MCLC: 400 million Chinese can't speak Mandarin (3)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Magnus Fiskesjo <magnus.fiskesjo at cornell.edu>
Subject: 400 million Chinese can't speak Mandarin (3)
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--this is of course premised on the politically motivated choice
enforcement of a national language started in the 20th century and is only
presented as something natural, inevitable. I was reminded just the other
day (in a lecture on the threat posed to the Javanese language --one of
the world's 10 largest languages-- by the enforcement of Indonesian, the
national language artificially imposed on Indonesian schoolchildren in
ways very similar to how putonghua is used to eradicate both minor and
major languages in China) of how this affects even major languages in
modern China. (As per the definitions used in linguistics, a language is
one not intelligible by speakers of another language, so the languages
south of the Yangtze should be properly called that and not dialects, if
per any scientific definition --but, they are of course called dialects
for the very purposes of downgrading & eradicating them).

ps. Does anyone know what are the best linguistic & sociolinguistic
studies of the ongoing demise of major southern Chinese languages, such as
Wu (Shanghainese)? I wonder if they exist. (Such work, on the endangerment
of major languages spoken by millions, apparently has only just started in
Indonesia.)

sincerely,

Magnus Fiskesjö