After entering the new country of residence, cross-border immigrant groups face the huge pressure of survival and language barriers. They need to solve the problem of “going to the countryside” or “doing as the Romans do”, which involves three language selection strategies. The first strategy is to “close the internal language and isolate external languages.” The group, maintaining a certain gap with the mainstream dominant language, only lives in a closed native language circle. The strategy is not covered in this article. The second is the strategy of “going out and abandoning the inside” or “adapting the external language and abandoning the native language.” The group adapts and shifts the dominant language, and abandons its own language in order to achieve the purpose of language integration or assimilation. The author constructs it as a language adaptation-assimilation model. The third is the strategy of “inheriting the native language in accordance with the outside world”, which not only adapts to the dominant language, but also inherits the native language. They are basically bilingual. The third strategy is the focus of this paper, and the author constructs it as the mode of language adaptation-inheritance.
This overview provides a glimpse to the current situations and future trends of cross-border languages management in the global context. As globalization continues to advance, ross-border languages as a global phenomenon is drawing more academic attention. This paper examines the practices of managing cross-border languages in African and European countries.It is shown that out of the practical needs from below and strategic interests from above, most national governments have taken planning measures, such as limited legal recognition, continuous orthographic and terminological standardization, and increased usage in basic or higher education, to manage the cross-border languages. It is predicted that in the future, the management of cross-border languages would rely increasingly on trans-national mechanisms with areal characteristics, which will lead to more regionalized solutions yet few universally accepted paradigms. In short, proper management of cross-border languages,as conceived of by policymakers, can yield positive effects, such as better interethnic relationship, improved areal stability, and upgraded economic, social and political integration.
During the Soviet era, languages of many nations, including Kazakh, once used the Latin alphabet, and later used Cyrillic alphabet in the fi rst half of the 20th century. After the independence in 1991, under the infl uence of Turkey, Central Asian countries put forward the discussion about the use of Latin alphabet on the basis of main nation language. In 1993, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan took the lead in reform of alphabetic Latinization. In the end of 2017, after years of debates and discussions, Kazakhstan finally started the reform of alphabetic Latinization and planned to finish it in 2025. According to the reform experience in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, languages have their own rules of self-development. Artifi cial shortening the process of development may produce unexpected results. After the reform of alphabetic Latinization, there would be the coexistence of two alphabet systems in Kazakhstan. In 1960s-1980s, Kazakh in China also experienced reform of alphabetic Latinization. Nowadays, letters on the basis of Arabic alphabet are widely used.
Cross-border languages have attracted much academic attention in recent decades. In China, though the term cross-border languages was used by scholars in the 1980s, these languages did not become a focal research fi eld for sociolinguists until the 21st century. Nowadays, China’s studies on cross-border languages have boomed and demonstrated some specific characteristics. From the perspective of language situations or language life, this paper makes a general overview of Chinese scholars’ research of cross-border languages mainly used among China and its neighboring countries, examining their theoretical considerations and practical analysis in this fi eld. It shows that Chinese scholars have made endeavors to defi ne the concept of cross-border languages, differentiate their types, and establish customized research methodologies. The paper then presents some case studies of cross-border languages, including Russian, Central Asian languages, Jingpo and Donggan, to demonstrate Chinese scholars’ insights on the planning and management of cross-border languages in different contexts. In conclusion, this paper suggests that the cross-border languages research could be expanded and framed in the Belt and Road Initiative at the macro level. Cross-border languages are the natural channels for cross-border ethnic groups’ communication, and cross-border languages research in the context of Belt and Road are promising in the future.
As one of the central issue in current education, intelligent reading undoubtedly has important social significance and research value. Compared with traditional reading, intelligent reading will be a powerful tool to change the current reading situation in China. The Chinese government attaches great importance to reading promotion work. Under the background of artificial intelligence era, we analyzed the current development status, social significance, development pain points and other contents of various types of reading platforms, analyzed the five issues in the development of Chinese intelligent reading such as weak basic theory and technical diffi culties, and put forward five suggestions such as confi rming the target, establishing national standards and three prospects such as improving theory and content for future intelligent reading development.
In recent history, four major Chinese Romanization transcription systems have offi cially been adopted in Taiwan, namely the General Chinese Phonetic Alphabet (GCPA), the Wade-Giles Scheme (WGS), the Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II (MPS II) and the Scheme of Chinese Phonetic Alphabet (SCPA). The advantages and disadvantages of these four systems have been a focus of discussion by researchers. Based on a quantitative comparison of six indices on the phoneme-grapheme relationship,this study attempts to analyse the features of each of four systems. The fi ndings show that WGS achieves the lowest in all of six indices and MPS II performs higher than those of WGS in four indices; although almost all indices of GCPA are superior to those of WRS and MPS II, it is SCPA that gains an advantage over those of GCPA in four indices. Based on the relationship between grapheme and phoneme and the degree of system optimization, the current study shows that, out of the four systems examined in this paper, SCPA is the best Chinese Romanization transcription system in both graphic representation of phoneme and economic efficacy in linguistic resource utilization. It is my hope that the use of quantitative indicators provides a new methodology and perspective for the formulation and evaluation of language policies.