56 nationalities in China
China is a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic country with 56 nationalities. Besides Han nationality which constitutes the majority of the county’s population, there are also 55 minority groups with great diversity in their language and culture. According to the fifth nationwide census, there are only two minority ethnic groups whose population number is over 10 million: Manchu nationality and Zhuang nationality. There are seven minority ethnic groups with a population of over five million, nine with over one million, four with over 500,000 and thirteen with fewer than 500,000. The population number of some minority ethnic groups is even less than 10,000. (National Bureau of Statistics of the People’s Republic of China, 2000). Even though minority groups account for a small part of the country’s population, almost half of the territory in China is occupied by minority nationalities (Dessaint, 1980). Most ethnic people live in remote and underdeveloped areas, for example, mountainous areas, plateaus and some forest areas.
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Minority languages in China
Among the 55 minority ethnic groups, the Hui and Manchu nationalities speak the same language as the Han majority: Mandarin Chinese. The other 53 nationalities use their own languages. There are about 120 ethnic languages in minority areas (Sun, 2004). Among these ethnic languages, 29 belong to the Sino-Tibetan family of languages, and they are mainly distributed in the Central South and Southwest regions of China. 17 ethnic languages that belong to Altai language family are mainly distributed in the Northeast and Northwest regions of China. Also, there are two ethnic languages that belong to the Indo-European language family. But there are also some ethnic languages for which we do not know the origin of. (State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China, 2009). Only 30 minority languages have written system and 20 languages have less than 1000 speakers (Zuo, 2007). Many minority languages are endangered and facing the threat of extinction.
Now, we can see that bilingual education in Chinese context is a complex issue, which means it is hard to appropriately and properly deal with the relationship between the national official language: Mandarin Chinese and the minority languages. On one side, if people in minority ethnic groups want to protect their language and cultural traditions, they need to learn their own language. On the other side, in order to integrate into the mainstream culture and increase communication with other groups, they also need to learn Chinese Mandarin. Therefore, it is of great importance to develop bilingual teaching in minority groups. Developing bilingual education is of great value for the development of minority ethic groups’ education but also for the improvement of the scientific and cultural level of the whole nation.
Fifty six nationalities
