With One Voice
Mandarin's Conquest of China
$45.89
- Paperback
184 pages
- Release Date
17 November 2026
Summary
Mandarin is one of the most-spoken languages in the world. But when it was codified as the new national language in China between the 1910s and 1930s, its artificiality was such that only a handful of people could speak it with any fluency. The state-led creation and spread of China’s national language is thus arguably the largest instance of social engineering in human history. What took centuries to accomplish in Europe was compressed into a mere three decades in China. How did this nationa…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781503648517 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 1503648516 |
| Author: | Jeffrey Weng |
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Imprint: | Stanford University Press |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 184 |
| Release Date: | 17 November 2026 |
| Dimensions: | 152mm x 229mm |
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Critics Review
“By tracing the contested invention of Mandarin as an ‘intensively cultivated artificial language’ in twentieth-century China, Jeffrey Weng dissects the interplay of power, society, and culture, pioneering a historical-comparative sociology of language while demythologizing the hegemony of Mandarin Chinese.”–Ho-fung Hung, Johns Hopkins University
“Thanks in part to creative digging and mining previously ignored sources, Jeff Weng has produced an impressive new analysis of Chinese language, nationalism, and linguistic reform. No scholarly book has come at language reform from so many angles, mixing discussion of spoken and written Mandarin language issues in quite the way he does.”–Jeffrey Wasserstrom, University of California, Irvine
Jeffrey Weng
Jeffrey Weng is Assistant Professor of Sociology at National Taiwan University.
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