Changes of tolerance of China’s English language policy from the aspect of Engli

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【Abstract】In recent years, because of the ‘open-door’ policy and the increasing role of english as a global language, increasing numbers of English words have been absorbed into Chinese by both direct and indirect borrowing. This article is explored to discuss the way of English borrowing into Chinese and how the changes of China’s English language policy have been made.

【Key Words】borrowing assimilation loan words loan blends direct borrowing

Introduction

Nowadays, there are more and more communications among nations in the world and English is regarded as a lingua franca, a tightly integrated world generally favors the spread of English. As the largest developing country in the world, China is pursuing more and more frequent communications with the rest of the world. Therefore, it is inevitable for the Chinese language to borrow some lexis from English. Since lexical borrowing is said to be the first sign of language shift and extinction, some academics are concerned about the problem of English infiltration and anxious about its consequences. In China such sentiments and fears are usually demonstrated in language planning programs and language policy, which are set down by the State Commission for Language Work (formerly the National Committee of Language Reform, the most authoritative institution for language work). Its tasks are to draft a national language policy, to design long-term language planning strategies for regulating language use, to make rules and regulations for the use of the Chinese language and the other ethnic languages and finally to supervise their use and to supervise the campaign to promote the use of Modern Standard Chinese(Putonghua) (Chinese Ministry of Education). According to Chen (2005), the Chinese language seems to have a tradition of purism due to its long history. In different times, due to the distinctive policy, the tolerance of the Chinese language to the assimilation of English borrowings varies. As stated by Chen(2005), there are mainly three ways of Chinese borrowing from English: loan words, loan blends and direct borrowing. This study was undertaken to explore and describe the changes of tolerance to English words. The hypothesis is that along with the development of the communication between china and the outside world, the tolerance of Chinese to english borrowings is getting greater and more direct.

Method

The data in this paper were collected from one Chinese newspaper, People’s Daily Overseas Edition, two magazines, Movie and China Business Focus, and the website of Xinhuanet. All the data would be checked to see whether they have been included or not in Xian Dai Han Yu Ci Dian(Contemporary Chinese Dictionary), which is one of the most popular and authoritative dictionaries of the Chinese language in contemporary China. And during the process of checking, four versions of the dictionary would be used to demonstrate the changes of the assimilation of Chinese to English borrowings at different times.

It is known that People’s Daily, China’s national newspaper published daily both in China and overseas, is the leading Chinese newspaper in China. It has a great deal of coverage of important events in China and around the world. The reports cover a wide range of information on politics and economics in China and the rest of the world, such as important policies of the Chinese government, the Sino-US relationship, war in Iraq, terrorists in Moscow and so on. Movie is a semimonthly magazine published in China and focuses on the popular movies and entertainment news. China Business Focus (CBF) is a famous magazine in the field of economics and business. The magazines are both regarded as the media which keep in touch with the world at the foreland. Xinhuanet was launched in 1997 as the online news service of Xinhua News Agency and it is the top news website in China, and one of the most influential sites in the world.

It is considered that the data found in the leading newspaper, magazines and the top news website represent the acceptance of English borrowings in Chinese.

The number of the words to be collected was considered to a limit of around sixty. The data were all randomly collected from the electronic version on the website and the newspapers and magazines in East Asia Collections in the library of Sydney University. In People’s Daily and Xinhuanet, articles were selected from the sections of China, Entertainment, Economics, Technology, Lifestyle and Culture. In Movie and CBF, articles were skimmed one by one. The headlines were scanned first. If a headline suggested that the article might have lexical items unique to aspects of English borrowing, the article was downloaded and became part of the data and was read with analyses on words and sentences. The borrowed lexical items focused on in this study are words.

Findings and Discussion

Sixty-one words are found totally from the four resources.

According to Chen (2005), the borrowings could be got by way of loan words, loan blends and direct borrowing. Following are the categories to the data based on the three methods.

Loan words

Transliteration and Translation are two main ways of acquisition for loan words. According to Oxford English Dictionary online, transliterate means “to replace (letters or characters of one language) by those of another used to represent the same sounds; to write (a word, etc.) in the characters of another alphabet.”It is the easiest and most direct way for a language to get new words from another language.

Translation, by definition, means, “rearranging words in the base language along a pattern provided by the other and thus create a new meaning” (Romaine, 1995: 57)

Loan blends

According to Zhou & Feng (1987), loan blending means that an English word or phrase is partly transliterated and partly translated paraphrasably or loan blends mean the words consisting of both Roman alphabet letters and Chinese characters.

Direct borrowing

This method means that the words are taken directly from English without any graphic transformation.

A list of all the items found and the respective category is given in Table 1.

In order to find the degree of acceptance of Chinese to these English origin words, the data were examined with the four versions of Contemporary Chinese Dictionary. The result is listed in Table 2.

Table 1 The categories of the data

Table 2 Data collected in different versions of the dictionary

The words ‘in, party, OK, cool, Java特效, 朋客punk,冲浪surf, 肥皂剧soup opera, 脱口秀talk show’, however, are not included in the dictionary.

From above it can be seen that the attitude for adoption of English origin words into Chinese is getting more tolerant along with the time. Before 1996, the assimilation of English words in Chinese was mainly from the aspect of medicine, furniture and so on. And actually these words were not new words in the English language. Since 1996, it seems that the speed of assimilation of English has accelerated, and the fields of the borrowed words have become richer. Most of the words are even new words in the English language. The way of assimilation of English words in Chinese has also been changing. Before the 21th century, loan words and loan blends were the main methods for Chinese to adopt the English lexis. In earlier times, Chinese borrowings were mainly based on phonetic transcription and semantic transposition, also known as transliteration and translation. Since the 1990s, the assimilation of loan blends has speeded up. And one significant point is that in 1996, for the first time, 39 letter words and some blended words such as WTO, GDP, IT, IP (internet phone) 技术 (technology) were sanctioned for inclusion in the revised Contemporary Chinese Dictionary, one of the most popular and authoritative dictionaries in contemporary China. They were included in the appendix of“Words Beginning with Foreign Letters” (Guo 2002: 3). The main aim of this dictionary is to spread Mandarin and standardize the Chinese language throughout the country, as mentioned above. In the 2002 version of the dictionary, there are totally 142 letter words and blended words. In the latest version, which was published in 2005, the number rose to 183. Though there are nine words in the data collected are not included in the authoritative dictionary, it could not be ignored and can be deduced that the attitude of acceptance of Chinese to English is getting more tolerant and the way is getting more direct.

But actually, though it could be said that the tolerance of Chinese to English borrowings is greater recently, there is controversy on the use of these new lexis, especially on the use of those direct borrowings. Maybe that’s why the words like “in, party” can be found in media resources but are not absorbed in the dictionary. Some scholars are conservative, saying that Mandarin is the national pride of China and English borrowings contaminate the Chinese language, damaging national image and pride. They think that these borrowings should be eliminated, especially in the mass media. Other scholars are more tolerant, saying what is called for is to regulate the use of foreign letter words. They think some selection of foreign words is needed so that those selected English abbreviations are relevant and meaningful in terms of global communication, such as GDP and IT. One problem of the use of direct borrowings, however, lies in the absence of an official rules. At present the direct borrowings are to some extent overused and misused. They are used unnecessarily on some occasions and without notes or explanations. Phonetic transcriptions of these abbreviations are on the rise, and are conducted without any standard, which results in different transcriptions for these words. To solve these problems, a better language policy is needed, and in my opinion, the language planning should try to establish the standardization of usage of foreign words and to provide an education policy to make the communities aware of these standards and to set up an incentive program to encourage the use and application of these standards.

Conclusion

In recent years, because of the “open-door” policy and the increasing role of English as a global language, increasing numbers of English words have been absorbed into Chinese by both direct and indirect borrowing. Indirect borrowing like loan words and loan blends were the mainstream methods of the assimilation of Chinese to English words, however, direct borrowing is seen to be more and more popular right now. Lettered words are in particular indicative of their direct borrowing from English, are frequently used in Chinese, acknowledged by many Chinese linguists, and are accepted into various Chinese dictionaries. That is, they have to some extent been integrated into the language and become part of it. Generally speaking, in recent years Chinese has opened up a little more in its acceptance of foreign influences. However, for the sake of better communication, the use of the borrowings needs to be more standardized and more appropriate policies need to be set.

Reference：

[1]Chen, C. Z. (2005). Qianxi Zhongwen Zhongde Jieci Xianxiang [English borrowing in Chinese]. Wen Jiao Zi Liao[Culture and Education], 32, 116-118.

[2]Guo, H. J. (2002). English loanwords in modern Chinese during the last twenty years and their influences upon Chinese grammar. Journal of Liberation Army Foreign Language Institute, 25(5), 1–4.

[3]Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China online. Retrieved Oct 2, 2007, from www.moe.省略/ edoas/website18/level3.jsp?tablename=169&infoid=4129.

[4]Romaine, S. (1995). Bilingualism (second edition). Oxford: Blackwell.

[5]The Oxford English dictionary online [electronic resource]. Retrieved Oct 2, 2007, from dictionary.省略.ezproxy1. library.usyd.edu.au/cgi/entry/50256338?single=1&query_type=w ord&queryword=transliterate&first=1&max_to_show=10.

[6]Wang, H. Y. & Yang, Y. (2006). Influence on Chinese by English borrowings. Shandong Foreign Language Teaching Journal, 6, 41-44.

[7]Zhou, Z. P. & Feng, W. C. (1987). The two faces of English in China: Englishization of Chinese and nativization of English. World Englishes, 6(2), 111-125.

（作者单位：重庆教育学院）