General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out that many deeply impoverished areas have been closed for a long time and are disconnected from the outside world. In some ethnic minority areas, "many people do not learn Chinese, do not know Chinese characters, do not understand Mandarin, and the eldest children drop out of school with their children." General Secretary Xi Jinping's words profoundly pointed out that the problem of language and writing is one of the important reasons for deep poverty. A unified language is essential for national unity, national unity, social progress and economic development. Continuing to vigorously promote Putonghua in poor areas is conducive to accelerating the modernization of education and completing the mission of language poverty alleviation.
At the same time, General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out during his inspection in Yunnan that the construction of new rural areas should "fully reflect the characteristics of rural areas, pay attention to local taste, retain rural styles, retain green mountains and green waters, and remember homesickness." "The native tongue of the dialect is an important part of preserving the taste of the countryside and remembering nostalgia. Rich local dialects and national languages inherit the unique cultural customs of various places, and are important linguistic and cultural treasures, and once they die, many local cultures relying on them will disappear with them.
General Secretary Xi Jinping's exposition on "poverty alleviation" and "retaining nostalgia" is full of dialectical materialist thinking of Marxist philosophy, which is the scientific program and action guide for my Chinese writing work.
China's territory is vast, the population is large, the economic and cultural development of various regions is unbalanced, the popularity of Putonghua is uneven, and the retention of dialects is also different. Therefore, I Chinese the work of chinese and written language should be timely, appropriate, and appropriate, adopt a differentiated language policy, properly handle the relationship between "promoting Putonghua" and "protecting language resources", and on the one hand, vigorously carry out language poverty alleviation and popularization of Putonghua in the old, young, and border and poor areas with complex Chinese dialects and ethnic languages, and complete the great mission of poverty alleviation; at the same time, we must protect language resources in economically developed areas where Putonghua is highly popular and the dialect is declining, and retain the nostalgia of the hometown.
In the "Impression of the City" exhibition held in Yantai, Shandong Province, the interesting dialects of various cities attracted many citizens to watch. Xinhua News Agency
1. Promote Putonghua and poverty alleviation
To get rid of poverty, we must pay attention to the combination of poverty alleviation and wisdom support. Zhizhi is to improve the cultural literacy and wisdom ability of the poor, "a strong country must first strengthen the language, strong language to help the strong country" and "poverty alleviation first to help the intellect, the wisdom should be the first to understand the language" The policy is the best explanation of language to help the intellect and language to help the poor. Although the average penetration rate of Mandarin in China has exceeded 70%, the development is uneven, the penetration rate in large cities is more than 90%, many rural areas are only about 40%, and some ethnic areas are even lower.
At present, the focus of China's poverty alleviation is on 14 concentrated contiguous areas of extreme poverty, such as the Liupan Mountains, the Qinba Mountains, and the Wuling Mountains, of which 11 are ethnic minority residential areas, and the others are border and poor areas with complex dialects, the geographical environment is harsh, the ecological environment is fragile, the popularity rate of Putonghua is not high, and many young and middle-aged farmers and herdsmen are unable to communicate and communicate in Mandarin, which seriously affects the economic development of individuals and even the entire region, and becomes an obstacle to individuals getting rid of poverty and getting rich, affecting local economic and social development. It is an important factor restricting the country to build a moderately prosperous society in an all-round way and even affecting the unity and harmony of nationalities
Actively promoting Putonghua among the poor population in ethnic language areas and Chinese dialect areas can reduce the difficulties in communication, promote the dissemination of knowledge and technology, and then improve the cultural level and economic development level of poor areas, and achieve the goal of poverty alleviation in China."By 2020, the new labor force of poor families should all have the ability to communicate and apply the national common language and writing."
2. Use the vernacular to retain nostalgia
While actively promoting Mandarin, we must also pay attention to protecting language resources. The promotion of Putonghua is to promote unity, economic development and poverty eradication, while the protection of language resources is to inherit historical culture. In areas with a high level of economic development and a high penetration rate of Putonghua, in the face of the decline of dialects, effective ways should be adopted to protect them.
Dialects and national languages are the carriers of local cultures and intangible cultural heritage with regional characteristics. Traditional folklore, folk songs, local operas, etc., all need to be carried and disseminated through the vivid local language transmitted orally, and only the written materials recorded cannot be passed on. The pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar of spoken dialects are living fossils of ancient languages and the most valuable living materials for the study of historical linguistics. Mandarin is essentially derived from dialects, and dialects enrich and nourish Putonghua, which is an inexhaustible source of The development of Mandarin. Dialect is also the bond of emotion, the basis of nostalgia and homesickness. Since people with the same dialect have a higher sense of identity, economic and cultural exchanges in areas with the same dialect are easier to carry out. For example, the scope of economic and cultural energy radiation in Shanghai is mainly concentrated in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, which have similar dialect cultural backgrounds, and this same dialect radiation phenomenon also exists in the Cantonese dialect area centered on Guangzhou.
Since the reform and opening up, the cross-regional movement of population has intensified, and consciously learning and using Mandarin has become a need to improve work and living standards. In economically developed areas, the popularity of Mandarin has reached more than 90%, and 100% among adolescents, while dialects have declined at an unprecedented rate, especially the ability of adolescents with intergenerational inheritance to acquire and use dialects has declined off a cliff. Even people who are proficient in dialects tend to use Mandarin to express new information and new things when communicating, and the use of dialects is mostly limited to daily life. As the linguist Liu Danqing said: "Many native speakers of dialects have lost the ability to establish a phonetic correspondence between the common language vocabulary and the words in the dialect, and have lost the ability to convert the common sentence form into dialect expressions, and the existing words and expressions constitute a solidified thesaurus and a limited structure form library, losing the breeding ability that language should have." Such a code has deviated from the producibility of language, indicating an unsustainable prospect. "The ability of young and middle-aged people to use dialects is an important indicator of the vitality and prospects of dialects, and from this point of view, the prospects of intergenerational transmission of dialects are not optimistic."
3. Differentiated Language Policy
To properly handle the relationship between popularizing the national common language and protecting dialects and ethnic languages, it is necessary to establish the awareness that language resources are important cultural, economic and strategic resources of the country, strengthen overall planning and coordination, and strive to form a construction and management mechanism of "orderly development, diversified input, and social sharing". In terms of specific policies and measures, it is necessary to differentiate policies in different regions and at different stages.
In the early days of the founding of New China, China adopted a strong national policy to promote Putonghua, which was very effective, and there were many valuable experiences that could be inherited and promoted. Since the new period, relevant departments have repeatedly issued articles emphasizing the promotion of Putonghua and launched a series of language poverty alleviation measures, such as increasing support for the teaching and research, curriculum development, construction of teaching materials and publication of Putonghua for ethnic minority students to learn Putonghua; continuing to implement the Putonghua training program for bilingual teachers in ethnic minority areas, strictly implementing the regulations on the standard of Putonghua qualifications for teachers; implementing the training program for cadres and young and middle-aged farmers and herdsmen in remote and ethnic minority areas, and carrying out Putonghua training services and vocational and technical training in areas where labor is exported and imported Promote counterpart support provinces and cities to include Putonghua training programs in the scope of counterpart support in ethnic minority areas, establish a long-term volunteer service system, and explicitly incorporate the improvement of Putonghua penetration rate into the performance appraisal of poverty alleviation work in local poverty alleviation and education departments, and include it in the main work tasks of cadres stationed in villages, and strive for practical results.
While promoting Putonghua in ethnic minority areas, attention should also be paid to protecting ethnic language resources. The "Thirteenth Five-Year Development Plan" of the National Language and Writing Undertaking proposes to carry out the project of inheriting and protecting China's outstanding language and culture, implement the project of protecting the resources of Chinese and Chinese, collect and sort out the actual corpus and network corpus of Chinese dialects, minority languages and folk oral culture, build a large-scale and sustainable development of multimedia language resource library, develop a language display system, and compile and improve the basic series of achievements such as the atlas and language history of Chinese and Chinese.
In urban areas where China's economy is developed or more developed and the penetration rate of Putonghua is already quite high, policies to protect language resources should be adopted. While publicizing and promoting Mandarin, it emphasizes the value of dialects and the importance of protecting dialects, and advocates that society give a relatively relaxed public opinion atmosphere to the multilingual environment dominated by the common language. Actively build a healthy and orderly multilingual society dominated by the common language and writing, encourage people to switch freely according to different communicative environments, insist on speaking Mandarin in formal occasions, and let dialects play a role in promoting nostalgia and family affection in daily life, and advocate the use of dialects to play a role in the prosperity of folk culture in the field of literature and art.
The promotion of Mandarin and the protection of dialects are dialectically unified. At the present stage, the language and writing work is to unremittingly promote Putonghua in poor areas with complex languages, improve the people's language communication ability, and promote regional economic and social development; at the same time, it is also necessary to take protective measures for declining dialects in economically developed areas with a high popularity rate of Putonghua and actively inherit local culture. There is no contradiction between promoting Mandarin and protecting dialects, as long as the principles are well grasped, the two can coexist and develop together.
Author: Zhang Jie (Researcher of institute of linguistics of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Special Researcher of Xi Jinping Research Center for Socialism with Chinese Characteristics in the New Era, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)
Source | The language text weekly report ID | Yuyanwenzizhoubao by | Zhang Jie
Editor-in-charge | Sun Xiaoning, editor, | Wang Weimin, Editor-in-Chief, | Chen Hui