Language Planning and Language Policy

East Asian Perspectives

Ping Chen, Nanette Gottlieb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136854460
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Ethnische Studien

Examines the major issues of language planning and policy in Japan, Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea and Vietnam, particularly those relating to the selection of official language, script, and written language.

Chapter One

Language Planning and Language Policy in East Asia: An Overview

Nanette Gottlieb and Ping Chen

Few other issues link or divide people and communities to the same extent as language. Language has been used to define the parameters of nation states, to define ethnicity, to differentiate between cultural conservatism and modernist progress and in diglossic situations to distinguish between rulers and ruled, educated and “ignorant”.

The topics under discussion in this volume illustrate the manner in which significant matters relating to language have been dealt with in some of the countries and regions in East Asia. We introduce readers in the following chapters to the many and varied issues which have attracted the attention of language planners in these areas. Geographical, historical and linguistic factors combined lend coherence to the volume. In keeping with common usage, we use the term ‘East Asia’ in its broadest sense, to include Viet Nam from the south-east as well as Japan, the People's Republic of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea from the north-east. There are of course many other countries within that geographical spectrum, but it is not our intention to produce an encyclopedic coverage of the region. While it might be argued that Singapore deserves a place in any study of language planning in East Asia, so much good material is already available on the Singapore experience (cf. Kuo 1984, for instance) that we have chosen instead to concentrate on areas less extensively researched.

In addition to the geographical affinity, there are two other factors which have prompted us to have Japan, mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea and Vietnam covered in the same volume. One is historical, the other linguistic.

All the countries and regions included in this book were under the strong influence of the Confucianist doctrines originating in China before modern times. They embarked upon the course of modernization around the middle of the nineteenth century, looking mainly to the western powers for innovations in science and technology and for novel approaches to general social progress. In the course of their transition from traditional to modernizing societies, these countries and regions faced, and continue to face, basically the same range of issues and concerns, ranging from the improvement of oral and written communication among members of the wider community, the urgent need to improve literacy rates, the facilitation of the introduction of new terminology into the native language, and the tension between nationalism and Westernization. Language has played a prominent role in the addressing of these issues and concerns, serving as the target for reform as well as the embodiment of distinct values and beliefs. Readers of this book will be able to observe and compare how these areas with a similar historical background have handled the various issues of language planning and policy on the road to modernization.

As will be elaborated shortly, the countries and regions covered in this book are also characterized by the fact that they all adopted, and some continue to adopt, the traditional Chinese script as the writing system for their indigenous languages. This book provides readers with an integrated perspective on what specific problems this has brought about for each of them when new writing systems were developed, and how they differ considerably in the formulation of language policy addressing the relevant issues.

1. General sociolinguistic profile of the region

Approximately 125 million people speak Japanese as their native language in the Japanese archipelago at the eastern periphery of Asia. Standard Japanese is spoken throughout the country, although a rich network of local dialects also still exists. Japan is and always has been a largely monolingual society, but its language has been strongly influenced by Chinese over centuries of cultural contact. Even the Japanese writing system was originally borrowed from China and later modified to suit local linguistic needs, with the result that Japanese is now written with a combination of characters and two phonetic scripts developed long ago from characters.

The four major Chinese-speaking countries and regions, namely the People's Republic of China (PRC), Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, are all situated in East Asia. Chinese is the sole official language in the PRC and Taiwan, one of two official languages in Hong Kong, and one of four official languages in Singapore. What is known as the Chinese language is actually composed of dozens of dialects, each of which is only understood by its own native speakers. Two of the major dialects, Northern Mandarin and Cantonese, are as different from each other as English and German.

Korea, like Japan, has long been a monolingual society strongly influenced by Chinese in both lexicon and script, although during the period when it was a Japanese colony (1910–1945), Japanese was taught extensively. The standard language of South Korea is the dialect of Seoul; that of North Korea, the dialect of Pyongyang. The phonetic Hankul script is used in tandem with a restricted list of 1,800 Chinese characters in the South; in the North, Hankul is used exclusively in the press and other published materials, although 3,000 Chinese characters are taught in schools to facilitate relations with the South in the event of reunification.

Vietnamese is the mother tongue of 60 million people and is the lingua franca among other ethnic groups living in Viet Nam, such as the Tay, Thai, ethnic Chinese, Hmong, Nung and other communities. As well as being a language of personal and national identity, Vietnamese has geopolitical significance in neighboring Asian countries, in particular Laos and Cambodia. There are mutually intelligible spoken dialects ranging from north to south of the country, with the Hanoi dialect serving as the standard for the written language. As in the case of Japanese and Korean, there has been a strong Chinese influence on the language, resulting in many loanwords, and Chinese characters were used as the official script for a very long time. Since 1945, the roman script has taken precedence over both characters and a phonetic, domestically developed script known as Nom in most of the country and at all educational levels.

2. Language planning and language policy: a general overview

Language planning refers to deliberate efforts to direct, change, or preserve the acquisition, structure, or functional allocation of language codes within a given society. It can be carried out by government bodies, official or private organizations, or individuals. Language policy, on the other hand, refers to systematic formulation of such efforts by authoritative agencies. It is usually explicit, embodied in laws, regulations and guidelines, as is the case with what is discussed in each of the eight chapters in this book. It can also be covert. As Schiffman (1996:211) observed, there is almost total lack of a coherent explicit policy at the federal level in the USA, and the strength of American language policy is not in what is legally or officially stated, but in the subtler workings of what he has called the covert and implicit language policy.

A distinction was first drawn by Kloss (1969) between status planning and corpus planning, which has since been generally adopted in the studies of language planning. Status planning aims to influence the allocation of functions among a community's languages or varieties of a language. On the list of functions given in Cooper (1989) are official, provincial, wider communication, international, capital, group, educational, school subject, literary, religious, mass media, and work. Corpus planning is concerned with such language-internal aspects as graphization, standardization, modernization, and renovation of language. Graphization refers to the provision of a writing system for language, involving issues such as the design, adoption, or reform of script and orthography. Standardization refers to the development of a norm which overrides regional and social dialects. The process usually comprises the isolation of a norm, evaluation of the norm as “correct” or “preferred”, and prescription and preferably codification of the norm for specific contexts or functions. Modernization refers to the process whereby a language becomes an appropriate medium of communication for modern topics and forms of discourse. Renovation refers to the efforts to change an already developed code in the name of efficiency, aesthetics, or national or political ideology (cf. Cooper 1989; Kaplan and Baldauf 1997).

Of the countries and regions studied in this book, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, and Viet Nam were all under the colonial government of a foreign nation for a long or short period of their history. Focal issues of language planning for these places during the colonial period related to status planning. A language foreign to the overwhelming proportion of the local population was promoted and stipulated as the official language and medium of instruction at the expense of indigenous languages, although the measures and approaches toward the goal differed in different places and periods. While the Japanese colonial government in Korea, Taiwan and Viet Nam resorted mainly to high-handed measures to pursue a prohibitive policy toward the indigenous languages, the French colonial government in Viet Nam and the British colonial government in Hong Kong showed more tolerance toward the local languages, as observed by Chen, Song, and Lo Bianco. On the other hand, as Gottlieb, Chen, Song, and Lo Bianco have discussed, language planning efforts in Japan and mainland China, as well as in post-colonial South and North Korea and Viet Nam have been mainly directed to corpus planning.

Readers of this book cannot fail to notice that the authors have devoted a large amount of space to the discussion of issues on script and written language, which might seem disproportionate in comparison with discussions of language planning in other countries. This treatment is justified by the fact that the lion's share of language planning in all the countries and regions under investigation here relates to script and written language. As a matter of fact, reform of script and written language is usually what first springs to the mind of language planners and the general public when the terms “language planning” and “language policy” are mentioned in these places. For more than three decades from 1954 onward, the national official institution for language planning in mainland China was simply called the Zhongguo Wenzi Gaige Weiyuanhui ‘Chinese Committee on Script Reform’; it was renamed the Guojia Yuyan Wenzi Gongzuo Weiyuanhui ‘State Language and Script Commission’ only in 1986.

Underlying the situation, we believe, have been three related factors. First, the Chinese community before modern times showed tremendous reverence for script and traditional literary language. Script was taken to be sacrosanct by the general public, to the extent that many people would not dare to step on a piece of paper with characters written on it. In spite of the difficulty of learning it and low proficiency in its use, a written language based not on the contemporary vernacular but on Old Chinese served as the norm for all official functions, including state examinations for the selection of candidates for positions in the bureaucracy. As many aspects of the script and the written language were ill-suited, or perceived to be ill-suited, to a modernizing society, as Chen discusses, the need for reform was acutely felt when China embarked on the road to modernization from the later years of the nineteenth century. Issues surrounding the script and the written language have since been at the center of language reform. The other three countries in the “Confucian cultural block”, Japan, Korea and Viet Nam, have all displayed a similar tendency to attach more importance to writing than to speaking properly, which partially accounts for their generally higher interest in written language than in spoken language.

Furthermore, as Gottlieb, Song, and Lo Bianco have noted, Japan, Korea and Viet Nam feature a relatively high degree of linguistic homogeneity in comparison with countries like India and Singapore. Diversity in dialects and languages is less of a problem for language planners, which is another reason why the efforts of language planning in these countries have been mainly concentrated on script and written language.

Finally, Japan, Korea, and Viet Nam were under the strong influence of China and the Chinese culture for more than a thousand years before the twentieth century. In comparison with Chinese, written codes in Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese were a much later development. During the early period, students and scholars in the three countries usually learned to write in Chinese when they acquired literacy. When first writing systems were designed to write in the indigenous languages, they were exclusively or mainly made up of Chinese characters in their original or modified form as the basic graphic symbols. Later on, indigenous scripts were designed for the respective languages by and large on phonemic principles. Chinese characters, meanwhile, were not discarded overnight. The Chinese script either continued to function as an alternative writing system for the indigenous languages, or served in a supplementary role to the indigenous scripts, with Chinese characters used side by side with other written symbols in the same text. A situation of digraphia prevailed in all three countries for a long period of time. Differing attitudes toward the situation and various approaches toward addressing problems arising from the situation have thus attracted the main attention from language planners in these countries (also cf. Hannas 1996).

3. Major issues involved in language planning in the region

3.1 Dialects and standardization

The issue of dialects and standardization is one that has been faced to varying degrees across the region. For modernizing nations, the existence of a standard language is imperative in order to facilitate education and the discourse of public life. Two of the main goals of language planning on Chinese since the late nineteenth century have been to promote a standard language based upon Northern Mandarin, and to establish and promote a written standard based on the contemporary vernacular in place of the traditional standard based on Old Chinese. The promotion of a spoken standard has been very successful. Modern Spoken Chinese, based upon the Beijing dialect of Northern Mandarin, known as putonghua in mainland China and Hong Kong, guoyu in Taiwan, and huayu in Singapore, has been extensively popularized. The second goal has also been achieved, with Modern Written Chinese based upon northern Mandarin generally used as the standard written style.

Other countries faced similar issues. In Japan, the matter of a spoken standard was resolved in 1916, when a publication of the Kokugo Chōsa Iinkai ‘National Language Research Council’ defined it as the language spoken by the educated people of Tokyo. The movement to replace earlier archaic written styles with one based on the contemporary spoken standard had been largely successful except in legal and government terminology by the mid-1920s, and even these areas were reformed in the late 1940s. In South Korea, the dialect of the capital, Seoul, has been regarded in practice as the standard for 600 years; the 1936 definition by the Hankul Hakhoi ‘Korean Language Society’ specified the dialect of the educated middle class in Seoul. In North Korea, the standard language was declared to be that based on the dialect of Pyongyang, a decision in part, as Song explains, stemming from political motives but also aimed at establishing a distance between the dialects of Pyongyang and Seoul. In the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam, although there do exist ethnic minority languages, the uncontested official language is Vietnamese, the mother tongue of 60 million ethnic Vietnamese; the choice of code, as Lo Bianco points out in Chapter Eight, is not an issue. Although a north-south continuum of dialects exists, they are mutually intelligible. The Hanoi dialect has been the standard on which the written language has been elaborated.

3.2 Script

In all the countries discussed in this book, as we have said, the issue of the writing system has bulked large in considerations of language planning. Outside China, it has been the influence of Chinese characters on writing vernacular languages which has caused most debate. Inside China itself, the issue of phoneticization of the writing system has been a burning issue, as Chen tells us in his chapter discussing the four functions which any new scheme of writing Chinese might fulfill. Design and promotion of phonetic writing for Chinese started in the sixteenth century and has been embraced with enthusiasm by language reformers since then. In the relatively short period between 1958 and 1980, as many as 1,667 schemes of phonetic writing for Chinese were submitted to the language planning institutions in Beijing. In Korea, although the alphabetic writing system Hankul was developed in the fifteenth century, the use of Chinese characters continued because Chinese enjoyed the status of the High language while Korean was relegated to that of the Low language. In South Korea, the government has wavered from time to time in its attitude to the use of characters and the revised Hankul orthography, allowing both. North Korea at first pursued a policy of abolishing characters altogether in a bid to address the problem of illiteracy, but after 1966, with an eye to the consequences of reunification, began once again to teach characters in schools while at the same time prohibiting their use in the media. It is clearly strategically important to the governments of both Koreas not to diverge too far in their handling of script in case a reunified Korea should find itself with a population sharply divided in matters of functional literacy.

The major aim of language planning on Chinese over the last hundred years or so has been to reform th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• Chapter One Language Planning and Language Policy in East Asia: An Overview
• Chapter Two Language Planning and Policy in Japan
• Chapter Three Development and Standardization of Lexicon in Modern Written Chinese
• Chapter Four Functions of Phonetic Writing in Chinese
• Chapter Five Policy on the Selection and Implementation of a Standard Language as a Source of Conflict in Taiwan
• Chapter Six Language Policy in Hong Kong during the Colonial Period before July 1, 1997
• Chapter Seven North and South Korea: Language Policies of Divergence and Convergence
• Chapter Eight Viet Nam: Quoc Ngu, Colonialism and Language Policy
• Index