Reuters: Oddly Enough: Say what? China says 400 million can't speak national language

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Say what? China says 400 million can't speak national language Sep 5th 2013, 10:49 Tweet Share this Email Print Related Topics Oddly Enough » Lifestyle » Passengers waiting to board trains crowd Beijing Railway Station February 7, 2013. Credit: Reuters/Jason Lee BEIJING | Thu Sep 5, 2013 6:49am EDT BEIJING (Reuters) - More than 400 million Chinese are unable to speak the national language Mandarin, and large numbers in the rest of the country speak it badly, state media said on Thursday as the government launched another push for linguistic unity. China's ruling Communist Party has promoted Mandarin for decades to unite a nation with thousands of often mutually unintelligible dialects and numerous minority languages, but has been hampered by the country's size and lack of investment in education, especially in poor rural areas. Officials have admitted they will probably never get the whole country to be able to speak Mandarin, formally called Putonghua in China, meaning "common tongue", suggesting everyone should be able to speak it. Ministry of Education spokeswoman Xu Mei said that only 70 percent of the country could speak Mandarin, many of them poorly, and the remaining 30 percent or 400 million people could not speak it at all, Xinhua news agency reported. "The country still needs to invest in promoting Mandarin," it quoted her as saying, ahead of an annual campaign to promote Mandarin held every year since 1998. "This year the ministry will focus on the remote countryside and areas inhabited by ethnic minorities," Xu said. The promotion of Mandarin has long been a contentious issue in China, despite the practical benefits of having the entire population fluent in one tongue, and in some cases has lead to violent unrest. Tibetans have protested against having to use Mandarin in schools, while in 2010 several hundred people took to the streets in the southern city of Guangzhou over fears the authorities were trying to marginalize Cantonese. (Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Nick Macfie) Tweet this Link this Share this Digg this Email Reprints We welcome comments that advance the story through relevant opinion, anecdotes, links and data. If you see a comment that you believe is irrelevant or inappropriate, you can flag it to our editors by using the report abuse links. Views expressed in the comments do not represent those of Reuters. For more information on our comment policy, see http://blogs.reuters.com/fulldisclosure/2010/09/27/toward-a-more-thoughtful-conversation-on-stories/ Comments (0) Be the first to comment on reuters.com. Add yours using the box above.

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