How to Forget Your Mother Tongue and Remember Your National Language (2005)
pinyin.info
pinyin.info
Mandarin has been promoted since imperial Chinese times because the emperors, their administration and all officials wanted to understand each other without translators, hence Mandarin or 官话 (language of the officials or "Mandarins") was used when you wanted to communicate properly to officials more senior or junior to you and it thus became prestigious by association.
The reason why it is promoted so heavily to now and sometimes in a degrading manner towards local languages is so that Chinese people can actually communicate with each other even if they're not from the same region.
If you can only speak a local language and not something like Mandarin or occasionally Cantonese, you're looked down because it is like a US person who can't speak English and only some incomprehensible "redneck" language (pardon my rudeness, just an example).
Both are horrific and monstrous. The argument "Yeah but it's happening in the west" doesn't really work with thinking people.
There are plenty of small countries in the world, that differ from neighbours only on relatively minor cultural details and whose main identity trait lies in having its own language.
Acknowledging the existence of the desire of self-determination and sovereignty and the link between language and ethnic identity can explain a lot, both about the desire to persevere in talking less "useful" languages and also about the efforts to repress their usage by large states (which acquired territories that are not historically culturally homogeneous)
First we were a French colony called "Nouvelle-France", then a British colony known as "Province of Lower Canada". Now, it's a province of Canada. It has been recognized by the federal government that the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada (2006).
The majority of the people here kept their language (French), the code of law (French civil laws) and the religion (Roman Catholic).
Almost everyone speaks and writes English fluidly. The population is mostly bilingual.
You do not need to suppress the local language and history of a region in order to live peacefully its population.
Should we?
From Portuguese mandarim, mandarij, from Malay menteri, manteri, and its source, Sanskrit मन्त्रिन् (mantrin, “minister, councillor”), from मन्त्र (mantra, “counsel, maxim, mantra”) + -इन् (-in, an agent suffix).
Chinese folk etymology sometimes falsely claims that the word originates from 滿大人 (Mǎndàrén, literally “Manchu important man”).
This article was written last decade, before the age of the ubiquitous smartphone in which the Latin alphabet is used to suggest Chinese characters [1]. Perhaps then a new application of Taiwanese 'church romanization' emerges, with character suggestions specific to that romanization - though not if the prevailing low prestige of fangyan languages remains.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEEPyE-nR58 [1] http://pinpinchinese.com/blog/how-to-type-chinese-with-pinyi...
The only reason Mandarin is writable is because of a huge vernacular 白话 drive after '49. Cantonese is also writable, but is only really used for things like TV scripts, it isn't generally taught.
Good luck trying to write Min (Taiwanese is a Min language), Shanghainese, or other language branches--you can write most of the vocabulary since it's almost always cognate to Mandarin or classical Chinese characters, but particles, pronouns, and other grammatical parts often have no standard character.
Are you speaking of the PRC and ROC only? Or has this spread to HK and SG? I remember a big mandarin movement in SG in the 80s but have hardly been back since then, and when I was was mostly around Cantonese speakers.
> It can be observed that the percentage of the population which speaks English and Mandarin has increased, while the percentage of those who speak other Chinese varieties has collapsed and is now limited mainly to the elderly. More recently, English is starting to displace Mandarin among the new generation of Singapore Chinese due to long term effects of the dominant usage of English in most official settings over Mandarin, the dominant usage of English as the medium of instruction in Singapore schools, colleges and universities, and the limited and lower standards of local mother education system over the years in Singapore.
Warm is an odd way to describe them, so I'm gonna try to give a more thorough explanation. Catalan in Catalonia (and Valencia and the Balearic Islands, I am a Valencian myself who grew up speaking and up to this day speaks Catalan regularly) has always been the "standard" language of the land, and Spanish was never the majority language of the region until 50 years ago (and it became the majority language because of immigration from other parts of Spain during the Nationalist Dictatorship of Franco, who until the late 60s/early 70s actively persecuted and discouraged the Catalan Language[Btw that immigration from other parts of Spain happened because Catalonia was an economic powerhouse compared to other parts of Spain, and this also one of the reasons why they are "autonomous" and the Catalan Language is official and whatnot, since you simply have more purchasing power politically speaking if you're richer than everyone in the country at the time).
Heck, the Spanish State tried to completely eliminate it actively for 300 years ever since 1714 until 1978 and yet they couldn't, contrary to what happened in France. Now the language is completely official in the region alongside with Spanish and education there, even sometimes in unis, is taught completely in Catalan (except in some cases), and this has been an "issue", mostly to people from outside of Catalonia who think that Catalans don't learn how to speak Spanish ranging from "completely" to "properly" (A lie btw, I until college went to a 100% Catalan Speaking School and I can assure you that I can speak Spanish more than fine). But it's impossible at the same time to not learn Spanish in Catalonia.
Why? Because all the media is in Spanish. Catalan Speaking media is simply weak and dead. And this is the "bigger" problem of the language. Catalan, while it may be in a rather good position in Catalonia, will never truly be a language of culture for people anymore. This saddens me, it really does, because I love my native language, however, I realize that this would happen to the language regardless if Spanish existed or not because just look at for example Sweden -they speak a small language close to English and thus most young people enjoy their culture in English, even going as far as to sometimes Englishize Swedish (and this has been an issue in Catalan too with Spanish, for example with the famous barbarismes [when you choose a Spanish word over a native Catalan one, for example: salida vs eixida (exit)]).
Overall, I genuinely believe that Catalan is gonna almost die in the next 100 years. Although at the same time I'd even wager to that on a 100 year timeframe I'd even wager to say that Spanish and any other language spoken in a free country is in danger to English.
Would you call asking English speakers to write exclusively using Chinese characters to be an adequate form of writing? It would hardly be useful except to specialists.
Romanization is taught to all students in China and HK during primary school but they move on to using characters within 1 year. I have never seen a fully romanized text in Chinese outside of educational materials.
I've only been to HK twice, but from this article [1] it sounds like the Cantonese script is used for more than just TV scripts.
> An impressive amount of traffic on the internet in these areas is being carried out in English, and parents are eager to have their children start learning English at younger and younger ages.
This was also true in the 1920's. Lin Yu Tang is probably the best known example: a Chinese author, living in China, who wrote his essays and novels in English. He was also heavily involved in the Romanization projects of the day. Like modern attempts, it foundered because of the forces that wanted one Chinese language in spite of reality (I had a good citation for this that I cannot find right now, I apologize). You either a) accept that there are lots of languages that have a place at the table in such an endeavor, b) bar everyone from the table except for a specific language and impose that everywhere, or c) give up and continue the ruse hidden behind the ideograms.
What's really weird is that the Japanese continue to use the kanji, hiragana, and katakana when they do have one language, most of their population knows the Roman alphabet, and the language fits better in the Roman alphabet than in the native syllabaries.
But then, who am I to talk? English's spelling hasn't made sense for centuries.
In parallel to the colonization of Taiwan by the RoC, in her case the language of government was English, but hardly anyone could speak or read it. She spoke none of the above at home, though could read and writer her mother tongue.
But by her 70s only English was left.
Sigh.
Your argument is incoherent so it's not clear if you're arguing for a common language other than English or no common language at all.
If it's the first one, that's a road that will lead to certain disaster. Requiring knowledge of a specific Indian language will automatically grant native speakers of that language advantage over other Indians. If tomorrow Gujarati or Bengali was chosen as the "national" language and every book was published in Gujarati, every movie and show was dubbed in it, every textbook was rewritten in it, every government form was written in it, wouldn't Gujaratis have an advantage over everyone else? Wouldn't everyone else implicitly become second class citizens?
That's not even hypothetical. This experiment of forcing a "national" language on population that never spoke it or understood has been tried before. It was a spectacular failure. Bangla speakers in East Pakistan didn't want to speak Urdu and didn't want to be treated as second class citizens because they couldn't. So they seceded. East Pakistan doesn't exist anymore.
No doubt you're thinking "no, not Gujarati/Bengali. Let's choose Hindi as the national language". Now understand this -> Hindi is a foreign language to me, though I am Indian. I studied it for 10 years so I'm reasonably fluent in it, but it is still a foreign language, as foreign as English. For that reason, states such as Tamil Nadu and Kerala will not accept the imposition of Hindi. This battle started in the 60s and continues today.
Of course, you might be arguing for no common language at all. Let's root out English and in it's place let's have ... nothing. I'm not sure what that would buy us, but sure.
English is a foreign language, but it is the only language is foreign to all Indians. That is why it is fair for it to remain an official language of the Indian Union.
FYI, you and I wouldn't be having this conversation if we didn't have English as common language.