Language Policy
Chinese language policy in mainland China is heavily influenced by Soviet nationalities policy and officially encourages the development of standard spoken and written languages for each of the nationalities of China. However, in this schema, Han Chinese are considered a single nationality, and official policy of the People's Republic of China (PRC) treats the different varieties of the Chinese spoken language differently from the different national languages despite the fact that they are more different from each other than, for example, the Romance languages of Europe. While official policies in mainland China encourage the development and use of different orthographies for the national languages and their use in educational and academic settings, realistically speaking it would seem that, as elsewhere in the world, the outlook for minority languages perceived as inferior is grim. The Tibetan Government-in-Exile argue that social pressures and political efforts result in a policy of sinicization and feels that Beijing should promote the Tibetan language more. Because many languages exist in China, they also have problem regarding diglossia. Recently, in terms of Fishman’s typology of the relationships between bilingualism and diglossia and his taxonomy of disgloosia(Fishman 1978,1980) in China : more and more minority communities have been evolving from “diglossia without bilingualism” to “bilingualism without diglossia”. This could be an implication of mainland China’s power expanding.
Read more about this topic: Languages Of China
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