A Billion Voices: China's Search for a Common Language: Penguin Special China by Moser David

Author:Moser, David [Moser, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781743771754
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-05-23T04:00:00+00:00

The plea of the last statement has poignancy; to many people the imposition of a national language seemed to entail that a huge proportion of the Chinese people would actually have to be taught how to ‘speak Chinese’. Opponents of the measures were not convinced; the requirement to learn the language seemed a slippery slope to being forced to speak it in everyday life.

Language policy toward ethnic minorities, such as Tibetan, remained unchanged, with the local languages still being taught in the schools alongside Putonghua. Article 53 in the original 1954 constitution stated that ‘Every minority group (minzu ) has the freedom to use and develop its language and writing system(s) and to maintain or reform its religion.’ The issue was the concept minzu , a notoriously slippery word to define, but basically having the sense of both ‘nation/nationality’ and ‘ethnic group’. Was the new People’s Republic to be considered as one nationality, or as a collection of separate nationalities, including the Han?

The government decided to continue treating the speakers of non-Han languages, such as Tibetan, as belonging to separate, minority nationalities, and thus entitled to linguistic autonomy. With regards to local Han languages, however, the CPC’s original position of unity-in-diversity became a victim of Realpolitik; the profusion of local dialects was now viewed as a long-term threat to national unity. The Han speech forms were now considered as fangyan , ‘dialects’, and not separate languages. The classification was based on politics, not linguistics; after all, surely all the ‘Chinese people’ must be speakers of one ‘Chinese language’?

In linguistic circles, a criticism was launched on foreign use of the word ‘languages’ to refer to what Chinese referred to as ‘dialects’. At a conference in Beijing in 1955, Wang Li, one of the most important Chinese linguists of the era, denounced Leonard Bloomfield as ‘a reactionary American linguist’ for stating that the term ‘Chinese language’ refers to a linguistic group made up of a great many varieties of mutually unintelligible languages , which was tantamount to saying that China was not one nation.34

When the 1950s policy statements began to be promulgated, it became clear that the expectation was for Chinese dialects to be eventually replaced by Putonghua. Even before Putonghua was officially adopted as the national language, on 26 October, 1955, the People’s Daily published an editorial ‘Strive to promote the reform of the Chinese script, the spread of Putonghua and the standardisation of Chinese’. The editorial proclaimed:

We should vigorously advocate the importance of the spread of Putonghua, so that people know correctly the relationship between dialects and Putonghua. Putonghua serves the people of the whole country, and dialects serve the people of an area. To spread Putonghua does not mean to wipe out dialects artificially, but to reduce the scope of dialect use progressively. This is in line with the objective laws of social progress. [emphasis author’s ] Dialects are to exist side by side with Putonghua for quite a long period, but the use of Putonghua must be expanded constantly.

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