LANGUAGE & LITERATURE
LANGUAGE & LITERATURE
“The government estimates roughly 1/3 of the population (400 million people) can’t speak the national language.”
LORCAN GEBRUERS
After years of searching, China had finally found its national language. 普通话 (p ǔ tōnghuà, literally “common spoken language”) was solidified as the constitutionally mandated national language in 1982. Defined as “the standard form of Modern Chinese with the Beijing phonological system as its norms of pronunciation, and Northern dialects as its base dialect, and looking to exemplary modern works in 白话 (báihuà) for its grammatical norms,” 普通话 is now taught in schools across China. This is, however, not without consequence. Standardisation of 普通话 and the resulting neglect of local dialects, causes the loss of culture which exists only in spoken form. While the costs of standardisation are already beginning to show, the arduous process is far from complete. The government estimates roughly 1/3 of the population (400 million people) can’t speak the national language. The nation, therefore, must still answer the question of how it will embrace its cultural diversity whilst continuing to promote a common language.
The emergence of the anti-imperialist ‘May Fourth Movement’ in 1919 saw calls for sweeping reforms encompassing all aspects, including language. Whereas most people strived for reformer Hu Shi’s dream of Chinese characters which could be “read aloud without the need to translate into the spoken language,” other individuals demanded the romanisation and subsequent eradication of Chinese characters. It was amidst this linguistic identity crisis that the ‘Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation’ was established. It set out to standardize and assign pronunciations to characters, giving rise to a new national language that seamlessly integrated written and spoken forms. Disagreements quickly ensued over which ‘dialect’ would be selected for standardization, resulting in a jumbled, ineffective hybrid of various ‘dialects’ which pleased no one. The commission recognized their mistake and 13 years later officially declared that the Beijing dialect was to become the national standard.
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