Thread by @JimMillward

I've been wondering to what extent the assimilating Mandarinization drive under Xi targets not just non-Chinese languages like Uyghur and Mongolian, but Sinic languages like Sichuanese and of course Cantonese. Here's news of a regulation requiring "putonghua" in 四川 work units:

I had the privilege of studying briefly with Rulan Chao Pian, daughter of Yuen Ren Chao 趙元任, the foundational Chinese linguist. Zhao Yuanren was involved in the creation of standard Chinese, and tells what an arbitrary process t was:

A "standard" pronunciation was decided, compromising southern, northern, traditional and modern phonetics, enshrined in the 1919 國音字典 National Pronunciation Dictionary.

"Since no teacher spoke in the national pronunciation as a native, it fell upon me to make phonograph records of this standard language, to be used henceforth in all the schools." But, Zhao points out, he was one teacher trying to change the way 600 million people talked.

Even with phonograph records, "it was found hard going to teach a language which nobody spoke. For thirteen years I was the sole speaker of this idiolect."

Then in 1932, the dictionary was quietly revised and replaced with a new one, employing pronunciation from Peiping (now Beijing). Suddenly, there were a million speakers of "standard Chinese," instead of just one.

That's where putonghua, or what's now called "national common use language" 国家通用语言 (and in Xinjiang now called 國語）came from: a Guomindang political decision to enshrine Beijinghua (Mandarin) as national language, less than a century ago.

This wasn't the choice of traditional language scholars or of people from other parts of China. While not opposed to standardization efforts, Zhao wrote that "the job of the teacher is to teach what language is appropriate under what situations....

"... if you want to communicate most effectively, then do such and such, so that correctness in language turns out to be a hypothetical imperative rather than a categorical imperative."

I.e. read Tang poems one way, talk on the podium one way, at home another way: this is a call for linguistic pluralism, straight out of his experience with China's rich regional, social, class and status differences.(Btw, US isn't a good model for PRC language policy: Europe is.)

I can't tell what Zhao would have said about today's CCP efforts to homogenize and Mandarinize the multilingual population of China. Linguists who know Zhao's work can chime in here. But I have heard how Zhao would travel around China, and through historical linguistic expertise

could approximate and talk to people in dialects of every place he went. He reveled in and studied the multiplicity of dialects and languages in China. In his first, attempt to create a standard national Chinese, Guoyin,

"'the rights and wrongs of the south and north and the logical and illogical of the ancients and moderns were argued." He didn't argue that there was one "correct Chinese." He tried to make a standard that was inclusive.

Yuen Ren Chao, "What is Correct Chinese?" _Journal of the American Oriental Society_ Vol. 81, No. 3 (Aug. - Sep., 1961), pp. 171-177.
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