Wednesday, July 13, 2005
Uniting China to Speak Mandarin, the One Official Language: Easier Said Than Done - New York Times
DATIAN, China - As a crowd formed around a rare foreign visitor in this town's open-air market, the conversation turned quickly from the price of dried fish and fresh fruit to how many dialects people here could muster.
Hoisting her cherubic 6-month-old daughter, Lin Jinchun, a 29-year-old dumpling seller, claimed that she could speak two, drawing a quick counterclaim of three from her mother, Lin Guimei.
What was the third dialect? someone asked. "Putonghua," the mother answered, counting the standard national language of China as if it were just another minor tongue. Meanwhile others, shouting above the din, chimed in that they could speak four, five or even six tongues.
As seen by many outsiders, China is a behemoth: the world's most populous country with a galloping economy and a more or less unified culture. But if Putonghua - Mandarin - is one of the world's most heavily spoken languages, in many parts of China it is lost in the mazes of local dialects.
Uniting China to Speak Mandarin, the One Official Language: Easier Said Than Done
Hoisting her cherubic 6-month-old daughter, Lin Jinchun, a 29-year-old dumpling seller, claimed that she could speak two, drawing a quick counterclaim of three from her mother, Lin Guimei.
What was the third dialect? someone asked. "Putonghua," the mother answered, counting the standard national language of China as if it were just another minor tongue. Meanwhile others, shouting above the din, chimed in that they could speak four, five or even six tongues.
As seen by many outsiders, China is a behemoth: the world's most populous country with a galloping economy and a more or less unified culture. But if Putonghua - Mandarin - is one of the world's most heavily spoken languages, in many parts of China it is lost in the mazes of local dialects.
Uniting China to Speak Mandarin, the One Official Language: Easier Said Than Done
