Pan Chengqian, 70, does not know English. But this is not a problem for him when contacting scholars in the United States via the Internet.

"We communicate with each other in Yao language," said the retired associate professor of the Beijing-based Central University for Nationalities.

Together with experts at home and abroad, Pan created a written language for his Yao ethnic group in 1980s.

In cooperation with American scholars, he is now compiling a dictionary of Yao, Chinese and English, the first of its kind to be published in China.

This would have been impossible 20 years ago because Yao, with a population of over 2.1 million, had never had its own written language.

Written languages for ethnic groups on increase

Yao is not alone. Most of China's 55 ethnic minorities, with exceptions such as Mongol, Tibetan, and Uygur, did not have their own written languages before 1949. Some had borrowed Chinese.

Thanks to the efforts made by the central government, 13 ethnic minorities have had their own written languages created over the past 50 years.

The number of ethnic minorities which have written languages increased to 22, said an official with the State Ethnic Affairs Commission (SEAC) on March 7.

Among these nationalities are Zhuang, China's biggest ethnic group with 18 million people which equals that of Australia, and Tu ethnic group, with a population of 190,000.

An idea proposed by late Chairman Mao

The idea of creating ethnic languages was first proposed by late Chairman Mao Zedong soon after the New China was founded in 1949.

Mao and other top Chinese leaders suggested written languages be created for those which had vocal ones in order to help preserve ethnic cultures and improve ethnic economic conditions.

Free will and independent decision making are the essential principles to be observed in formulating an alphabetic system of writing for these ethnic groups, said Li Xulian, an SEAC official working on ethnic languages.

"China's ethnic groups are free to decide either they would adhere to the Chinese (language of the Han people) or they would like to have a new language," he said.

All the new written languages were based on the 26-letter Latin alphabet. They are more learner friendly as the spelling always accords with the pronunciation.

How Zhuang language taken into form

Wei Xinglang, 69, participated in creating a new written language for the Zhuang ethnic group in the 1950s.

"We decided to formulate an alphabetic system of writing for our group because the Chinese language has four tones, but ours has six," said Wei, who himself is from Zhuang ethnic group. " Sometimes it fails to embody the uniqueness of our culture."

He recalled that over 90 percent of all Zhuang ethnic people could not read and write in early 1950s.

"It would be even more difficult for these people to learn Chinese without a written language of our own" he said.

The result is that tens of thousands of farmers in south China' s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region have learnt to read and write within a short period of time. Pan said that he believed the newly formulated languages not only help eliminate illiteracy, but also benefit cultural exchanges among different ethnic groups.

Schools in areas with concentrations of ethnic nationalities prove that children who have learnt the new written languages make more progress when they learn Chinese and English.

Long Qingli, a 25-year-old woman of Zhuang nationality in Guangxi, studied the Zhuang language in primary school. She was able to learn a new way of sub-tropical farming from an ethnic newspaper published in her language, which led her and her family from rags to riches.

More than 700,000 young or middle aged people like Long have studied the Zhuang language over the past two decades. The central government has earmarked at least five million yuan (US$602,400) annually for popularizing the ethnic language.

New problems

Some ethnic groups altered their primary decisions during the application or experimental period. Yi nationality gave up the new written language and returned to the old but later reformed one. Uygur and Kazak ethnic groups resumed using their original Arabic alphabets. Hani ethnic people picked up one out of the two invented for it.

Problems do occur. Some experts noted that the employment of ethnic languages is just limited. Today's young people are not as enthusiastic as their parents in learning their own languages. They tend to study languages that are more widely used.

(People's Daily March 8, 2002)