
How to Forget Your Mother Tongue and Remember Your National Language (2005) - gpvos
http://pinyin.info/readings/mair/taiwanese.html
======
forkLding
The article is well-researched, however it misses several details of why
people promote Mandarin so much.

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).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_Chinese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_Chinese)

~~~
gpvos
Those are logical reasons, but to do that you don't need to suppress writing
and education in the local language. There are enough countries where both the
local and the national language are taught at school.

~~~
rayiner
It's not as efficient as having a single national language. When my mom was
growing up in Bangladesh, English was taught in school alongside Bengali, and
was used in important official business ( _e.g._ legal opinions of courts were
all written in English until 1985). But English wasn't her main language, and
to this day, after living in the U.S. for 30 years, she still struggles to
communicate complex ideas in English. People will never speak the national
language as well as they could if they speak a different, regional language at
home. (Any given person might, but many people will not.) And that will impose
transaction costs on your society trying to deal with language barriers.

~~~
hkai
Yes, it's more efficient to convert everyone to a single culture and make sure
there's no diversity. It's a bit hard to do without violence, but doable.

Should we?

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petecox
The fangyan/topolect distinction reminds me of Italy. The Tuscan language of
the renaissance and Dante was deemed "Italian" following unification in the
mid 19th century. Yet the regional topolects of Italy derive not from a
unified standard Italian but dating back two millennia to the time of Caesar.
Here in Australia, children will learn standard Italian as a foreign language,
if only to communicate with their grandparents speaking a fossilized 1940-50s
"dialect" from the villages they fled post the war, with an implied stigma
that said octogenarians aren't speaking 'properly'. Here's an interesting clip
sampling regional Italian languages: [0]

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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEEPyE-nR58) [1]
[http://pinpinchinese.com/blog/how-to-type-chinese-with-
pinyi...](http://pinpinchinese.com/blog/how-to-type-chinese-with-pinyin-
android/)

------
smallnamespace
It's difficult to write any regional Chinese language because for about two
thousand years, the standard written form was Classical Chinese, which is
about as close to spoken forms as Latin is to modern Romance languages.

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.

~~~
gumby
> Cantonese is also writable, but is only really used for things like TV
> scripts, it isn't generally taught.

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.

~~~
barry-cotter
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Singapore](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Singapore)

> 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.

------
madhadron
For context, Victor Mair is one of the foremost Sinologists in the English
speaking world.

> 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.

~~~
sempron64
It's very difficult if not impossible to move Japanese to Romanized spelling
completely as most complex compound words are constructed out of Chinese
ideograms, and make sense only based on their spelling. The On-yomi (chinese
reading) for many characters is identical to that of entirely unrelated
characters, because Japanese has no tonality. Most of these words cease to
make sense if spelled phonetically in Latin characters -- their spelling is
their definition. As an aside, this phonetic ambiguity allows for very
entertaining untranslatable puns.

~~~
madhadron
And yet they manage when speaking, and we manage in English with lots of
homonyms as well. And French manages with so much verbal ambiguity that they
have dictation bees the way English speakers have spelling bees.

------
billfruit
Hasn't something like that happened with French and France, whereby a
multicultural nation was politically engineered into a monoculture.

~~~
rockinghigh
Yes, it did. Local dialects were banned in school and at home in favor of
“French” in the early 1900s. It was successful in that almost no one speaks
the local dialects anymore. Unlike in Spain, for example, where the same
dialects and languages survived (Basque, Catalán).

------
gumby
This explains an oddity from my mother who said she’d never seen a written
hokien but found written Cantonese unremarkable.

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.

------
throwawy32434
(Greater) China atleast has mandarin. If you're to get anywhere in India,
you're stuck with the old imperial tongue: English. Hindi, Tamil, Sanskrit and
many others have roads that lead to little other than penury. Some
independence this has been; it's not surprising that it took mindless brown-
sepoys to fulfil the mandate of the colonial government.

Sigh.

~~~
nindalf
This is wrong.

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.

