Activity: Talk or presentation types › Invited talk
Description
Irish Institute for Chinese Studies Public Lecture Series Professor Lee explores the relationship between Chinese language and national and diasporic communities. He discusses the nature and kinds of language(s) over the past two thousand years or more in the space we now call China. He addresses the question of how and why in recent years "Mandarin" has come to be synonymous, at least for non-Chinese, people with "Chinese"; the paucity of words in the English language to describe the different kinds, moments and registers of "Chinese" being one of the key factors in this confusion. The status of other Chinese languages and the rich cultural diversity they represent alongside the national language is also discussed.