Chinatowns, as neighborhoods for overseas ethnic Chinese, have garnered considerable scholarly attention from linguistic landscape (LL) researchers in recent years. These investigations tend to treat old immigrants who have been tied to the neighborhoods for generations as the key text producers of LL, with far too little attention paid to the LL…

This dissertation explores Bai language use in Jianchuan County, China. On the basis of interviews with 42 language users, transcripts of spontaneous conversation and elicited narratives, excerpts from Bai texts in an alphabetic orthography and Chinese characters, and six months of participant observation, I demonstrate how language users'…

Information and communication technology appears to have had a profound impact on language use in Japan. An important issue arising from this is said to be the increase in the use of Chinese characters (kanji) outside the official standard. This development has made a re-appraisal of the existing script policy necessary in order to accommodate the…

Author described efforts to modernize a system of writing, extremely difficult to teach and to learn, and assessed the benefits of changing from traditional characters to a Latin alphabet including the cost that would be involved: the separation of modern Chinese writing from the heritage of the past. (Editor/RK)

Based on travel to the People's Republic of China, language changes and reform are reported. New meanings of old expressions and new expressions are listed and discussed. Language reform consists of: popularization of Putonghua, simplification of the characters, and romanization of the Chinese Language. (SW)

Reviews the history and development of the Pinyin grapheme system for the transcription of Chinese, and contrasts Pinyin graphemes with those of several other systems for Chinese. It is argued that Pinyin should be accepted as the standard system for Chinese transcription. (JL)