From Nominations of Socio-Ethnic Groups to Categorization of Minority Languages in China: Semantic Analysis

Since 1949, the Chinese government has issued a series of laws and regulations to protect, develop minority languages, to confirm their social function and status. The article generally presents the sociolinguistic parameters of language categorization of the People’s Republic of China. These sociolinguistic parameters concentrate on two aspects: the language policy and the social status of the language. While the former one represents the attitude of the government to languages, the latter one, however, reflects the functionality of a language in the society. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the interrelation between state ideology and categories of social, ethnic groups and nominations of languages in the People’s Republic of China. Therefore, the terminology of 民族 [min zu] (nationality, nation) is analyzed within Chinese language space. The different meanings of the notion of min zu are studied. The main attention is paid to the social status of languages and dialects of People’s Republic of China. Considering the content of laws and regulations, the article explains the legal status of minority languages and gives examples of actual use in different fields. © 2019, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.