The standardization of Global Chinese is seen in three developments of the globalization of Chinese. First, speakers of Chinese in Chinese diaspora communities are shifting from dialects to Putonghua. Second, schools in every country adopt Putonghua, Pinyin and simplified characters as the standard in teaching Chinese as a second or foreign language. Third, to promote Global Chinese education, China has established five hundred Confucius Institutes and one thousand Confucius Classrooms worldwide. However, we still see new variations of the standard in the process of the standardization of Global Chinese. This article reviews the history of the rise and fall of global languages, explores, with the community SLA model and the language identity as a process model, the underlying motivation for the variation of Global Chinese in the spread of the standard, and shows that gaps in language identity are the motivation that leads to the variations.
This paper focuses on the vocabulary differences between British Mandarin Chinese and Putonghua. Drawing on a newspaper corpus, I demonstrate a number of results: there are lots of new words in British Mandarin Chinese; those words which are shared by British Mandarin Chinese and Putonghua are different in their sememes and connotations; differences are also found in the collocation of words; due to the historical connection between the United Kingdom and Hong Kong, many Cantonese words have become part of the British Mandarin Chinese. Meanwhile, I analyze the main causes of these differences and propose communication strategies between speakers of British Mandarin Chinese and speakers of Putonghua.
Chinese language education among overseas Chinese plays a vital role in learning language and culture of their motherland and carrying on the ethnic heritage. During the Qing dynasty, the Chinese language education started to draw official attention, and this resulted in the subject of teaching Chinese to the descendants of Chinese immigrants living in other countries. Since then on, subsequent Chinese governments have attached a lot of importance to overseas Chinese education, and showed keen concern through bringing out relevant policies and measures. This article attempts to review the policies and measures concerning overseas Chinese education implemented by Chinese governments since the late Qing period, and the developing stages corresponding to the features of respective historical period were distinguished. The historical background, domestic and international contexts under which the policies were enacted were also discursively analyzed. It is my hope that what I summarized in this article can serve as a reference in future policy making.
After only three decades, China has seen a great achievement in studying overseas Chinese language. The research area has experienced three periods, and the research perspective has also seen three shifts: from Chinese language outside China to overseas Chinese language, then to the Global Chinese. The research perspective has also moved from focusing on linguistic features to discussing the teaching and learning of the Global Chinese, then to examining the social use of Chinese language across the world, which has been integrated into the national strategy of language development and has gotten associated with the fate of overseas Chinese. Guided by the framework of time ordering, regional differences, and the growing interest in topics, this article reviews the major accomplishments in domestic study of the Global Chinese.
The emerging of the term “Global Chinese” shows that China starts to plan its language from a global perspective. Driven by a brand new view of language, voluminous literature on Global Chinese has been published in China and this enriched the study of modern Chinese language. As a result, a new popular research area has come into being. This article aims at reflecting on the formation process of the Global Chinese and reviewing the regional features of the research and the subject coverage, including structualist study at micro level, sociolinguistic study at macro level, and language acquisition study. In the conclusion part, I endeavor to look into the future directions of the Global Chinese study.
The sustained development of China’s economy and the concrete measures under China’s internationalization strategy, the Belt and Road Initiative, have provided strong impetus to the global spread of Mandarin. The ASEAN region, a key partner of China’s Maritime Silk Road cooperation, is a good example. With closer ties between China and ASEAN countries over the past years, the number of learners taking Chinese as a second/foreign/international language in this region will continue to increase steadily, which will bring new opportunities for the globalization of Mandarin. However, opportunities always coexist with challenges. Challenges faced by the promotion of Mandarin in ASEAN will also be a microcosm of problems which other countries or regions along the Belt and Road Initiative may face. This paper proposes a progressive model of promoting Mandarin in ASEAN countries in conjunction with the major trends of the global spread of Mandarin and ASEAN’s local characteristics, which could serve as a good reference for achieving the “glocalization” of Chinese.
This paper reviews the current discussion concerning people’s right of giving up the mother tongue from angles of nature of the right, legal resource, rights and obligations, and implications for practices. The paper first reviews the definition of the mother tongue; second it discusses the notion of language right; and further it contents that giving up the mother tongue is also a kind of language right. The paper further discusses the questions of (1) whether individuals have the right of withdrawing from their ethnic community; (2) whether it is more beneficial to learn the majority language or language of minority group; (3) who is responsible for maintaining minority language, the government or the minority people; and (4) whether the right of giving up one’s mother tongue is a positive or a negative right. The paper proposes that giving up one’s mother tongue is a kind of negative right being derived from the right of choosing one’s language, and thus it is not necessary to be listed as a separate right. In term of practice, the author argues that the minority ethnic groups and their members should not be restricted in choosing their ethnic language as the mother tongue because of the preservation obligation, but they should be cautious when exercising the right of giving up the ethnic language.