Media and State: China’s linguistic policy as reported in the issues of Language Situation in China (2005-2015)

Li Yuming has recently written the introduction of the 2015 issue of the Language Situation in China, entitled “New media and linguistics”. It is remarkable that he has devoted a section on the problems which affect society in the era of new media (or “net-media”, wangluo meiti). Among them, Li Yuming has comprehended the problem of the relationship between new media and standard language: the former must not be felt as threatening the pureness of the language, as large groups of people have evoked in the latest years, but certainly a source of not standardized linguistic phenomena, which may compromise the harmony of the life of language. The 2015 issue of Language Situation is not at all the first to deal with the problematic relationship between media and standard language: in fact, since its first issue in 2006, Language Situation has always given report about China’s language policy towards not-standardized linguistic items (such as foreignisms, but also dialects, borrowings, the language of Internet and even neologisms), which in the latest years have flourished in contemporary Chinese media. The present contribution aims at spotting the main features of the issues of Language Situation; in particular, the tendencies of China’s linguistic policy and the language-related problems China has been facing in the last 10 years, as reported in the Language Situation reports will be highlighted. This overview will show, on the one hand, that China has been constantly striving to impose a standard language, as a vehicle for a standard culture and a standard self-image, to (new) media. On the other hand, she has permanently coped with parts of language which by nature would eschew standardization. As a result, China has been trying to hold a position in between those who have reckoned not-standard items a threat to China linguistic (and not only linguistic) identity and those who would let not-standard items flood, leaning towards either one at different times.