{"id":268,"date":"2013-09-24T21:06:52","date_gmt":"2013-09-24T20:06:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/?p=268"},"modified":"2013-09-24T21:06:52","modified_gmt":"2013-09-24T20:06:52","slug":"learning-to-speak-proper-the-economist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/?p=268","title":{"rendered":"Learning to speak proper (The Economist)"},"content":{"rendered":"<hgroup>\n<h2>Spread the word<\/h2>\n<h1>Mandarins push Mandarin<\/h1>\n<\/hgroup>\n<aside><time>Sep 21st 2013\u00a0<\/time>|\u00a0XIBIAN, FUJIAN PROVINCE\u00a0|<a href=\"http:\/\/www.economist.com\/printedition\/2013-09-21\">From the print edition<\/a><\/aside>\n<div>\n<p>AS MORE people around the world start to study Mandarin, China\u2019s education ministry has revealed that much work still needs to be done teaching the language at home. <!--more-->It announced this month that 400m people, nearly a third of the population, are unable to communicate in Mandarin, and that many more cannot speak it well.<\/p>\n<p>That may seem a lot of people unable to speak their own national language but, as recently as 2007, nearly half China\u2019s citizens were unable to communicate effectively in what is known, in Mandarin, as\u00a0<em>putonghua\u00a0<\/em>(\u201ccommon speech\u201d). Some are speakers of ethnic-minority languages such as Uighur or Tibetan, which are unrelated to Mandarin. But others are ethnic Han Chinese whose mother tongue is a Chinese language that is not Mandarin.<\/p>\n<p>In Xibian village, near Fuzhou, capital of the south-eastern province of Fujian, most residents can speak Mandarin (with a strong accent). Classes at school are taught in it and most television programmes use it. But day to day, villagers chat, sing, haggle and pray in Min, a language unintelligible to Mandarin speakers. Though there are hundreds of different dialects that are variations of Mandarin, linguists say that Min is one of eight separate Chinese languages spoken within China. These include Cantonese (which is spoken by more people than live in France). They share some lexical and grammatical features with Mandarin, but are roughly as similar only as English is to Dutch. They can also be written using Chinese characters, rather as English and Dutch can both be written using the Roman alphabet.<\/p>\n<p>Early education in regional languages is tolerated, as is some broadcasting. But Communist Party mandarins insist on calling them dialects, not languages, in an attempt to create \u201cnational unity and homogeneity\u201d and promote the standard language, says Umberto Ansaldo, a linguist at the University of Hong Kong.<\/p>\n<p>Official efforts to spread Mandarin sometimes encounter resistance. In 2010, when the Cantonese-speaking city of Guangzhou hosted the Asian games and officials ordered local broadcasters to switch to Mandarin for the occasion, hundreds marched in protest. That same year there were protests in Tibet about the forced use of Mandarin in schools. It ain\u2019t just what you say that causes problems, but also the way you say it.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Spread the word Mandarins push Mandarin Sep 21st 2013\u00a0|\u00a0XIBIAN, FUJIAN PROVINCE\u00a0|From the print edition AS MORE people around the world start to study Mandarin, China\u2019s education ministry has revealed that much work still needs to be done teaching the language at home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":160,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2,13,65,56],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}