China News Service, Beijing, November 3. Question: As Mandarin becomes more and more popular, will national languages disappear? China gave the answer
——Exclusive interview with Kong Jiangping, Director of the Linguistics Laboratory of Peking University
China News Service reporter Zeng Yue
China is a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-dialect and multi-script country. The languages of various ethnic groups have gone through thousands of years of exchange, contact and integration, and together they outline the historical picture of the continuous development of Chinese civilization.
As the national common spoken and written language becomes more and more popular, will national languages disappear as a result? Recently, Kong Jiangping, director of the Linguistics Laboratory of Peking University, accepted an exclusive interview with China News Service's "East-West Question" and talked about "China's answer" based on the laws of language evolution and empirical research.
The interview transcript is summarized as follows:
Reporter from China News Service: What historical laws are embedded in the evolution of national languages and characters, and how to reveal the logic of the formation of the pluralistic unity of the Chinese nation?
Kong Jiangping: About 12,000 years ago, the last ice age ended, the climate warmed, and agricultural civilization emerged. Archaeological findings show that in China at that time, the substantial increase in food production capacity led to a massive increase in population, and ethnic migration and neighborhood mixing became more frequent. Tribes that were originally scattered all over the country gradually formed alliances and formed different Neolithic cultures. Through contact, exchange and integration, close ties were established between the various cultures, and they gradually reached a very high level. Language contact, blending and integration have become the mainstream in this period.
Then, China gradually transitioned from a tribal alliance to a centralized dynasty during the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties. By the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, due to the expansion and development of agricultural areas, some Hu, Rong, Di, Yi and barbarian tribes gave up fishing, hunting and gathering and nomadic herding to integrate with the Chinese, while others moved to the north. By the time of the unification of the six kingdoms during the Qin Dynasty, the Central Plains were basically composed of Chinese tribes. From the Qin and Han Dynasties to the Tang Dynasty, the Chinese began to migrate outward, reaching Liaodong and Korea in the east, the Hexi Corridor in the west, both sides of the Yangtze River, Bashu and Lingnan in the south, and the Yinshan Mountains in the north. During this historical process, the southern tribes, such as the Sanmiao, Baiyue, and Ba people, all integrated into the Chinese nation. Only a small number retreated to remote mountainous areas, forming the remains of different ethnic minorities today.
During the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, due to climate cooling and other reasons, a large number of northern ethnic groups moved into the Central Plains, forming a major ethnic and cultural integration. During the Tang and Song Dynasties, due to the great integration of the peoples of the Central Plains and the Western Regions, the language and audio culture of the Chinese nation reached its peak. During the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties, the northern grassland peoples and the Central Plains peoples further achieved great integration in terms of population, language and culture.
It is not difficult to see from this development process that the Chinese national community was formed and developed in the historical process of long-term exchanges, exchanges and integration among various ethnic groups. The Chinese nation’s spoken and written language and audio culture have subsequently formed a huge language and cultural category and system, that is, the Chinese nation’s spoken and written language and audio culture community. Among them, the phonetic system is constantly integrated and reconstructed in cross-ethnic contact, and the vocabulary system is constantly enriched, adjusted, and updated in line with the needs of social production, cultural exchanges, and civilization development.
As a social product of human discourse ability, language is closely related to political systems and social development, and will inevitably evolve with changes in social forms. In the natural process of mutual influence, continuous integration, and dynamic updating of languages of different ethnic groups, whether it is the practical needs of politics, economy, production, life, and social development, or the inherent laws of language evolution, the language is constantly moving closer to a universal language with broader social functions.
China News Service reporter: Some people worry that as Mandarin becomes more and more popular, the national language will disappear. What do you think about this? You have led a team for a long time to carry out field investigations on the contact and integration of Chinese languages and characters. What findings have you made?
Kong Jiangping: This kind of worry is unfounded and unnecessary. In order to carry out scientific research, in recent years, I have led 12 teams composed of teachers and students from the Linguistics Laboratory of Peking University and more than a dozen other universities to conduct special surveys across the country, especially in ethnic minority areas. Using field survey methods and frameworks covering seven types of survey content, including language ecological information, language vitality, and text vitality, I set up 12 0 survey points, simultaneously tracking the differences in language use between people aged 30 and 60, and quantitatively scoring from different scenarios such as government agencies, campus education, commercial markets, medical institutions, family communities, folk activities, etc., to systematically evaluate the true survival status of each ethnic language, and measure the speed and degree of mutual integration.
Research results show that the languages of China's ethnic minorities are very well preserved in family communities, traditional sacrifices, wedding etiquette, ethnic songs, etc., and there is a strong atmosphere of using native languages among the people. For example, according to the results of the language vitality survey, the vitality of the use of ethnic languages in Xinjiang reaches more than 90% in ethnic communities and families; in hospitals, courts, economic and trade and other public areas, the vitality of the use of ethnic languages also maintains a high level, which fully reflects that Xinjiang's ethnic languages and their sound culture have been effectively protected and inherited.
At the same time, we found that in multi-ethnic areas such as Xinjiang, Tibet, and Guizhou, people of different ethnic groups will actively use common languages such as Mandarin when communicating on public affairs, and intra-ethnic communications will more often use their own ethnic languages, forming a pattern of the coexistence of the popularization of national common languages and the protection and use of ethnic languages.
China News Service reporter: What impact does artificial intelligence technology have on the protection and inheritance of ethnic languages?
Kong Jiangping: Since the advent of large-scale artificial intelligence models, the protection and inheritance of national languages and cultures has undergone further disruptive changes.
In the past, we used traditional acoustic methods to produce the "Digital Classics of Chinese Audio Culture". By extracting acoustic parameters such as vocal cord vibration, extreme frequency, voice strength, and breathing patterns, we preserved the records of minority languages and their cultural resources, and hoped to describe various phonetic systems through the International Phonetic Alphabet. However, this method relies on field investigation and recording archiving, and is subject to factors such as storage media, utilization efficiency, and dissemination scope, and has certain limitations.
Now, we are trying to build a large language corpus of ethnic minorities with the help of large artificial intelligence models. By collecting standardized corpora, we train and generate language models with unlimited language generation capabilities to achieve the purpose of permanently protecting a language.
Taking Hani language as an example, the vocabulary system of traditional Hani language is relatively thin. Folk oral narratives are mostly built around farming scenes, and complex syntactic expressions are scarce. After the Hani-specific language model is formed, complex Chinese sentence structures can be input to the model, and the model can complete the conversion independently to achieve creative expansion of language expression. After the generated results are reviewed by Hani native speakers, some new corpus can be generated and fed back to the model to participate in training. Since the newly added complex syntax originates from the modern Chinese system, this language evolution not only completes the development of Hani language in the large language model, but also promotes the integration and interoperability of Hani language and Chinese.
The spoken and written languages of China's various ethnic groups are an important foundation for Chinese civilization. The language systems of different ethnic groups carry distinctive cultural forms and contain unique historical memories, values and knowledge systems. Their cultural value is irreplaceable.
China has long been committed to popularizing the national common spoken and written language and scientifically protecting the spoken and written languages of all ethnic groups. On July 1 this year, China officially implemented the Law on Promotion of Ethnic Unity and Progress, which clarifies in legal form that the state respects and guarantees the learning and use of ethnic minority languages, promotes the standardization, standardization and informatization construction of ethnic minority languages, and supports the protection, compilation, research and use of ancient books of ethnic minorities.
In this context, the application of digital technology, especially artificial intelligence large models, provides a new technical path for the protection and development of ethnic languages. Based on digital modeling of the phonetic system, vocabulary system, grammatical rules, etc. of ethnic minority languages, combined with folk songs, oral literature and other corpus, the large language model can generate content that conforms to the grammatical norms and word formation rules of ethnic languages, and protect, inherit and utilize ethnic languages and cultures more efficiently and flexibly, thus providing strong support for consolidating the basis for exchanges and integration of various ethnic groups and forging a strong sense of the Chinese nation's community.
