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!”