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).
What you say is very practical but ignores a fundamental psychological trait of human behavior that is otherwise shaping the geopolitical landscape for centuries all around the world.
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)
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.
I live in Québec, Canada and I can't agree enough.
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.
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.
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.
There's even more countries that used to be part of a bigger nation or empire, but which split up largely by native language borders as their power waned. One way to view this sort of forced homogenization is as an insurance policy to that future eventuality.
There's the additional complication of the word "Mandarin" being derived from "Mǎndàrén" (满大人, i.e. Manchu lord) because it was the language used by the Manchu officials of the Qing dynasty to communicate with their Chinese subjects. But the Manchu used their own non-Sinitic language internally, and translating 官话 as "Mandarin" when it refers to the court language of prior dynasties is a weird reversal of time.
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”).
Thanks for the correction. The Wiktionary article doesn't cite any sources, but the etymology sections are usually reliable, so I guess I'll trust it over my Chinese teacher.
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.
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.
It also doesn't help that no regional language in China has government backing. Compare the Catalans, who are very passionate about teaching a standard version of their language, to the government of Hong Kong, which is lukewarm about Cantonese at best.
>Compare the Catalans, who are very passionate about teaching a standard version of their language
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.
The point was that arguing the language "cannot be written" is sort of prima facie incorrect given that there are existing written forms already defined. So if you need one that is easier to use than what is already there, it's no harder, right?
Well, Chinese characters can be used to represent foreign sounds.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Cantonese is still dominant in Hong Kong, but Mandarin has long since taken over in Singapore in all official contexts and, increasingly, in the private sphere as well. Unlike comparatively homogenous HK, Singaporeans speak a whole slew of dialects (Hokkien/Minnan, Teochew, Hakka, Cantonese, etc) and Mandarin also serves as a unifying factor.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
(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.
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.
This looks to be a standard Indian/Hindu nationalist historian revision practice.
As conventional historians and anthropologists agree, Indo-Europeans originate as a nomadic pastoralist population from somewhere on the steppes around Ukraine and Kazakhstan. The major European branches of Celtic, Germanic, Italic, Balto-Slavic, Hellenic, and Anatolian (e.g. Hittite) spread into Europe, virtually extinguishing all the other existing languages (Basque is the only one to survive to the modern day). It's thought that this spread didn't involve any sort of violence of conquest.
The Indo-Iranian (and Indo-Aryan subbranch underneath it) is generally understood to originate from Indo-European migrations across the steppes, which would eventually come to dominate the settled regions of modern Iran through modern India as the language of the rulers and, much more slowly, eventually the language of the commoners as well. The similarities between Vedic texts and Zoroastrianism also allows us to trace the development of Zoroastrianism and Hinduism from a common set of Indo-Iranian religious beliefs.
The revisionism comes from those who do not want to believe that Hinduism arose from non-native Indian traditions. For these people, Indo-Aryans are indigenous Indian people, perhaps a continuation of the Harappan civilization. And so Indo-Aryan is Sanskrit is Vedic is Hindu is Indian, and the discovery of a culture in Syria that may have a ruling Indo-Aryan population (I should note that recent scholarship tends to believe that it did not) is therefore evidence of a commonality of culture as distant as Syria that originated in India.
If you're going to object to the standard PIE hypothesis, you need a much, much stronger argument than "my folk etymology of one word supports my hypothesis better."
I have a decent knowledge of the history of the steppe regions, and their interactions with settled, urban populations; of the development of early civilizations within the Near East; and of the comparisons between Zoroastrianism and the Vedic pre-Hindu religion. All of that evidence very strongly supports the classic Proto-Indo-European hypothesis and very strongly counsels against Indigenous Aryan hypotheses, so you are going to need provide very compelling evidence if you want to convince anybody.
Until running into folks like these I never understood why Ahmed Hasan Dani couldn't get a job after getting a gold medal in Sanskrit at Benares Hindu University. Now I see it wasn't just because he was the wrong kind of Kashmiri - apparently it's only worth teaching people Sanskrit if they follow the party line.
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