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With more than 1.3 billion people, China exhibits an array of diversity in many domains, including education and language. The 2000 census shows a population of more than 106 million for ethnic minorities, most of whom speak one of the approximately 120 identified minority languages. This entry describes the linguistic diversity of ethnic minorities in mainland China from a sociolinguistic perspective. Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao are excluded from general discussion because the situations of minority languages in these regions differ substantially from that in the mainland. In Taiwan, many aboriginal languages have undergone a series of experiences that involve linguistic suppression, language loss, and revitalization for some linguistic groups. Minority languages in Hong Kong and Macao, on the other hand, are imported through new migrants from other countries, even if they have been spoken for centuries in the region—for example, Portuguese.

Ethnic Diversity and Complexity in China

The Chinese term shíoshù mínzú is translated into English as “minority nationality.” While it is closely related to the concept of ethnic minority, it represents a convenient way to classify the non-Han peoples in China into the designated categories rather than recognizing their ethnic identity. Language is often a good indicator of ethnicity, for an ethnic group typically has its own language. Nonetheless, the relationship between minority languages and shíoshù mínzú is extremely complex.

In the Chinese tradition the variety of Chinese spoken by the emperor was taken for granted as the standard language; all other Chinese varieties, whether or not intelligible to speakers of the standard one, were simply referred to as topolects (fãngyán, usually translated as “dialect”). To a linguist, a topolect could be treated as a language, but in China it is regarded as a dialect. Under the conventional practice, a branch of Chinese languages is seen as one language with many dialects. When this model is applied to minority languages, an official shíoshù mínzú can take on closely related but mutually unintelligible languages as different dialects of one minority language. For instance, the Yi nationality is said to speak six topolects. Although many of them share the tradition of using Yi characters in religious books, the linguistic distance between these modern Yi languages is too great for speakers of a nonstandard variety to learn them.

Minority Languages in Education

To communicate in a minority language is necessary in remote villages where children have not been exposed to Mandarin (Putonghua; standard Chinese) when they first enter school. The use of a minority language as an auxiliary teaching tool is sometimes confused with bilingual education. The most crucial factor favorable to teaching of a minority language in school is a long history of a writing system. Well-established bilingual education in Chinese and a minority language is available to larger ethnic groups such as the Uyghurs, the Kazakhs, the Mongols, the Koreans, and the Tibetans (each more than 1 million). Except for Kazakh, the other four developed their own writing forms more than 5 centuries ago. A writing system in use by ordinary speakers indicates widespread literacy, and it supports formal education in the minority language. Bilingual education programs for other ethnic minority groups are often experimental and funded by nongovernment organizations, for example, the Bai in Yunnan and the Dongxiang in Gansu. Even if the result is positive, they may not be able to continue for financial reasons.

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