China plans to use Olympic to spread Chinese language

Saibal Dasgupta / TNN / Feb 12, 2008, 00:45 IST

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The Communist Party leadership now wants to use the coming Olympic Games as a launching pad for spreading the knowledge of Chinese language among sports lovers across the world.

China plans to use Olympic to spread Chinese language

BEIJING: Hanyu Pinyin, the phonetic system that uses Roman characters to support the learning of Chinese language. The Communist Party leadership now wants to use the coming Olympic Games as a launching pad for spreading the knowledge of Chinese language among sports lovers across the world.
Pinyin has been extensively used by both Chinese and non-Chinese to learn the language since the first edition of the phonetic system was published in 1958 after being adopted by the National People's Congress, the Chinese parliament, that year.

Pinyin also played a part in national integration as the government used it to establish Latin forms for the language of 12 minority groups including Zhuang, Buyi, and Hani.
"This year our nation will stage the 29th Olympic Games. This offers an excellent opportunity to put Chinese civilization on display and to expand the influence of Chinese linguistic culture," the People's Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party said in an editorial.

China started using its language as a tool for diplomacy and spread of its influence some years back by establishing Confucius Institutes, modelled along the lines France's Alliance Francaise, across the world. At present there are 226 branches of the Confucius Institute across in 66 countries.
Pinyin is now an accepted form of communication even among Chinese who use Chinese characters in their origin. Government signs often use both Chinese characters and pinyin for rendering the sound in Roman characters. It has been popularized in schools, newspapers, TV and advertising.

The government also renamed the "Friendlies" the five mascots for Beijing 2008 Olympics, as "Fuwa", a literal Chinese pinyin translation. The new name is now widely accepted by Chinese people.
Recently years have seen an energetic effort on the part of the government to popularize Pinyin since it came out with a National Common Language Law to provide a legal basis for applying pinyin in 2001. It also published the Xinhua Dictionary and Modern Chinese Dictionary, in order to establish standards on the use of pinyin to spell people's names and places.
Pinyin started life as a tool for learning characters in primary schools. It now serves as a communication tool and has become as bridge linking China to the whole world, the official media quoted Zhou Youguang, a 102-year old linguist with five decades of work in developing pinyin, as saying.
"As a cultural tool, Pinyin is easy to learn and use and meets the needs of times, so it can spread all by itself," Zhou said.