Language and National Identity in Asia

You can piece together another trove of language stories here, this time from 20 modern Asian countries – each profiled by a different scholar. Once again, I adopted this for a course and the students were engrossed.

To take just one story: for 2000 years the vast Chinese empire had a centralized administrative tongue against a chatter of spoken dialects. But then, in the early 20th century, a sea change: the ripple of Western nationalism and liberalism that carried away the empire also produced a movement for wholesale language reform – creating one standard spoken language to unite the… show more.