Overview
- The contributors of this volume provide the first comprehensive scrutiny of this sweeping linguistic revolution from three unique perspectives.
- First, outside scholars critically question the parities between constitutional rights and actual practices and between policies and outcomes.
- Second, inside policy practitioners review their own project involvements and inside politics, pondering over missteps, undergoing soul-searching, and theorizing their personal experiences.
- Third, scholars of minority origin give inside views of policy implementations and challenges in their home communities.
- The volume sheds light on the complexity of language policy making and implementing as well as on the politics and ideology of language in contemporary China.
Part of the book series: Language Policy (LAPO, volume 4)
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About this book
Language matters in China. It is about power, identity, opportunities, and, above all, passion and nationalism. During the past five decades China’s language engineering projects transformed its linguistic landscape, affecting over one billion people’s lives, including both the majority and minority populations. The Han majority have been juggling between their home vernaculars and the official speech, Putonghua - a speech of no native speakers - and reading their way through a labyrinth of the traditional, simplified, and Pinyin (Roman) scripts. Moreover, the various minority groups have been struggling between their native languages and Chinese, maintaining the former for their heritages and identities and learning the latter for quality education and socioeconomic advancement.
The contributors of this volume provide the first comprehensive scrutiny of this sweeping linguistic revolution from three unique perspectives. First, outside scholars critically question the parities between constitutional rights and actual practices and between policies and outcomes. Second, inside policy practitioners review their own project involvements and inside politics, pondering over missteps, undergoing soul-searching, and theorizing their personal experiences. Third, scholars of minority origin give inside views of policy implementations and challenges in their home communities. The volume sheds light on the complexity of language policy making and implementing as well as on the politics and ideology of language in contemporary China.
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Keywords
Table of contents (19 chapters)
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Introduction: The Context of the Theory and Practice of China’s Language Policy
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Theory and Practice in the Center
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The Center Versus The Periphery in Practice
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Theorizing Personal Experiences from the Practice
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Theory and Practice Viewed from Minority Communities
Reviews
From the reviews:
"This volume tries to give an overview of ‘the dramatic linguistic revolution that has swept across China’ during the second half of the twentieth century. … In the 19 papers which this book presents, the reader is made well aware of the enormous complexities involved in language-planning in a country with more than 1.3 billion inhabitants. … This quite detailed and scholarly study can be read by anyone with a deeper interest in Chinese culture, language, society." (E. Van Laerhoven, Acta Comparanda, Vol. XVI, 2005)
Editors and Affiliations
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Language Policy in the People’s Republic of China
Book Subtitle: Theory and Practice Since 1949
Editors: Minglang Zhou, Hongkai Sun
Series Title: Language Policy
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-8039-5
Publisher: Springer Dordrecht
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eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive
Copyright Information: Springer Science+Business Media New York 2004
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4020-8038-8Published: 16 September 2004
Softcover ISBN: 978-94-017-4032-6Published: 03 October 2013
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4020-8039-5Published: 11 April 2006
Series ISSN: 1571-5361
Series E-ISSN: 2452-1027
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIX, 345
Topics: Sociolinguistics, Political Science, Chinese, Asian Languages