Northern Qiang

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many

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2003

China

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Sichuan Province

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Latin scripts

Sichuan Province

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Chinese

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"Education in the Qiang areas is all in Chinese, though in recent years there has been a movement to implement bilingual education. Many of the children now can go to school, but the children often have to travel great distances to get to school. They will often live at the school, either for one week at a time, if the school is relatively close, or for months at a time, if it is farther away. Local educators have noticed that even with the opportunity for free education offered by the central government, there has been a continuously high drop-ou rate among children from remote villages. One reason, they believe, is that most of the children from the remote villages cannot cope with the school education because teaching in the schools is all in Chinese an they cannot speak Chinese. The call for a bilingual approach in education mainly refers to the use of spoken Qiang as a medium of instruction in the lower grades alongside Mandarin in order to facilitate the learning of Chinese ... In general, Chinese has been the main language of education and communication with non-Qiang people. The spoken form of Chinese used is the Western Sichuan subdialect of Southwest Mandarin, while the written form used is that of Standard Modern Chinese. The Qiang have been in contact with the Han Chinese for centuries (see Sun 1998). However, in the past, only the men who left the Qiang area to trade or work or had to deal with Han Chinese on a regular basis would learn Chinese. Children below the age of fifteen rarely spoke Chinese, but now with more universal access to Chinese schooling and to TV (which is all in Standard Modern Chinese), even small children in remote villages can speak some Chinese. Now very few Qiang people cannot speak the Qiang language. In many villages by the main roads, and in some whole counties in the east of Aba Prefecture (where contact with the han Chinese has historically been most intense), the entire population is monolingual in Chinese. The tendency toward becoming monolingual in Chinese is becoming more prevalent now than ever before due to strong economic and social pressure to assimilate, and to the popularization of free primary and secondary education in Chinese. The number of fluent Qiang speakers becomes smaller day by day. Qiang is therefore very much an endangered language." (p.5-6)