INTRODUCTION: LINGUISTIC TRENDS

In recent years, Tibetans have engaged in a series of protests to defend their increasingly marginalised language. In October 2010, more than a thousand Tibetans in Qinghai protested against reports that the government was planning to put in place policies that would limit the use of the Tibetan language in schools by teaching all subjects except for English and Tibetan in Putonghua (BBC 2010). These protests spread to Beijing, where Tibetan university students also protested their concern about the proposed policies (Wong 2010). The European Parliament has supported Tibetans in defending the status of their language. It adopted a resolution in support of a language policy in which all subjects can be taught in the Tibetan language and condemned the Chinese government for its use of Putonghua as the main medium of instruction in Tibet.

China was, and still is, a multi-lingual society, and has practised multi-lingual teaching for many centuries. The fifty-five recognised minorities in the PRC use more than 120 different languages (Sun Hongkai 2004). Officials in ethnic autonomous regions are encouraged to speak multiple languages, including both Putonghua 普通话 (common speech, mandarin) and local languages (Zhou 2004). The National People's Congress uses seven different languages in its work, and five different scripts appear on Chinese bank notes. Among the Han Chinese majority there is also great linguistic diversity, with a number of spoken Chinese language groups, such as the Wu, Yue and Min, having tens of millions of speakers. The expansion of Chinese state power and the power of the market into all corners of China has, however, witnessed the dramatic spread of Putonghua across China, which has slowly diluted the importance of minority languages.

There now seems to be a tendency towards the strengthening of Putonghua, as indicated by a number of factors: the decline in the use of minority languages; the increasing use of Putonghua as an official teaching language in minority areas; the use of Putonghua in official meetings involving minorities; and the lack of incentives for those Han Chinese who work in minority areas to study minority languages (see Evans 2010; Feng 2009; Lin 1997).