Mandarin

Tuesday

Leyla Sanai

Language lessons: Taipei Story, by Rebecca Kuang, reviewed

Rebecca Kuang was quietly writing cult classics for years before she hit the best-seller lists with Babel, a Victorian fantasy based on colonialism and opium wars, and Yellowface, a deliciously dark story about literary plagiarism and the ego-smashing right hook that social media can administer. Then came Katabasis, skewering academia and the exploitation of naive students. The breadth of Kuang’s knowledge reflects her high-achieving CV, which takes in Cambridge, Oxford and Yale. Taipei Story explores her identity as a Chinese- American. It relates the experience of Lily, a Yale student attending an intensive summer course in Chinese language and culture in Taipei.

Tuesday

Cindy Yu

Dialect and identity: is Mandarin bad for China?

44 min listen

Across the span of China, a country as big as Europe, there are countless regional dialects and accents – perhaps even languages. Often, they're mutually unintelligible. The Chinese call these ‘fangyan’, and each Chinese person will likely be able to speak at least one fangyan, while also understanding Standard Mandarin, the official language of the People's Republic. It means that the Chinese are more multilingual than you might think. But it also means that the question of language is inherently a political one. Standard Mandarin has a relatively short history, created by the country’s founding fathers to unify the spoken word in a huge country. But with the ubiquity of Standard Mandarin now, is fangyan at risk of dying out?

Tuesday

Steerpike

Fears over Mandarin shortage in Whitehall

'China Spy Blitz' blared the Sun this morning: 'UK spooks hiring Mandarin speakers in cyber war.' Spy bosses, the paper reports, are embarking on a recruitment drive, directed at people who speak the language or have grown up within a multilingual family, with MI5, MI6 and GCHQ all increasingly wary about a moment of reckoning with the Communist superpower. Yet while the secret services have woken up to the threat posed by Beijing, others within government appear to still be fast asleep. Newly obtained figures reveal that the number of fluent Mandarin speakers within the Foreign Office (FCDO) has dropped by nearly 10 per cent since 2016.