Friday marked the 25th International Mother Language Day, a UNESCO observance for promoting the preservation and protection of linguistic diversity. For Tibetan communities on the Tibetan plateau and in the diaspora, the issue...
Recent media pieces have drawn attention to the growing popularity of Mandarin and the use of language in promoting socio-economic ties between China and other countries, especially in the Global South. One primary example is in...
In the face of growing government repression, many residents of Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and various provinces of China have fled abroad to seek refuge. This fateful decision to uproot one’s life splits identity between a native...
Chinese authorities are continuing their efforts to Sinicize religious and ethnic minorities. Religious practices during Ramadan were stifled and censored this year, and many mosques across China have been stripped of their...
The Douban comment was not inflammatory. In fact, it didn’t even betray an overt opinion. But for censors, it was too much. “A note for posterity: this will be Inner Mongolia’s last Mongolian-language gaokao,” it read. Censors...
Five years after his arrest on charges of inciting separatism, Tashi Wangchuk, an advocate for Tibetan-language education, has been released from prison. He attempted to use legal avenues to reinstitute Tibetan-language...
The Associated Press’ Huizhong Wu reports that at least 23 people have been detained following protests across Inner Mongolia against recently announced language education reforms. The new policies would gradually replace...
While China is often accused of stoking ethnic tensions by marginalizing minority languages, the...
At his Culturally Curious blog, Matt Adler talks to Columbia University’s Robert Barnett...
Linguist Abduweli Ayup returned to Xinjiang after studying in the U.S. with the goal of opening...
Up to 40% of China’s minority languages may be at risk of extinction. Phonemica, a project aiming to document China’s threatened languages and dialects through stories told by native speakers, is currently raising...
A widespread fear among Tibetans, both at home and in exile, is that their language will die out. Education reforms relegating Tibetan to secondary status in schools are one of the core grievances against Chinese authorities,...
From Smh.com: CHINGLISH, the often funny mistranslation of Chinese into English, may soon be harder to find as Beijing prepares to standardise translations of thousands of Chinese dishes and public signs before the 2008 Olympic Games. The city, determined to promote itself as modern and sophisticated, is planning to get rid of translations such as […]
From the Jewish Telegraphic Agency: S.H. Chang is a Yiddish specialist at Wenzao Ursuline College of Languages in Taiwan. She may be one of a kind ” after all, you don’t find many Chinese academics in Taiwan studying and writing about Yiddish. A soft-spoken Taiwanese woman in her early 30s who has written about and […]
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