The specific version of Chinese that I am learning (i.e., Mandarin) is also called 普通话 pǔtōnghuà ("universal common language"). Readers of this blog may have noticed that I use the general word "Chinese" when referring to elements that may be common to more than one dialect, and the word "Mandarin" when referring to the spoken and written form that I'm currently learning.
Over at The China Story, I read a fascinating article by Gerald Roche on the origins of Mandarin.
An excerpt:
This national language did not exist at the start of the twentieth century. Linguist David Moser has described Putonghua as ‘an artificially constructed hybrid form, a linguistic patchwork of compromises based upon expediency, history, and politics’. Although based in part on the Mandarin of north-eastern China, Putonghua had a total of zero speakers at the start of the previous century. It only came to be spoken by a majority of the Chinese population (53 percent) as recently as 2007. By 2015, this number had been raised to 70 percent, and a target was set to reach 80 percent by 2020.
In other words, the Chinese government created a new language based on elements of those that existed before, standardising and rationalising its elements, and popularising it as the common language for the entire country. Standard Mandarin, more properly called Putonghua, retains the name "Mandarin", but is an artificially developed variant of that earlier dialect.
The rhyming slogan reads:
大家请说普通话，语言文字规范化 dàjiā qǐng shuō pǔtōnghuà, yǔyán wénzì guīfànhuà
"Everyone, please speak Putonghua ("universal common language"). Standardisation of language and speech."
The artificial origins of official Mandarin explain to a great extent why I'm finding the language logical and surprisingly easy to learn. I guess all the confusing quirks and grammatical exceptions that abound in natural languages got weeded out as part of the process. (As a hopeful learner, I'm not complaining!)
It strikes me that countries with multiple languages are inherently hard to govern, and governments tend to fall back upon the formula of a single "national" language to serve as the link between all of their people.
I'm no stranger to this conversation.
The country of my birth (India) has at least 30 official languages recognised by the constitution, and hundreds of dialects. Since independence in 1947, successive Indian governments have tried hard to popularise the notion of a single "national" language (Hindi) to serve as the lingua franca, although this is not official. Officially, Hindi and English are the two "administrative" languages of India, yet there is relentless pressure from the central government and sections of Indian society to make Hindi the country's sole national language.
I find myself in a curious position. As a student of Chinese, it greatly simplifies my life to have to learn a single standardised language with defined pronunciation rules, straightforward grammar, and a simplified script. I also welcome the prospect of this language being spoken and understood by virtually everyone in China, so if I were ever to visit and tour the country, I could be assured of being able to communicate with the local populace no matter where I went. I don't want to have to learn multiple languages to visit a multilingual country. I wouldn't bother to learn even one in such a case!
Yet, as a non-Hindi-speaking Indian, I remember my own, and my family's, resentment at the several ham-handed attempts on the part of successive Indian governments to "impose" Hindi on the entire country. Our sense of identity was viscerally threatened by the prospect of an imposed cultural uniformity. The debate continues back home in India, and I suspect that as the population of the Hindi-speaking states of the North continues to outstrip that of the rest of the country, that simmering debate may one day boil over. Hindi as the de facto national language may one day be a reality, but unless it happens naturally through demographic and economic drivers, the future could be anything but peaceful.
It seems to me that the problem of finding a "national" language for a modern nation-state with multiple cultural "nations" within its political borders is immensely hard. Tempting as it may be to strive for a single national language that displaces all others in importance, the process is fraught with risk. Countries with more than one language that attempted to elevate one above the others often broke up. The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia had respectively favoured Russian and Serbo-Croat over all the others, and the relegation of other languages to a subordinate status seemed to have sharpened, rather than blunted, the sense of subnational identity.
Even the "velvet divorce" of the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic from what was called Czechoslovakia occurred along linguistic lines.
Canada, Belgium and Spain are all examples of "advanced" countries that nevertheless have restive linguistic minorities.
The Chinese attempt at linguistic engineering has been surprisingly effective, having been sustained over generations. The use of primary education to train successive generations of young Chinese in one standard language seems to have achieved a second Cultural Revolution (thankfully a less cataclysmic one). But the potential for trouble remains, especially with significant linguistic minorities. This Lowy Institute article talks about the resentment felt by speakers of Cantonese.
It struck me that standardised Mandarin (Putonghua) is not the only artificial national language I have come across.
Hindi
This article talks about how Hindi was artifically created, and by a Scotsman of all people!
According to the article, John Borthwick Gilchrist, a self-trained linguist employed by the East India Company, split the commonly spoken language in North India (variously called Hindustani or Khari Boli) into two languages - Urdu with the Persian/Arabic script (Nastaliq) and Hindi with the Sanskrit script (Devanagari). Further, the vocabulary of Hindi was made distinct from that of Urdu by rebasing it on Sanskrit words.
Urdu
Why, Urdu itself is artificial in its own way.
1. Although it arose "naturally", it was the various military campaigns in the Deccan up to the 16th or 17th century that brought together soldiers from various parts of India and the Middle East, and created a hybrid language. The name "Urdu" itself comes from the Turkish word "Ordo" for "army" (the other legacy of which is the English word "horde").
2. When Pakistan was created, its four constituent provinces each had its own language - Punjab (Punjabi), Sindh (Sindhi), Baluchistan (Baluchi) and the Northwest Frontier Province (Pashto). Urdu was not native to the geographical region occupied by the new political nation-state of Pakistan. Rather, it was the native language of the political elite from the northern plains of India, who agitated for and obtained Pakistan. It was this elite that made Urdu the common national language for their new country.
The Wikipedia entry on the origins of Urdu is fascinating.
In the Delhi region of India the native language was Khariboli, whose earliest form is known as Old Hindi. It belongs to the Western Hindi group of the Central Indo-Aryan languages. The contact of the Hindu and Muslim cultures during the period of Islamic conquests and in the Indian subcontinent (12th to 16th centuries) led to the development of Hindustani as a product of a composite Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb. In cities such as Delhi, the Indian language Old Hindi began to acquire many Persian loanwords and continued to be called "Hindi" and later, also "Hindustani". In southern India (especially in Golkonda and Bijapur), a form of the language flourished in medieval India and is known as Dakhini, which contains loanwords from Telugu and Marathi. An early literary tradition of Hindavi was founded by Amir Khusrau in the late 13th century. From the 13th century until the end of the 18th century the language now known as Urdu was called Hindi, Hindavi, Hindustani, Dehlavi, Lahori, and Lashkari. By the end of the reign of Aurangzeb in the early 18th century, the common language around Delhi began to be referred to as Zaban-e-Urdu, a name derived from the Turkic word ordu (army) or orda and is said to have arisen as the "language of the camp", or "Zaban-i-Ordu" or natively "Lashkari Zaban". The Turko-Afghan Delhi Sultanate established Persian as its official language in India, a policy continued by the Mughal Empire, which extended over most of northern South Asia from the 16th to 18th centuries and cemented Persian influence on Hindustani. The name Urdu was first introduced by the poet Ghulam Hamadani Mushafi around 1780. As a literary language, Urdu took shape in courtly, elite settings. While Urdu retained the grammar and core Indo-Aryan vocabulary of the local Indian dialect Khariboli, it adopted the Nastaleeq writing system – which was developed as a style of Persian calligraphy.
So there you have it. Three large Asian countries with a complex linguistic history (China, India and Pakistan), each trying in its own way and with different levels of success, to forge a common national identity through the use of a common language.
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