In a world of Ebonics and Esperanto, standardized languages remain the key to literacy and world peace. Note even the difference between designating age from birth versus year one differs between Chinese and English.
Pictographic simplification in the various language reform programs only reveals the bureaucratic nature of state capitalism and the problem of uneven development in the historical advancement of socialism. Here, ideographic development signifies ideological developments as Chinese has less formalized and even more uneven solutions to manage phonetic elements in which Japanese has attempted as Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji.
Prior to the twentieth century, Chinese governments of the imperial period seem to have taken little notice of language problems. The sociolinguistic situation which prevailed for many centuries, wherein governmental business was carried out either in the written literary language or in the oral lingua franca based on the speech of the imperial capital, served the practical needs of the government quite well.
- There is not a unique "Chinese language". There is a group of related ways of speaking, which some may call dialects, others call "topolects" (a calque of Chinese 方言, fāngyán; DeFrancis uses the term "regionalects"), and still others would regard as separate languages, many of which are not mutually intelligible.
- One such variant, based on the speech of the Beijing area, has been chosen as the standard language in the People's Republic of China, and is now known as Pǔtōnghuà, or "common language". Linguists writing in English often use the term Modern Standard Chinese to refer to the same language.
- The Chinese writing system has a heavy phonological basis, shown in the phonetic elements present in more than 95% of total Chinese characters (not balanced by frequency of use). Unfortunately, they are missing from many common characters, and their utility was somewhat diminished by historical changes in both pronunciation and graphical forms. Even then, DeFrancis estimates that 66% of phonetic elements are still "useful" (pp. 109–110). Many scholars focused exclusively on the semantic elements of Chinese characters, missing the point that phonetic elements are a necessary resource for Chinese readers. The Chinese script is not a brilliant ideographic script; it is a poor phonetic script.
- Although there are characters in the Chinese writing system that visually represent concepts, such as 一 二 三 for "one", "two", and "three", Chinese writing is not ideographic in the sense that the symbols represent ideas divorced from language. There can be no such thing as a completely ideographic writing system, where there would be symbols to stand for all possible individual concepts and where morphemes or phonemes would play no significant role in writing individual words. For instance, most Chinese monosyllabic morphemes are written as phono-semantic compounds that include a non-ideographic, phonetic element.
- The Chinese script, with its huge number of characters, its complexity and its irregularities, is harmful to the literacy improvement efforts of the Chinese society, and needs to be replaced by a more efficient writing system if China is to achieve the benefits of modernization.
In general, the communist government which took power in 1949 continued the linguistic policies of the former regime, expressing strong support for a single báihuà as the common written language was further strengthened, and the use of Putonghua was curtailed altogether.
Little official action on the language reform front was taken until the mid-1950s. Among the resolutions of the National Script Reform Congress which met in October 1955 were suggestions concerning reform and simplification of the traditional logographic script, as well as suggestions about promoting the study of national language, now officially called Putonghua (Mandarin Chinese) ‘the common language’.
Perhaps the most dramatic steps in language policy have been those concerned with the reform and simplification of the traditional script, long felt to be too complicated and difficult to learn. Reform of the writing system is the chief concern of the Committee on Script Reform which is an organ of the State Council, the highest administrative organ in the People’s Republic of China. The first major step in script reform took place in 1956 with the publication of a list of 515 characters, of which twenty were to be abolished outright and the remainder simplified to some degree; most commonly simplification took the form of reducing the number of strokes in a given character, but in a few cases the components were changed dramatically.
The future direction of script reform at the present time is somewhat unclear. Some further simplification is possible on a minor scale, but there is a wide-spread feeling that a period of stability and efforts toward greater standardization in use of characters is now needed (Norman 256).