Chen Yuan Linguistic Works (Vol. 1, 2, 3)

Author: Chen Yuan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 1998-02-01
Features: ★32-page paperback, published by Liaoning Education Press
Excerpt: The tendency towards non-standardization is often present, yet social life demands language and writing standardization. Only in this way can language communication be more precise and effective, so it is often necessary to correct non-standard tendencies. In any society, both its organization and members require a certain level of standardization in the language and writing they use. If you use your variant and I use mine, social communication would become very difficult, as is commonly said, "without a common language," it is impossible to convey information, let alone exchange ideas. However, language and writing are inherently dynamic, and society influences them, so language and writing must change—moving from standardization to non-standardization. This non-standardization constantly struggles against standardization. This is not due to anyone intentionally causing trouble but rather the inevitable course of things. We need not find it strange or feel afraid. However, as mentioned above, standardization is the need of the common community of social language, and an information-based society requires even more standardization, because an information-based society demands high speed, high efficiency, and high accuracy in information communication. Without standardization, high speed, efficiency, and accuracy become meaningless. Below, I will take the standardization of characters used in shop signs as an example to discuss how non-standardization impacts standardization, why social writing exhibited such non-standard tendencies during the open and dynamic 1980s, and other related issues. Research on the standardization of characters in shop signs, like other topics in sociolinguistics, cannot be confined to bookish reasoning; it must involve sampling surveys in society. Such surveys should not merely pick out prominent examples for elaboration, as doing so would not yield convincing patterns.