The Chinese language law is the first specialized law on spoken and written language in China, adopted at the 18th meeting of the Standing Committee of the Ninth National People's Congress on October 31, 2000; it came into effect on January 1, 2001. The law stipulates the scope, norms and standards for the use of the country's common spoken and written language. According to this law, the national standard spoken and written language is

Standard Chinese Standard Chinese ()—in linguistics Standard Northern Mandarin or Standard Beijing Mandarin, in common speech simply Mandarin, better qualified as Standard Mandarin, Modern Standard Mandarin or Standard Mandarin Chinese—is a modern standa ...

and standardized Chinese characters.

Background

Throughout history, China, due to the large amount of different cultures and ethnicities in its borders, has been home to dozens of languages. In order to assist mutual intelligibility, the

Chinese government The Government of the People's Republic of China () is an authoritarian political system in the People's Republic of China under the exclusive political leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It consists of legislative, executive, mi ...

, since its inception as the

PRC China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

, has been seeking to standardise and simplify the

Chinese language Chinese (, especially when referring to written Chinese) is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in Greater China. About 1.3 billion people (or approximately 16% of the ...

. Until recently, even the government-promoted simplified Chinese had at least seven mutually unintelligible dialects.

Description

This law is enacted in accordance with the

Constitution of the People's Republic of China The Constitution of the People's Republic of China is the supreme law of the People's Republic of China. It was adopted by the 5th National People's Congress on December 4, 1982, with further revisions about every five years. It is the fou ...

in order to promote the normalization, standardization and healthy development of the national common spoken and written language, to enable the language to play a better role in social life, and to promote economic and cultural exchanges among all ethnic groups and regions. This law stipulates the use, management and supervision of the national common spoken and written language. All citizens have the right to learn and use the standard spoken and written Chinese language, and the State provides citizens with the conditions for it. The law also stipulates that the use of the national common spoken and written language should be conducive to the upholding of state sovereignty and national dignity, to unification of the country and unity among all ethnic groups, and to socialist material progress and ethical progress.

Impact

The law made it illegal to teach languages other than Chinese in schools. Similar laws have been widely criticised as attempts to force minority groups to assimilate into Chinese culture, though the PRC denies those claims.

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