhstan, 17% in Ukraine, 9% in Kyrgyzstan, 10% in Moldova, 1% in Azerbaijan, 1% in Georgia.

Recent estimates of the total number of speakers of Russian:

Source	Native speakers	Native Rank	Total speakers	Total rank
G. Weber, "Top Languages", Language Monthly, 3: 12-18, 1997, ISSN 1369-9733	160,000,000	7	285,000,000	4
SIL Ethnologue	167,000,000	7	277,000,000	5

 And now we shall focus on to Russia itself. 

Russian language as state language and other national languages in the Federal Republic of Russia

The Russian Federation is home to as many as 160 different ethnic groups and indigenous peoples. As of the 2002 census, 79.8% of the population is ethnically Russian, 3.8% Tatar, 2% Ukrainian, 1.2% Bashkir, 1.1% Chuvash, 0.9% Chechen, 0.8% Armenian, and the remaining 10.3% includes those who did not specify their ethnicity as well as (in alphabetical order) Avars, Azerbaijanis, Belarusians, Chinese, Evenks, Georgians, Germans, Ingushes, Inuit, Kalmyks, Karelians, Kazakhs, Koreans, Maris, Mordvins, Nenetses, Ossetians, Poles, Tuvans, Udmurts, Yakuts, and others. There are 21 republics within the federation that enjoy a high degree of autonomy on most issues and these correspond to some of Russia's ethnic minorities.

104 languages are currently spoken on the territory of the Russian Federation. Russian language is the only official state language, but the individual republics have often made their native language co-official next to Russian (see the appendix). The origins of Russian language go back to the 6th century. Growing with the history of the society, the nation and the state it developed through the Kievan period (9th-11th centuries), Feudal breakup (12th-14th centuries),  the Moscovite period (15th-17th centuries), Empire (18th-19th centuries), Soviet period and beyond (20th-21st centuries). In the mid 1800’s Standard Russian based on the Moscow dialect became the official language. But it should be pointed out that the difference between the language of Kievan Rus' and Modern Russian is not so great as to make impossible comprehension of the 11th-century texts by an educated Russian. This difference is much smaller than, say, the enormous gap between Old English and Modern English. This backbone feature of Russian language contributed greatly to the survival of the language through ages and the acquisition of the position of the dominant language on the vast territory of Russia, the common official language throughout the Russian Federation understood by 99% of its current inhabitants. With the expansion of the Russian state the language served the governors as a powerful tool to administer and unite the numerous ethnic groups  and provide access to literary and scientific materials not available in minority languages.

That is why it is not a question of domestic policy to support and promote Russian as a national language on the territory of the Russian Federation – on the contrary, past several decades it was the policy of the Soviet and then the Russian state to protect and support languages of national minorities and ethnic groups (but it has become an issue for the foreign policy of Russian to protect the rights of ethnic Russians and those who consider Russian as their mother tongue against the suppressive and discriminate actions of authorities in some former Soviet republics). The Russian legal system, first of all the Constitution, declares and provides that every citizen has the right to determine and state his national identity, use his native language and his language of communication, education, training and creative work. Each of the 21 republics has the right to institute its own State Language (see appendix). At present 14 out of 21 national republics have issued Decrees on Language. The Republics of Kalmykia, of Tatarstan, of Chuvashia, Sakha and several republics in the Northern Caucasus have produced their proper programs pertaining to the preservation and development of their national language. The linguistic policy of the central government of the Russian Federation is based on three fundamental principles: the preservation of Russian as the common language of the Federation; the support and development of minority languages; the three-tier system of language treatment – those of the nations of Russia, the national minorities of Russia and the indigenous communities of Russia. The educational system is built up accordingly to this policy. Languages of minorities are taught at primary and secondary schools in all the autonomous republic irrespective of the status of the language. The national languages are taught in the pertaining republics and other regions with dense population of that nationality. Financing the education from both federal and local budgets provides for further development of institutions of all educational levels in reference to the local language particularities. Russian language remains the language of state administration, of judicial procedures (every citizen has the right to be provided with proper translation into his mother language) and of the armed forces, of the scientific communities.

Conclusion
A small subplot in Arthur C. Clarke's novelization of 2010 concerned the crew of a Russo-American spaceship, who attempted to break down boredom with a “Stamp Out Russlish!!” campaign. As the story went, both crews were fully fluent in each other's languages, to the point that they found themselves crossing over languages in mid-conversation, or even simply speaking the other language even when there was no-one who had it as their native tongue present. This is a very smart picture of the interaction of languages and people. It depicts the major trend of linguistic development of the human race  - free from national, political and material prejudices it naturally tends to be what it “au fond”, as the French say, is to be – a most comfortable and enriching tool of communication. In the future, when the status of a nationality will not have to be proved through the status of its language and the sense of a nationality will not have an acute political sense, when the globalisation processes will bring together people from all parts of the world, as Internet communication is doing right now, we will witness, perhaps, the emergence of a new world language, a fusion of present languages, accepted and used by all the people of the globe. But in the meantime the natural way of development is: one language unites people, unites a society, a nation, a state and does not exclude the right for existence and flourishing of other languages present.

SAWIKAAN 2005

Ginanap naman ang Sawikaan 2005 noong Agosto 4-5, 2005. Dalawang araw na idinaos ang Sawikaan sa taong ito. Ang unang araw ay tinampukan ng talakayan tungkol sa papel ng midya sa pagpapalaganap ng modernong Filipino at tungkol sa karanasan ng ilang piling bansa sa pagpapaunlad ng kanilang wika. Ang mga tagapagsalita sa unang paksa ay ang beteranong komentarista sa radyo na si Dely Magpayo ng DZRH, ang news director na si Jim Libiran ng ABC 5, at  ang editor na si Ariel Dim. Borlongan ng Balita. Tinalakay naman ni Vladimir F. Malyshev ng Embahada ng Russian Federation ang karanasang Ruso sa wika (The Experience of Russia in Developing a National Language) at ni Prop. Shirley Sy ng UP Asian Center ang karanasan sa Tsina (The Experience of China in Developing a National Language).

Ginanap naman ang pamimili ng salita ng taon sa ikalawang araw. Labindalawa (12) ang nominadong salita sa 2005: blog  ni Vladimeir Gonzales; huwéteng ni Roberto Añonuevo; e-vat ni Leuterio Nicolas; gandára ni Winton Lou Ynion; caregiver ni James Kenneth Sindayen;  call center ni Silvestre Jay Pascual III;  pasawáy ni Patrick Flores; networking ni Jelson Estrella Capilos; wiretapping ni Yolado Jamendang Jr.; coño ni Sharlene Valencia;  tibák/t-back nina April Imson at Salvador Biglaen, Jr.; at  tsunami  ni Michael Francis Andrada.

Bahagyang binago ang proseso ng pagpili sa taong ito. Sa halip na tatlo, lima ang piniling finalist. Ang limang ito ay ang e-vat, gandára, huwéteng, pasawáy, at tibák/t-back. Sa pagtatapos, hinirang na Salita ng Taon ang huwéteng na sinundan ng pasawáy at ng tibák/t-back. Nagkaloob din ng espesyal na premyo para sa pinakamahusay na paraan ng presentasyon na nakamit ng nagtaguyod ng salitang e-vat.

Nagkamit ng gantimpalang P7,500 ang Salita ng Taon;  P5,000 ang ikalawa; at P3,000 ang ikatlo. Ang pinakamahusay na presentasyon ay may gantimpalang P1,500 at ang iba pang hindi nagwagi ay tumanggap din ng P1,500. Kaloob ng Blas F. Ople Foundation ang mga salaping gantimpala.

Sa huling bahagi ng programa, inilunsad ang aklat na Sawikaan 2004, Mga Salita ng Taon na tumatalakay sa mga salitang iniharap ng taong iyon. Limbag ito ng University of the Philippines Press.