Language Rights In A Changing China

Author : Alexandra Grey
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 1501512552
Total Pages : 360 pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Language Rights in a Changing China written by Alexandra Grey and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-05-10 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China has had constitutional minority language rights for decades, but what do they mean today? Answering with nuance and empirical detail, this book examines the rights through a sociolinguistic study of Zhuang, the language of China’s largest minority group. The analysis traces language policy from the Constitution to local government practices, investigating how Zhuang language rights are experienced as opening or restricting socioeconomic opportunity. The study finds that language rights do not challenge ascendant marketised and mobility-focused language ideologies which ascribe low value to Zhuang. However, people still value a Zhuang identity validated by government policy and practice. Rooted in a Bourdieusian approach to language, power and legal discourse, this is the first major publication to integrate contemporary debates in linguistics about mobility, capitalism and globalization into a study of China’s language policy. The book refines Grey’s award-winning doctoral dissertation, which received the Joshua A. Fishman Award in 2018. The judges said the study “decenter[s] all types of sociolinguistic assumptions." It is a thought-provoking work on minority rights and language politics, relevant beyond China.

Author : Alexandra Grey
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 1501512404
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Language Rights in a Changing China written by Alexandra Grey and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-05-10 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China has had constitutional minority language rights for decades, but what do they mean today? Answering with nuance and empirical detail, this book examines the rights through a sociolinguistic study of Zhuang, the language of China’s largest minority group. The analysis traces language policy from the Constitution to local government practices, investigating how Zhuang language rights are experienced as opening or restricting socioeconomic opportunity. The study finds that language rights do not challenge ascendant marketised and mobility-focused language ideologies which ascribe low value to Zhuang. However, people still value a Zhuang identity validated by government policy and practice. Rooted in a Bourdieusian approach to language, power and legal discourse, this is the first major publication to integrate contemporary debates in linguistics about mobility, capitalism and globalization into a study of China’s language policy. The book refines Grey’s award-winning doctoral dissertation, which received the Joshua A. Fishman Award in 2018. The judges said the study “decenter[s] all types of sociolinguistic assumptions." It is a thought-provoking work on minority rights and language politics, relevant beyond China.

Author : Qing Zhang
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1134610564
Total Pages : 198 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Language and Social Change in China written by Qing Zhang and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-11 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Language and Social Change in China: Undoing Commonness through Cosmopolitan Mandarin offers an innovative and authoritative account of the crucial role of language in shaping the sociocultural landscape of contemporary China. Based on a wide range of data collected since the 1990s and grounded in quantitative and discourse analyses of sociolinguistic variation, Qing Zhang tracks the emergence of what she terms “Cosmopolitan Mandarin” as a new stylistic resource for a rising urban elite and a new middle-class consumption-based lifestyle. The book powerfully illuminates that Cosmopolitan Mandarin participates in dismantling the pre-reform, socialist, conformist society by bringing about new social distinctions. Rich in cultural and linguistic details, the book is the first of its kind to highlight the implications of language change on the social order and cultural life of contemporary China. Language and Social Change in China is ideal for students and scholars interested in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, and Chinese language and society.

Author : Minglang Zhou
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN 13 : 1402080387
Total Pages : 345 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Language Policy in the People’s Republic of China written by Minglang Zhou and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2004-08-27 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Lin Pan
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 331910392X
Total Pages : 189 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book English as a Global Language in China written by Lin Pan and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-10-28 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers insight into the spread and impact of English language education in China within China’s broader educational, social, economic and political changes. The author's critical perspective informs readers on the connections between language education and political ideologies in the context of globalizing China. The discussion of the implications concerning language education is of interest for current and future language policy makers, language educators and learners. Including both diachronic and synchronic accounts or China’s language education policy, this volume highlights how China as a modern nation-state has been seeking a more central position globally, and the role that English education and the promotion of such education played in that effort in recent decades.

Author : Gulbahar H. Beckett
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136638075
Total Pages : 401 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book China's Assimilationist Language Policy written by Gulbahar H. Beckett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-06-17 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China has huge ethnic minorities – over 40 different groups with a total population of over 100 million. Over time China’s policies towards minority languages have varied, changing from policies which have accommodated minority languages to policies which have encouraged integration. At present integrationist policies predominate, notably in the education system, where instruction in minority languages is being edged out in favour of instruction in Mandarin Chinese. This book assesses the current state of indigenous and minority language policy in China. It considers especially language policy in the education system, including in higher education, and provides detailed case studies of how particular ethnic minorities are being affected by the integrationist, or assimilationist, approach.

Author : Minglang Zhou
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN 13 : 1402080395
Total Pages : 345 pages
Book Rating : 4.95/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Language Policy in the People’s Republic of China written by Minglang Zhou and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-04-11 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Jeffrey Gil
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030761711
Total Pages : 188 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Rise of Chinese as a Global Language written by Jeffrey Gil and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-06-07 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the macroacquisition of Chinese – its large-scale acquisition and adoption for various purposes by individuals, governments and organisations – and the implications of this process for the future of English as a global language. The author contextualises the macroacquisition of Chinese within the global ecology of languages, then analyses the factors responsible for the macroacquisition of Chinese, showing, in contrast to most academic and popular commentary, that a character-based writing system will not stop Chinese from becoming a global language. He then articulates three possible future scenarios: English remaining a dominant global language, English and Chinese both being global languages, and Chinese becoming a global language instead of English. The book concludes by outlining directions for further research on the acquisition and use of Chinese around the world. It will be of interest to students and scholars with an interest in English as a global language, Chinese as a second/foreign language, language education policy, and applied linguistics more generally.

Author : Joseph Lo Bianco
Publisher : Multilingual Matters
ISBN 13 : 1847692281
Total Pages : 330 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book China and English written by Joseph Lo Bianco and published by Multilingual Matters. This book was released on 2009 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China has become the world's largest English learning society, and China's decisions in relation to English will directly affect its fortunes into the future. This unique volume explores the prospects of English in relation to the debates on identity and cultural values that mass English teaching in China have stimulated.

Author : Jing Tsu
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0735214735
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Kingdom of Characters (Pulitzer Prize Finalist) written by Jing Tsu and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-01-17 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 What does it take to reinvent a language? After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology. Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who reinvented the Chinese language, among them an exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, a Chinese-Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao's phonetic writing system, and a computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup from the floor of a jail cell. Without their advances, China might never have become the dominating force we know today. With larger-than-life characters and an unexpected perspective on the major events of China’s tumultuous twentieth century, Tsu reveals how language is both a technology to be perfected and a subtle, yet potent, power to be exercised and expanded.