Why does China want to protect the diversity of its language on the one hand and promote Putonghua as the common language on the other hand?

On the one hand, the spread of Putonghua helps people from different regions to understand each other better, promoting cultural and economic exchange. China’s law encourages the use of Putonghua but never quells dialects. In protecting dialects, we are preserving the roots of local cultures.

How many languages are spoken in China today?

Linguists believe that there are 297 living languages in China today. These languages are geographically defined, and are found in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Tibet. Mandarin Chinese is the most popular language in China, with over 955 million speakers out of China’s total population of 1.21 billion people.

What is the main spoken dialect in modern China?

Mandarin
The official dialect of China is Mandarin, also call “Putonghua”. More than 70\% of the Chinese population speaks Mandarin, but there are also several other major dialects in use in China: Yue (Cantonese), Xiang (Hunanese), Min dialect, Gan dialect, Wu dialect, and Kejia or Hakka dialect.

What is by far the most spoken dialect of Chinese?

Mandarin. This is the group spoken in northern and southwestern China and has by far the most speakers. This group includes the Beijing dialect, which forms the basis for Standard Chinese, called Putonghua or Guoyu in Chinese, and often also translated as “Mandarin” or simply “Chinese”.

What are the dying languages in China?

China

Language	Status	Comments
Mra language	Critically endangered	Also spoken in: India
Muda language	Vulnerable
Muji language	Definitely endangered
Mulam language	Vulnerable

Is the Chinese language dying?

Main stream Chinese language (Putonghua) is not dying but some of the dialects are dying especially dialects that are not so widely spoken. Chinese central government is trying very hard to assimilate Southern Chinese by limiting usage of their dialects.

Is English widely spoken in China?

There are hundreds of millions of people in China studying English, but less than 1\% of Mainland Chinese are conversational, according to some estimates. Not surprisingly, more English is spoken in China’s large cities than in the smaller towns. Don’t panic!

How can China protect the integrity of its language?

The Chinese government, which attempts to protect the integrity of its language by removing foreign words from dictionaries. While legally and government-enforced methods may be effective to a point, the UN and others agree there are better ways to preserve a country’s mainstream languages as well as lesser-used dialects.

What do young Hong Kongers think of the Chinese government?

Fewer and fewer young people in Hong Kong identified themselves as Chinese nationals, as found by pollsters at the University of Hong Kong. The younger respondents were, the more distrustful they were of the Chinese government.

Can China control global discourse?

While we can expect this type of direct pressure to increase as China gains increasing global influence, China will never be able to directly control discourse externally as effectively as it does internally. For that, it has sought out and found eager hosts among the most important conveyors of American soft power.

Is the Human Rights Council’s letter to China a document?

The text of the first letter, criticizing China, has been made available (PDF); the second letter has not yet made its way into the general public but both letters reportedly included requests that they be recorded as documents of the Human Rights Council’s just-concluded 41st Session.