The Penguin China Specials have provided insight into everything from Beethoven to World War One from the China experts’ China experts. Known for a lucid, intelligent look at modern China unhampered by ideology or cant, David Moser doesn’t disappoint with his entry in these series of short books – essentially pamphlets.
In A Billion Voices, Moser’s topic is the rise of Mandarin as lingua franca for this huge country and its hundreds of dialects and languages. Originally pushed by the May Fourth crew as part of the modernization of China, the project had its difficulties, with a split between northerners who wanted the new language based on the Beijing dialect and a southern contingent who wanted a hybrid southern-northern form – the former being the most practical solution and of course eventually winning out.
Amusingly, the committee in charge descended into fisticuffs at one stage due to dialect differences, leading one member to mistakenly believe he had been personally insulted.
The result, including a pronunciation guide for the basic 6,500 characters, was really just a statement of intent, since it all got put on hold while China was embroiled in war with Japan and internal conflict.
When the dust settled and the People’s Republic was founded in 1949, one of Mao’s first projects was to use a common language as part of building a united people. Moser sees this as vital: “The future stability and cohesion of the republic would depend on the answers.”
The project was daunting, as Moser points out: “Is there such a thing as ‘the Chinese language’? Should the Chinese people share a common tongue? How should it be defined? How should pronunciation, vocabulary and correct usage be determined? Should Chinese continue to use the centuries-old character system, or should it be replaced by an alphabet, or some other phonetic system?”
The result was “an artificially constructed hybrid form, a linguistic patchwork of compromises based upon expediency, history and politics.” And the project remains ongoing; according to the Chinese Ministry of Education, about a third of the country’s population remains unable to communicate in Putonghua – the “ambitious” target is for all Chinese people to be Mandarin-speakers by 2050.
And then there’s the writing; endless replacement alphabets were suggested, but in the end the characters survived, perhaps in part thanks to a chat between Mao and Stalin.
However, 515 characters and 54 character components were simplified in 1956, cutting the number of strokes needed in writing by about an eighth; a second round of simplification was proposed in 1977, but the push back was too strong this time, from people who saw this as a form of cultural desecration.
The Mandarin project has in most aspects been impressively successful, and ironically one sign of this is regional variation. “Even when Putonghua becomes the dominant language in a region, it is seldom heard in its pure form; the evolving norm is Putonghua spoken with local accents and features.”
David Moser: A Billion Voices - China’s Search for a Common Language (Penguin) is available on Amazon.
For more book reviews, click here.
0 User Comments