Language Planning for China's Ethnic Minorities

Abstract

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) recognizes language as one but not the sole determinant of ethnic identification. Following the analysis of nationality outlined in Joseph Stalin's essay, Marxism and the National Question, official Chinese policy recognizes common territory, common economic ties and common psychological ties as of comparable importance to language in determining the existence of an ethnic group or-as it is generally referred to in Marxist terminology-minority nationality. The existence of four criteria allows some leeway for arbitrary judgments, since a group may meet some rather than all the tests (i.e., common language but territorial discontinuity, or territorial continuity and psychological ties but several different languages or very different dialects of a common language). The Chinese government has reserved to itself the right to final judgment on the existence of a national minority, declaring emphatically that a self-reported name of a nationality cannot automatically confirm the existence of such a nationality group.1 Within the first I5 years of its founding in 1949, the Chinese People's Republic (PRC) had confirmed the existence of 54 such nationality groups, with linguistic identification playing a significant role in this designation. Approximately 40 million people were included. The list of 54 was considerably less than the several hundred self-reported names amassed in the process of taking the 1953 census, and this paring down made the government's language planning significantly easier. The CCP had come to power pledging to allow each ethnic group within its borders to develop according to its unique historical characteristics and raise its overall cultural level, with the group's language clearly being considered an important part of this ethnic-cultural