What do you think?
Rate this book
A Billion Voices: China's Search for a Common Language
Mandarin, Guoyu or Putonghua? "Chinese" is a language known by many names, and China is a country home to many languages. Since the turn of the century linguists and politicians have been on a mission to create a common language for China. From the radical intellectuals of the May Fourth Movement, to leaders such as Chiang Kai-shek, and Mao Zedong, all fought to push the boundaries of language reform. Now, internet users take the Chinese language in new and unpredictable directions. David Moser tells the remarkable story of China’s language unification agenda and its controversial relationship with modern politics, challenging our ideas of what it means to speak Chinese.
120 pages, Paperback
Published October 1, 2016
48 people are currently reading
511 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 56 reviews
November 17, 2017
A fascinating little book about the history of the Chinese language, or more specifically what most people around the world call Chinese.
Turns out - and I have to say as someone who studied Chinese as their major at university I am a little ashamed to admit this - that what we know today as Chinese has only really existed for around 70(ish) years. Of course I knew that Mandarin (or putonghua as it is known inside the mainland, guoyu in Taiwan) was a standardised form of the language which a significant percentage of people in China cannot speak, but I was unaware of the history of the language and the work that went into developing it and rolling it out.
Interesting facts too about the long debate on whether to completely abolish the written form of the language, amidst arguments that it was part of the reason that so many people were illiterate back in the mid 20th century. If you're at all interested in China or languages I'd really recommend checking this short book out.
Turns out - and I have to say as someone who studied Chinese as their major at university I am a little ashamed to admit this - that what we know today as Chinese has only really existed for around 70(ish) years. Of course I knew that Mandarin (or putonghua as it is known inside the mainland, guoyu in Taiwan) was a standardised form of the language which a significant percentage of people in China cannot speak, but I was unaware of the history of the language and the work that went into developing it and rolling it out.
Interesting facts too about the long debate on whether to completely abolish the written form of the language, amidst arguments that it was part of the reason that so many people were illiterate back in the mid 20th century. If you're at all interested in China or languages I'd really recommend checking this short book out.
March 30, 2017
Much of the content of this short book was already quite familiar to me, since my major life study is Chinese linguistics, and I have in fact written a good bit on more or less the same material myself. I did however pick up bits and pieces of interest here and there, e.g. about the volatile temper of language reform leader Wu Zhihui.
Notable is that much like John DeFrancis, Moser seems to be cheering on the "get rid of Chinese characters and replace them with a Latin alphabet" faction, and makes the idea that "China's cultural history is to a great extent encoded and preserved in Chinese characters" sound like a naive and misguided one. Well, I for one happen to agree with it. At some point I really should write that book. He also sides clearly with the "Many Chinese dialects are actually different *languages*" faction. To that I reply, read about the difference between a "language" and a "dialect" in Stephen R. Anderson's Languages: A Very Short Introduction. Moser does himself mention that a "dialect" is often defined more by politics than by linguistic criteria - and that is in fact the case in many places around the world, not just in China. So I have always considered this a non-argument, and think it's fine to respect the preference of native speakers. Some Chinese definitely do disagree that all varieties of Han Chinese are "dialects" - but this is often due largely to political reasons as well. Mutual intelligibility is often *not* the key defining characteristic of a "dialect", in my view. It is in fact a knotty issue that doesn't lend itself well to judgments based on a single criterion.
Recommended nevertheless for anybody interested in a quick introduction to and overview of the development of the modern spoken and written Chinese languages. The book is an easy and fast read, up to date, and informative.
Notable is that much like John DeFrancis, Moser seems to be cheering on the "get rid of Chinese characters and replace them with a Latin alphabet" faction, and makes the idea that "China's cultural history is to a great extent encoded and preserved in Chinese characters" sound like a naive and misguided one. Well, I for one happen to agree with it. At some point I really should write that book. He also sides clearly with the "Many Chinese dialects are actually different *languages*" faction. To that I reply, read about the difference between a "language" and a "dialect" in Stephen R. Anderson's Languages: A Very Short Introduction. Moser does himself mention that a "dialect" is often defined more by politics than by linguistic criteria - and that is in fact the case in many places around the world, not just in China. So I have always considered this a non-argument, and think it's fine to respect the preference of native speakers. Some Chinese definitely do disagree that all varieties of Han Chinese are "dialects" - but this is often due largely to political reasons as well. Mutual intelligibility is often *not* the key defining characteristic of a "dialect", in my view. It is in fact a knotty issue that doesn't lend itself well to judgments based on a single criterion.
Recommended nevertheless for anybody interested in a quick introduction to and overview of the development of the modern spoken and written Chinese languages. The book is an easy and fast read, up to date, and informative.
Read
November 12, 2021"How many language groups are there in China? The exact classifications for local languages and dialects are still debated, but seven major groups are conventionally recognised: Mandarin (guanhua官话 or beifanghua北方话,‘ northern speech’), Wu吴, Gan赣, Xiang湘, Min闽, Cantonese (Yue粤), and Hakka (Kejia客家)..."
From A BILLION VOICES: China's Search for a Common Language by David Moser.
A fascinating history of the mechanics and politics of language creation and canonization by David Moser, an American linguist and social scientist living and working in China for decades, both in the university and in television broadcasting.
🗣️Moser covers a lot of ground here, from the very real need for a common language after the fall of the Qing dynasty in the early 1900s, to the ever-shifting nature and creep of "western words" into the language, specifically via the Internet and social media.
"Few of the students are aware that the Chinese they are learning is not the naturally existing ‘language of the Chinese people’ – for there never was such a thing – but is actually an artificially constructed hybrid form, a linguistic patchwork of compromises based upon expediency, history and politics. This linguistic construct is called Putonghua, a 普通话, ‘common speech’, and it is the official version of Chinese now promulgated in the People’s Republic of China."
He also discusses the many non-Han dialects (Tibetan, Uyghur, Mongolian), and the pedagogy of teaching the construct language to a new generation who do not speak this language at home, and the role of television, movies, and social media in language acquisition.
A BILLION VOICES is one of the *many* Penguin Specials from Penguin Australia, various nonfiction and fiction shorts about/from China and Hong Kong. All are available as ebooks (and quite reasonably priced in the US - maybe your region too?) and a little harder to find (but still out there!) paper copies.
This book was a little over 100 pages with notes and was a great primer for Chinese language history and cultural linguistics, as well as the specific politics of language.
#ReadtheWorld21 📍China
From A BILLION VOICES: China's Search for a Common Language by David Moser.
A fascinating history of the mechanics and politics of language creation and canonization by David Moser, an American linguist and social scientist living and working in China for decades, both in the university and in television broadcasting.
🗣️Moser covers a lot of ground here, from the very real need for a common language after the fall of the Qing dynasty in the early 1900s, to the ever-shifting nature and creep of "western words" into the language, specifically via the Internet and social media.
"Few of the students are aware that the Chinese they are learning is not the naturally existing ‘language of the Chinese people’ – for there never was such a thing – but is actually an artificially constructed hybrid form, a linguistic patchwork of compromises based upon expediency, history and politics. This linguistic construct is called Putonghua, a 普通话, ‘common speech’, and it is the official version of Chinese now promulgated in the People’s Republic of China."
He also discusses the many non-Han dialects (Tibetan, Uyghur, Mongolian), and the pedagogy of teaching the construct language to a new generation who do not speak this language at home, and the role of television, movies, and social media in language acquisition.
A BILLION VOICES is one of the *many* Penguin Specials from Penguin Australia, various nonfiction and fiction shorts about/from China and Hong Kong. All are available as ebooks (and quite reasonably priced in the US - maybe your region too?) and a little harder to find (but still out there!) paper copies.
This book was a little over 100 pages with notes and was a great primer for Chinese language history and cultural linguistics, as well as the specific politics of language.
#ReadtheWorld21 📍China
November 12, 2023
Prompted by a brief segment in a Press Club broadcast featuring Penpa Tsering, the president of the Tibetan government-in-exile, I located David Moser's A Billion Voices: China's Search for a Common Language (2016), on the Kindle and began reading.
I am not here to dispute Tibet's quest for autonomy, nor to say whether it is or isn't part of China because I don't know enough about it to have an opinion. I recommend listening to his address to hear what he says.
But clearly, the facts about education and literacy in Tibet are contested. This glowing 2019 report with happy photos is from CGTN, whose headquarters are in Beijing, while the Tibetan Review paints a different picture.
Nevertheless, I do think there's a case to be made for any country to ensure that all its people have access to a uniform language, and sometimes even in places where nationality is not in dispute, that meets with resistance. In the media I see Australia's First Nations people working hard to maintain and resurrect their languages but struggling with English and reliant on translators, and I feel anxious about the choices that their children don't have when they don't go to school.
The West can be criticised for many things, but mass literacy has been a priority in Western societies since industrialisation. Countries that have not achieved this goal for all their people condemn them to poverty and compromised economic development. Literacy enables full participation in society and offers access to information, ideas, health knowledge, and cultural and political activity.
Moser, however, who knows more about this than I ever will, says, however, that in China, the purpose of mandating Putonghua (Standard Chinese) as the common language and especially teaching it to children is to instill a sense of cultural identity, and to strengthen the ‘cohesiveness’ of the people residing within China’s borders. The impact on cultural identity is keenly felt in Tibet and among the Uyghur in Xinjiang, but Moser says that extreme reactions to the imposition of Chinese as the language of instruction are rare.
Anyway...
Moser's book tells me that it was not the Communists who took power in 1949 who mandated a common language in China.
When the Qing dynasty fell to the Xinhai Revolution in 1912, and the Republic of China was formed there was a chasm between the spoken and the written word. Only a tiny elite could read and write classical Chinese.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/11/12/a...
I am not here to dispute Tibet's quest for autonomy, nor to say whether it is or isn't part of China because I don't know enough about it to have an opinion. I recommend listening to his address to hear what he says.
But clearly, the facts about education and literacy in Tibet are contested. This glowing 2019 report with happy photos is from CGTN, whose headquarters are in Beijing, while the Tibetan Review paints a different picture.
Nevertheless, I do think there's a case to be made for any country to ensure that all its people have access to a uniform language, and sometimes even in places where nationality is not in dispute, that meets with resistance. In the media I see Australia's First Nations people working hard to maintain and resurrect their languages but struggling with English and reliant on translators, and I feel anxious about the choices that their children don't have when they don't go to school.
The West can be criticised for many things, but mass literacy has been a priority in Western societies since industrialisation. Countries that have not achieved this goal for all their people condemn them to poverty and compromised economic development. Literacy enables full participation in society and offers access to information, ideas, health knowledge, and cultural and political activity.
Moser, however, who knows more about this than I ever will, says, however, that in China, the purpose of mandating Putonghua (Standard Chinese) as the common language and especially teaching it to children is to instill a sense of cultural identity, and to strengthen the ‘cohesiveness’ of the people residing within China’s borders. The impact on cultural identity is keenly felt in Tibet and among the Uyghur in Xinjiang, but Moser says that extreme reactions to the imposition of Chinese as the language of instruction are rare.
Most ethnic minorities acknowledge the advantages of the language policy, even at the expense of some cultural diversity. Many Tibetan and Uyghur parents have maintained that the problem is not that Putonghua is stressed too much, but rather too little. Faced with the practical reality of trying to succeed in a predominantly Chinese speaking country, both parents and children tend to emphasise Chinese language studies, in part because the gaokao, the national college entrance examination, is administered only in Chinese. (A Billion Voices by David Moser, Penguin Specials, Kindle Edition, Location 1073)
Anyway...
Moser's book tells me that it was not the Communists who took power in 1949 who mandated a common language in China.
When the Qing dynasty fell to the Xinhai Revolution in 1912, and the Republic of China was formed there was a chasm between the spoken and the written word. Only a tiny elite could read and write classical Chinese.
Classical Chinese was almost perversely difficult to learn and master, and a tiny percentage of privileged scholarly elites had the time and leisure to master it. As with all texts in pre-modern China, it was written entirely without punctuation, and stylistically favoured an extreme economy of expression, thus requiring a great deal of background knowledge and context to draw out the meaning from the cryptic text. The classical textual tradition was fundamentally anti-democratic, elitist, and, most importantly, a serious impediment to literacy. The May Fourth intellectuals therefore sought to release the world of Chinese scholarship from the stranglehold of Classical Chinese, and instigated a movement to publish all books in a vernacular form called baihua, (literally ‘plain speech’), a written form grammatically patterned on the standard northern Mandarin dialects, which were at least passively comprehensible by a majority of the Chinese population.
For the May Fourth activists, the baihua movement was not a matter of literary aesthetics; it was a matter of China’s cultural survival. The artificial classical language had remained the official written language of China for more than 2,000 years. Whereas Europe had discarded Latin and was publishing books in the vernacular by the sixteenth century, incredibly, Classical Chinese continued to be the language of Chinese texts until well into the twentieth century. Imagine a London of the 1920s in which all scholarly books were still published in Latin, enjoyed by only a small percentage of literate scholars, while the works of Shakespeare, Dickens and Darwin remained inaccessible to the masses. This is essentially analogous to the case for Chinese literature of the time. In fact, it was not until 1920 that the Chinese Ministry of Education, with intense prodding from the May Fourth scholars and linguists, ordered that primary and middle school texts be changed from Classical Chinese to the vernacular, and mandated that all textbooks be written in baihua. (Literally, 'plain speech') (Loc 333-347).
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/11/12/a...
June 9, 2022
From my first interaction with languages, I heard these whispers about Chinese. There was a gossip that slipped through the cracks of my wall of textbooks: there is no Chinese language!
How come that is?
I mean, there is no “Chinese” per se, but rather a multitude of languafges spreading over the entire territory of today`s China.
I had been curious about this rumor for some time. I searched some videos on YouTube, but there was nothing too satisfactory, that until I stumbled upon this author`s video introduction into the history of what we call today “Chinese”.
It is truly a fascinating story, worth reading about (or listening. I can`t really find the video right now to attach it in here).
Quote:
“The rather imprecise term ‘Mandarin Chinese’ is now used to refer to a range of mutually intelligible varieties of Chinese that have been accepted as the standard official language throughout all the countries and regions of the Chinese diaspora.”
The criticism that I have to give this book may be that at times, it is too pedantic. It went a bit too far with the didactic tone. Indeed, it was advertised as a fun simple way of learning some quick facts about Chinese. But, truly, here are moments in which the author is losing the track, maybe out of enthusiasm, but nonetheless, at times I was drifting away with them and I did not like it that much.
Overall, quite a nice book to make your introduction into the different aspects concerning the Chinese language!
April 20, 2020
A very interesting read after hearing brief explanations from my parents on the changes in Chinese language and writing. Also very satisfying to have the difficulty of learning Chinese explained and spelled out after my years of torture at Chinese school. Moser writes with a sense of humour, a trait greatly needed in a book that delves into the dense history of Chinese linguistics.
“Chinese is phonetic in the way that sex is aerobic; technically true but in practice not the most salient thing about it.”
“Chinese is phonetic in the way that sex is aerobic; technically true but in practice not the most salient thing about it.”
September 16, 2018
This book is a short and sweet introduction to the history and development of Mandarin/guoyu/putonghua. Overall, I found it to be informative and engaging, and I learned things I didn't know, despite being a student of linguistics and Chinese who is studying in China right now.
That being said, I was a little put off by the author's attitude towards the idea of abolishing Chinese characters and replacing them with a phonetic system. He laments the complexity of the current writing system and seems to be in favor of abolishing it entirely, or at least very sympathetic to those who were/are. It's not a position I personally agree with-- as a student of Chinese, I do spend a lot of time practicing characters, but at the same time I in fact find them easier to read than equivalent sentences in pinyin. Short words or sentences presented without context in pinyin are often difficult, if not impossible, to decipher because of the many homophones in the language. Not to mention of course the massive cultural and artistic value of Chinese characters. However, this disagreement didn't color the rest of the book for me, and I would certainly recommend it to anyone studying Mandarin or interested in the topic.
That being said, I was a little put off by the author's attitude towards the idea of abolishing Chinese characters and replacing them with a phonetic system. He laments the complexity of the current writing system and seems to be in favor of abolishing it entirely, or at least very sympathetic to those who were/are. It's not a position I personally agree with-- as a student of Chinese, I do spend a lot of time practicing characters, but at the same time I in fact find them easier to read than equivalent sentences in pinyin. Short words or sentences presented without context in pinyin are often difficult, if not impossible, to decipher because of the many homophones in the language. Not to mention of course the massive cultural and artistic value of Chinese characters. However, this disagreement didn't color the rest of the book for me, and I would certainly recommend it to anyone studying Mandarin or interested in the topic.
August 13, 2018
This book is an example of something called "A penguin special", which is a kind of short introduction to a subject, meant to be able to be read in a single sitting, which is nonetheless packed with information. I didn't know that there is such a thing as a penguin special before reading this book.
This book kind of fills a gap that I've noticed in the litature on Chinese history: while there are plenty of books on the political history of China, I've had trouble finding books on the history of China's language reform. When I was living in Taiwan and started learning traditional characters (prior to that I only read simplified characters), I started noticing patterns to the simplification process, and this got me curious about who was responsible for actually carrying out the simplification process and what their logic was. In some cases the logic is obvious enough. For example, the character 驚, meaning "surprised", is an admitedly rather insane character (my Taiwanese friend Leo likes to describe it as a space-filling curve), but it sounds like 京, which is rather more reasonable. So, they replaced the whole mess with a 京 that has a little heart on the side (to let you know it has something to do with the mind (because in ancient times the Chinese believed consciousness originated in the heart)), giving you 惊. That's reasonable enough.
But then there are examples like 車-->车, where every single instance of a 車-like shape gets replaced with a 车-like shape. For example 東-->东, 連-->连, 軍-->军 etc, where, while the process is at least consistent, it's hard to see what the benefit is. 车 isn't so much simpler than 車 as just different. Perhaps the most bizarre of all is 夠-->够, where there is obviously no reduction in comlexity at all and which just seems to be designed to confuse people with dyslexia.
In any event, here at last is such a book, and while it doesn't go into nearly as much depth as I would have liked (in particular, none of the above is explained), it is better than nothing. One of the more interesting tidbits in the book is that when the Chinese language reform started shortly after the fall of the Qing dynasty, many revolutionaries (Mao included) wanted to do away with Chinese characters entirely, not just simplify them. For example, here is a 1918 open letter written by Qian Xuantong in response to an article written by Chen Duxiu arguing that for China to save itself, it must abandon confucianism:
Dear Mr. Chen,
In an early essay of yours you strongly advocated the abolition of Confucianism. Concerning this proposal of yours I think that it is now the only way to sae China. But opon reading it I have thought of one more thing: if you want to abolish Confucianism, you must first abolish the Chinese [written] language. If you want to get rid of the average person's childish, uncivilised, obstinate way of thinking, then it is all the more essential that you first abolish the Chinese language. To abolish Confucianism and eliminate Taoism is a fundamental way to prevent the fall of China and to allow the Chinese to become a civilised nation in the twentieth century. But a more fundamental way than this is to abolish the written Chinese language, in which Confucian thoughts and fallacious Taoist sayings are recorded.
The book repeats a rumor that I had read somewhere online but can't find anymore, which says that it was Stalin of all people who convinced Mao not to go ahead with his plan to abolish Chinese characters. However, unlike my source on the internet, the book is clear that this is only an unverified rumor.
Personally, I think that had Chinese characters been abolished, it would have been a great loss to the world, for while they are admittedly extremely inefficient, they are also beautiful and wonderfully different, and it's the differences in the world that make it interesting. The author, oddly, doesn't seem to agree - he seems to lament the fact that Mao didn't succeed in this particular language reform:
One can almost hear the ardent language reformers breathe a collective moan of despair at that time. If there was one chance to push through such an utterly radical reform, it would only come now, under the near-total authority of Mao and the momentum of the CCP's mandate. Mao's reversal seemed to represent a missed opportunity of historic proportions.
Besides character reform, much of the book is concerned with how Mandarin (based on - but not exaclty equal to - the Beijing dialectic) was selected as the offical language of China and the extent to which the CCP has been successful in forcing its adoption throughout the country. This apparently took a couple of tries - initially, it was proposed that the national language be a kind of compromise between Northern and Southern languages - however, once this was agreed upon it dawned on the reformers that since this was an invented language with no native speakers, they would have trouble finding teachers to pass it along to the next generation. So, a slightly perturbed copy of the Northern Dialect was settled on as a pragmatic alternative.
I enjoyed this book, but I would have preferred to read a version of it that was several times longer and went into much greater detail about the topics that interest me.
This book kind of fills a gap that I've noticed in the litature on Chinese history: while there are plenty of books on the political history of China, I've had trouble finding books on the history of China's language reform. When I was living in Taiwan and started learning traditional characters (prior to that I only read simplified characters), I started noticing patterns to the simplification process, and this got me curious about who was responsible for actually carrying out the simplification process and what their logic was. In some cases the logic is obvious enough. For example, the character 驚, meaning "surprised", is an admitedly rather insane character (my Taiwanese friend Leo likes to describe it as a space-filling curve), but it sounds like 京, which is rather more reasonable. So, they replaced the whole mess with a 京 that has a little heart on the side (to let you know it has something to do with the mind (because in ancient times the Chinese believed consciousness originated in the heart)), giving you 惊. That's reasonable enough.
But then there are examples like 車-->车, where every single instance of a 車-like shape gets replaced with a 车-like shape. For example 東-->东, 連-->连, 軍-->军 etc, where, while the process is at least consistent, it's hard to see what the benefit is. 车 isn't so much simpler than 車 as just different. Perhaps the most bizarre of all is 夠-->够, where there is obviously no reduction in comlexity at all and which just seems to be designed to confuse people with dyslexia.
In any event, here at last is such a book, and while it doesn't go into nearly as much depth as I would have liked (in particular, none of the above is explained), it is better than nothing. One of the more interesting tidbits in the book is that when the Chinese language reform started shortly after the fall of the Qing dynasty, many revolutionaries (Mao included) wanted to do away with Chinese characters entirely, not just simplify them. For example, here is a 1918 open letter written by Qian Xuantong in response to an article written by Chen Duxiu arguing that for China to save itself, it must abandon confucianism:
Dear Mr. Chen,
In an early essay of yours you strongly advocated the abolition of Confucianism. Concerning this proposal of yours I think that it is now the only way to sae China. But opon reading it I have thought of one more thing: if you want to abolish Confucianism, you must first abolish the Chinese [written] language. If you want to get rid of the average person's childish, uncivilised, obstinate way of thinking, then it is all the more essential that you first abolish the Chinese language. To abolish Confucianism and eliminate Taoism is a fundamental way to prevent the fall of China and to allow the Chinese to become a civilised nation in the twentieth century. But a more fundamental way than this is to abolish the written Chinese language, in which Confucian thoughts and fallacious Taoist sayings are recorded.
The book repeats a rumor that I had read somewhere online but can't find anymore, which says that it was Stalin of all people who convinced Mao not to go ahead with his plan to abolish Chinese characters. However, unlike my source on the internet, the book is clear that this is only an unverified rumor.
Personally, I think that had Chinese characters been abolished, it would have been a great loss to the world, for while they are admittedly extremely inefficient, they are also beautiful and wonderfully different, and it's the differences in the world that make it interesting. The author, oddly, doesn't seem to agree - he seems to lament the fact that Mao didn't succeed in this particular language reform:
One can almost hear the ardent language reformers breathe a collective moan of despair at that time. If there was one chance to push through such an utterly radical reform, it would only come now, under the near-total authority of Mao and the momentum of the CCP's mandate. Mao's reversal seemed to represent a missed opportunity of historic proportions.
Besides character reform, much of the book is concerned with how Mandarin (based on - but not exaclty equal to - the Beijing dialectic) was selected as the offical language of China and the extent to which the CCP has been successful in forcing its adoption throughout the country. This apparently took a couple of tries - initially, it was proposed that the national language be a kind of compromise between Northern and Southern languages - however, once this was agreed upon it dawned on the reformers that since this was an invented language with no native speakers, they would have trouble finding teachers to pass it along to the next generation. So, a slightly perturbed copy of the Northern Dialect was settled on as a pragmatic alternative.
I enjoyed this book, but I would have preferred to read a version of it that was several times longer and went into much greater detail about the topics that interest me.
February 5, 2021
Very informative: it gave me all the history of modern Chinese language that my teacher never told me when studying
December 28, 2021
The backstory of the language reform effort that led to the "simplification" of the Chinese script in about 100 pages, which is really impressive~concise writing, and Moser manages to highlight the absurdity and hilarity and yet the enormity of it all. At times it felt like reading a recap of the most massive data science project ever.
Pretty much all of the information presented here is new to me. I enjoyed learning about Jackie Chan's invention of the word duāng in a shampoo commercial going viral and now I have some better clarity about the actual terms re: learning "Chinese" vs. "Mandarin" vs. "putonghua" vs. "huayu".
Still wrapping my head around all the implications and consequences of these decisions made, and while there were ideas of scrapping the entirety of the Chinese languages + the script itself to opt for, like, Esperanto—Idk but I am glad it did not go that route.
Pretty much all of the information presented here is new to me. I enjoyed learning about Jackie Chan's invention of the word duāng in a shampoo commercial going viral and now I have some better clarity about the actual terms re: learning "Chinese" vs. "Mandarin" vs. "putonghua" vs. "huayu".
Still wrapping my head around all the implications and consequences of these decisions made, and while there were ideas of scrapping the entirety of the Chinese languages + the script itself to opt for, like, Esperanto—Idk but I am glad it did not go that route.
January 26, 2023
4.5 stars - a really concise and well-explained history of Putonghua.
My only very small gripe was that it kept stressing the difficulty of learning the Chinese characters and the Chinese writing system, and while this is true for adult/new learners (esp those used to an alphabetical writing system), I'm skeptical that character acquisition is a problem for native Chinese speakers taught via the 九年义务劳 education system.
When tutoring Mandarin, I'm always really surprised by how different (and IMO much less efficient) textbooks and CFL teaching methods are for foreign students vs. local kids learning to write, and how much easier it would be if CFL learners were taught using some of the techniques I remember from Chinese primary school, such as learning the names of strokes and radicals, and esp. learning stroke order. I do think Chinese can be taught in a manner that significantly decreases its difficulty, but CFL curricula have not yet fully achieved this.
My only very small gripe was that it kept stressing the difficulty of learning the Chinese characters and the Chinese writing system, and while this is true for adult/new learners (esp those used to an alphabetical writing system), I'm skeptical that character acquisition is a problem for native Chinese speakers taught via the 九年义务劳 education system.
When tutoring Mandarin, I'm always really surprised by how different (and IMO much less efficient) textbooks and CFL teaching methods are for foreign students vs. local kids learning to write, and how much easier it would be if CFL learners were taught using some of the techniques I remember from Chinese primary school, such as learning the names of strokes and radicals, and esp. learning stroke order. I do think Chinese can be taught in a manner that significantly decreases its difficulty, but CFL curricula have not yet fully achieved this.
October 3, 2021
Got a complex problem with your country but 200 spare years to solve it? You've come to the right place.
Due to its population and size, China seems to encounter issues that the rest of the world doesn't ever need to worry about. This is a short expose on the trials and tribulations of creating and implementing a common lanuage for 1 billion disparate cultures and peoples. Just your standard Monday morning task.
It's fun to watch the CCP try to solve the unsolvable. Spoiler: in China, it ususally ends in lots of stuff getting banned.
As with most pocket-size books, it's a brief overview that seeks to summarise rather than analyse in depth. As with most pocket-size books, I finished it with a sense that I'll never truly understand the complexity of the issue, but it was a tasty starter for the topic.
Not that I'm ever likely to go back for a 2nd course.
Due to its population and size, China seems to encounter issues that the rest of the world doesn't ever need to worry about. This is a short expose on the trials and tribulations of creating and implementing a common lanuage for 1 billion disparate cultures and peoples. Just your standard Monday morning task.
It's fun to watch the CCP try to solve the unsolvable. Spoiler: in China, it ususally ends in lots of stuff getting banned.
As with most pocket-size books, it's a brief overview that seeks to summarise rather than analyse in depth. As with most pocket-size books, I finished it with a sense that I'll never truly understand the complexity of the issue, but it was a tasty starter for the topic.
Not that I'm ever likely to go back for a 2nd course.
October 18, 2019
Interesting
A well written description of the promotion of Mandarin as a common language to unify the peoples of China and also looking at the script for increasing general literacy. So many arguments and different starts along the way. For readers who enjoy languages and history.
A well written description of the promotion of Mandarin as a common language to unify the peoples of China and also looking at the script for increasing general literacy. So many arguments and different starts along the way. For readers who enjoy languages and history.
Want to read
April 17, 2017WSJ review 2-16-17 OF
February 16, 2020
Sweet little book (only a bit over 100 pages) on the history of Putonghua.
March 3, 2018
A good introduction to the emergence of Modern Standard Mandarin, accessible to the novice, sound enough for the experienced...
...but of course, with plenty to quibble about, depending on your particular bugbear. I find Moser tends to overstate the difficulties of Chinese characters, for example, from page 71:
"Can the character simplification program be considered a success? The general consensus is that the streamlined graphs represent marginal progress - in the way that flyswatters help to decrease the fly population - but are woefully inadequate for ultimately addressing the real problem, which is literacy."
Well, it just so happens Wikipedia has a list of literacy rates by country here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of..., which gives China a 96.4% literacy rate. And further down the page on a list of other territories, it gives Macau 96.2% and Taiwan 98.7%. And here's a report from South China Morning Post from December last year (http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/ar...), which says: "In the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2016, released this week, the city was ranked third, with an average score of 569, behind Russia with 581 and Singapore with 576."
And yet Moser doesn't give us much more than an assertion of how difficult and time-consuming it is to learn to read Chinese characters to back up his claim that the characters are a major hindrance to literacy.
Now, there's plenty wrong with literacy rates and their reporting, and also with Wikipedia, but it seems to me that if Moser's going to keep claiming that Chinese characters are a serious impediment to literacy, he's going to have to put up some hard evidence. And yet the evidence available from a few seconds googling does not seem to support his claim....
But still I give this book four stars, because if you're interested in a good, solid round-up of how Modern Standard Mandarin emerged into the world, you could certainly do worse than A Billion Voices.
...but of course, with plenty to quibble about, depending on your particular bugbear. I find Moser tends to overstate the difficulties of Chinese characters, for example, from page 71:
"Can the character simplification program be considered a success? The general consensus is that the streamlined graphs represent marginal progress - in the way that flyswatters help to decrease the fly population - but are woefully inadequate for ultimately addressing the real problem, which is literacy."
Well, it just so happens Wikipedia has a list of literacy rates by country here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of..., which gives China a 96.4% literacy rate. And further down the page on a list of other territories, it gives Macau 96.2% and Taiwan 98.7%. And here's a report from South China Morning Post from December last year (http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/ar...), which says: "In the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2016, released this week, the city was ranked third, with an average score of 569, behind Russia with 581 and Singapore with 576."
And yet Moser doesn't give us much more than an assertion of how difficult and time-consuming it is to learn to read Chinese characters to back up his claim that the characters are a major hindrance to literacy.
Now, there's plenty wrong with literacy rates and their reporting, and also with Wikipedia, but it seems to me that if Moser's going to keep claiming that Chinese characters are a serious impediment to literacy, he's going to have to put up some hard evidence. And yet the evidence available from a few seconds googling does not seem to support his claim....
But still I give this book four stars, because if you're interested in a good, solid round-up of how Modern Standard Mandarin emerged into the world, you could certainly do worse than A Billion Voices.
May 2, 2018
As he tells the story of the adoption, promotion and spread of 普通话, "the common tongue", the official language of the PRC, what English-speakers might call 'Mandarin', Moser breezily introduces some salient aspects of Chinese language(s), some amusing personalities who argued over it (them) through the last century, and the motivations for and implications of language policies as they have either changed or simply been enforced more thoroughly.
Given the tremendous linguistic variety in this great nation, back in the Republican period (as to the alert today), "to many people the imposition of a national language seemed to entail that a huge proportion of the Chinese people would actually have to be taught how to 'speak Chinese'." (64) As Moser says, poignant indeed. How the suitor and the husband differ! What was the convoluted rhetorical stance of a hopeful Party in 1934 became another stick with which to beat the diversity and the spirit out of the People after the honeymoon was over. Moser makes no secret of his attitude to the tenor of the present regime, nor his bemusement at the unecessary complexity of Chinese script and how it consumes so much of its native users' mental energy. On the latter point I am more inclined to enjoy it than he is, but I very much understand where he is coming from.
The book reads like an extended feature in a quality magazine, learned but not too learned, a blend of fact and opinion, and from my perspective rather too slim a volume to justify its price. It also suffers from being rather rushed; there are many more infelicities of grammar, syntax and spelling than 120 small pages (yes, the pages are very small) really call for. And yet it still deserves four stars for its boldness, its sense of fun, and the attempt to educate non-Chinese about what is and will continue to be one of the most important languages around.
Given the tremendous linguistic variety in this great nation, back in the Republican period (as to the alert today), "to many people the imposition of a national language seemed to entail that a huge proportion of the Chinese people would actually have to be taught how to 'speak Chinese'." (64) As Moser says, poignant indeed. How the suitor and the husband differ! What was the convoluted rhetorical stance of a hopeful Party in 1934 became another stick with which to beat the diversity and the spirit out of the People after the honeymoon was over. Moser makes no secret of his attitude to the tenor of the present regime, nor his bemusement at the unecessary complexity of Chinese script and how it consumes so much of its native users' mental energy. On the latter point I am more inclined to enjoy it than he is, but I very much understand where he is coming from.
The book reads like an extended feature in a quality magazine, learned but not too learned, a blend of fact and opinion, and from my perspective rather too slim a volume to justify its price. It also suffers from being rather rushed; there are many more infelicities of grammar, syntax and spelling than 120 small pages (yes, the pages are very small) really call for. And yet it still deserves four stars for its boldness, its sense of fun, and the attempt to educate non-Chinese about what is and will continue to be one of the most important languages around.
September 16, 2021
This short book was a fascinating look at the push for standardization of the Chinese language. Moser concisely explained the linguistics, history and politics of the push to make a codified and unified Chinese language since the last years of the Qing dynasty. He follows the push to eliminate the Chinese ideograms in favor of a phonetic system as well as the pushback that resulted in the creation of pinyin and a partially successful simplification of the ideograms. He then focuses on the ambivalent push the Chinese government of the new standardized Chinese in schools, radio and television as well the pushback it met by regions devoted to their dialect and the ways they searched to keep it alive. Definitely worth the quick read.
December 28, 2020
我是澳大利亚出生的，爸妈是上海-无锡人，所以家里是说上海话。我小时候上过中文学校，但是我总是对“普通话”的理解感到挣扎应为更上海话的区别太大了。this short book was an enlightening story about the history of contemporary chinese language, and the various political, psychosocial, and ideological issues related to adopting a "common language", which not only had the power to unify, but also to oppress ethnic minorities within PRC's jurisdiction. now i know why learning "pǔtōnghuà" chinese was such a bloody struggle for me, and i am glad that i still hold onto my 上海话 dialect as an ideological act of defiance.
January 24, 2017
Great piece
Well written, humorous and folksy writing style covers up the academic strength and rigor underlying the treatise covering the emergence and evolution of China's modern language policy
Well written, humorous and folksy writing style covers up the academic strength and rigor underlying the treatise covering the emergence and evolution of China's modern language policy
February 11, 2018
The People’s Republic of China contains a billion people. It is a political fiction to say that they all speak dialects of the same language. Vast regions containing millions of people speak languages which are mutually unintelligible. Paradoxically, the written form of the languages vary quite little, because the writing system does not reflect sound. Chinese characters are non-phonetic. Thus, speakers of the different languages of China can look at the same characters and derive the same understanding from them, even though the sound of their utterances may differ. By comparison, a speaker of English would look at the symbols 3+4=7, and pronounce that as “three plus four is seven.” A speaker of Spanish would look at the same symbols and read it as “tres más quatro es siete.” But both speakers will understand the same idea from those symbols.
In order to unify the language of China, the central government is pushing a somewhat artificial language, based largely on the “dialect” of Beijing. It is called putonghua (普通话). This book tells the story of the political and intellectual forces behind its creation, as well as the practical problem of educating millions of people in how to speak it. It also tells of the pushback from language communities which fear a loss of local/regional culture when their language is related to second-class status. The book is fairly short, but quite adequate to satisfy the curiosity of a non-Sinologist.
In order to unify the language of China, the central government is pushing a somewhat artificial language, based largely on the “dialect” of Beijing. It is called putonghua (普通话). This book tells the story of the political and intellectual forces behind its creation, as well as the practical problem of educating millions of people in how to speak it. It also tells of the pushback from language communities which fear a loss of local/regional culture when their language is related to second-class status. The book is fairly short, but quite adequate to satisfy the curiosity of a non-Sinologist.
February 4, 2020
A Billion Voices recounts the development of modern China's standardized language, putonghua 普通话.
From romanisation methods to regional dialects, Moser teases out the tangled linguistic problems facing twentieth century language reformers in China. The potential solutions proposed at that time are fascinating. Slight shifts in tides may have resulted in China abandoning the character system in favor of the Latin alphabet or developing an entirely new alphabet altogether.
Quotes
"Chinese characters are so difficult to learn that even the best system of rudimentary characters, or simplified teaching, does not equip the people with a really efficient and rich vocabulary. Sooner or later, we believe, we will have to abandon characters altogether, if we are to create a new social culture in which the masses fully participate."
Mao Zedong - Page 57
"A shared language does not imply a shared vision for society. With the establishment of Putonghua, China may well achieve its ultimate goal of language unity—a billion voices speaking as one—only to find social and political unity as elusive as ever."
Page 106
From romanisation methods to regional dialects, Moser teases out the tangled linguistic problems facing twentieth century language reformers in China. The potential solutions proposed at that time are fascinating. Slight shifts in tides may have resulted in China abandoning the character system in favor of the Latin alphabet or developing an entirely new alphabet altogether.
Quotes
"Chinese characters are so difficult to learn that even the best system of rudimentary characters, or simplified teaching, does not equip the people with a really efficient and rich vocabulary. Sooner or later, we believe, we will have to abandon characters altogether, if we are to create a new social culture in which the masses fully participate."
Mao Zedong - Page 57
"A shared language does not imply a shared vision for society. With the establishment of Putonghua, China may well achieve its ultimate goal of language unity—a billion voices speaking as one—only to find social and political unity as elusive as ever."
Page 106
May 24, 2024
A great book about the Chinese language(s)
Today we take it for granted that there is one Chinese language that every Chinese speaks. This book is a reminder of how recent it has been that case. I always wondered why European languages like Italian and Spanish are considered different languages when they sound so similar, while Chinese (Putonghua) and Cantonese are considered different dialects of the same language when they sound so different. It turns out there’s no clear boundaries between languages and dialects as the author claims. Another interesting point is the separation of the Chinese written language and the Chinese spoken languages. It never occurred to me that the traditional written materials were not records of how people spoke. It’s in its own separate form.
Today we take it for granted that there is one Chinese language that every Chinese speaks. This book is a reminder of how recent it has been that case. I always wondered why European languages like Italian and Spanish are considered different languages when they sound so similar, while Chinese (Putonghua) and Cantonese are considered different dialects of the same language when they sound so different. It turns out there’s no clear boundaries between languages and dialects as the author claims. Another interesting point is the separation of the Chinese written language and the Chinese spoken languages. It never occurred to me that the traditional written materials were not records of how people spoke. It’s in its own separate form.
January 27, 2019
This is short but lots of interesting tidbits. The parts about Chinese characters were pretty familiar to me, but a useful corrective to the constant nonsense written about the topic (parts of it were borrowed from Moser's classic essay, "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard," which is definitely worth a read). More interesting to me were the fanatical lengths China has gone to to create a standard language for Chinese people, the history of script reform (an effort originally intended to go farther than it did but sacrificed for political considerations), and the importance of pinyin in promulgating standard pronunciations. I think this book helps give context to the Chinese government's contentious efforts to eliminate Cantonese in Hong Kong.
March 25, 2018
This was a fun read, and I strongly recommend it to any serious student of the Chinese language. Moser gives a good blend of history and ground level explanations of Chinese language. I have studied Chinese for a few years now, though I still came away having learned a little from his linguistic sidetracks.
This book could have used a better editor, however. There were some formatting issues and typos that distracted from what is otherwise a lovely, concise review of how modern Putonghua emerged from thousands of years of Chinese history and decades of attempts at developing a modern language to accommodate the millions and millions of Chinese speakers.
This book could have used a better editor, however. There were some formatting issues and typos that distracted from what is otherwise a lovely, concise review of how modern Putonghua emerged from thousands of years of Chinese history and decades of attempts at developing a modern language to accommodate the millions and millions of Chinese speakers.
May 9, 2020
Lovely short little book about the history of Putonghua. It had the perfect combination of history, linguistics and analysis. I learned a lot about the context of Putonghua and pinyin and their relationship to the CPC and the KMT and how it differs slightly from the Beijing dialect and 國語 (gwok jyu) and the various attempts at standardising both the spoken and written language. There was also a small amount of information about non-Han ethnicities in China and how their minority languages have been treated in CPC laws. Highly recommended for people interested in the Chinese language and China in general.
May 5, 2019
In this short book, David Moser does an excellent job of explaining how China struggled to develop a single language for all of its citizens. This was no easy task, as this book points out, given that China has always had a multiplicity of local languages that are mutually unintelligible. If you want to know more about China's language, how China's scholars developed a single language for the nation, and how China's leaders have since worked indefatigably to promote a single language in its attempt to create national unity, I highly recommend this book.
November 9, 2019
There was a lot of information packed into this little volume, all of it engagingly written. A colleague at the Mandarin immersion school where I work gave it to me, and I was amazed to learn that the Chinese that I am currently learning is a recent development. Moser gives insight both into the particulars of China and the bigger picture ideas of language and identity, national identity, and the democracy of literacy.
December 29, 2019
Short book on China's efforts starting in the 20th century to unify the Chinese topolects into a single language, both written and spoken. Includes many interesting and juicy details. Minus one star for harping on about how horrible Chinese characters are, which always feels icky to me when it's non-Chinese linguists arguing about how much abandoning the characters will improve the language and literacy situation.
December 15, 2021
This book is very informative and interesting, it details the historical process behind creating and selecting the spoken and written language to unify a nation of over 1 billion people, which is definitely no ordinary feat! For thousands of years, China has been a vast assortment of mutually unintelligible spoken languages, and the written language was historically complex due to its classist origins. This book describes how the governments in the 20th century aimed to resolve these issues, as language unification was paramount to nation building, but a massive obstacle to overcome.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 56 reviews