TikTok Users In China Temporarily Banned For Speaking Their Own Cantonese Language Instead Of Using The Official Mandarin

from the linguistic-censorship dept

Most people know about TikTok, from the company Bytedance, but not many know that it is the international version of the similar, but separate, Douyin app. The What's on Weibo site has a good explanation of why the two versions came about, and how they differ:

Why would Bytedance go through the effort to create two apps running on different systems? The answer partly lies in China's strictly controlled online environment, where (social) media companies have to adhere to local policies on what is and what is not allowed to be published on their (user-generated) platforms.

Having two distinct apps allows Bytedance to enforce China's strict rules for the domestic market, while granting foreign users more freedom in what they can post. Overt censorship is unacceptable in many other countries, and would probably have throttled TikTok's rapid rise. As a result of this split market, people outside China are generally unaware of the rules imposed on Douyin content. David Paulk is Head of News on the Sixth Tone site, which provides valuable independent news and commentary on the country. A recent Twitter thread from him offers a rare chance to see the kind of thing that happens on Douyin:

On Monday, the Guangzhou-based WeChat account Yangcheng Net posted an article detailing how several Douyin users had received 10-minute bans from the platform for speaking their native Cantonese during livestreams.

A pop-up notification told the streamers to "Please speak Mandarin to involve more users from other areas (of China)." Among the suggestions for "rectification" was "please speak Mandarin."

A person who manages a Douyin account promoting Cantonese culture to its 230,000 followers said he had received two bans and multiple warnings for using Cantonese. Clearly, using Mandarin instead of Cantonese would nullify the whole point of the account. Naturally, Paulk wanted to know why Cantonese was being discriminated against in this way:

When we contacted PR for ByteDance, TikTok's large & powerful parent company, they strongly advised us against pursuing the story. We said we were going to anyway, but they went over our heads to get it canned.

Paulk wrote that he suspected Douyin was under pressure from the Chinese government to make sure nothing "objectionable" was being said, and a Mandarin-only rule made that easier. His suspicions seem to be confirmed by a later comment from Douyin's PR:

Douyin is building out content safety capabilities for additional languages and dialects. As one of the most widely spoken dialects in China, Cantonese is a top priority, and we hope to have it fully supported in the near future.

Cantonese is already supported in livestreams -- you just start talking. In this context "support" clearly means censor. It's also interesting that Cantonese is dubbed a "dialect" in Douyin's statement. There are around 68 million native speakers of Cantonese -- more than most languages around the world -- notably in Hong Kong. Moreover, Cantonese is not merely a "dialect" of Mandarin, as Douyin implies when it talks of "languages and dialects": they are quite separate languages that derive independently from Middle Chinese. As Wikipedia notes: "Middle Chinese texts sounding more similar to modern Cantonese than other present-day Chinese varieties, including Mandarin." Maybe Mandarin users of Douyin should be told to speak in Cantonese so they can get closer to their language's ancient roots.

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Filed Under: cantonese, censorship, china, content moderation, douyin, mandarin, tiktok
Companies: bytedance

DailyDirt: You Say Tomato, I Say Tomahto

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Dead languages don't change and evolve. It's the languages that people speak the most that develop new words and new dialects. In the past, it's been difficult to track the evolution of language, but with more and more wiretapped phonecalls digital voice recordings available for analysis, linguists are in a better position to study how languages are changing. Here are just a few interesting links on language dialects.

• Joshua Katz used linguistic data from Bert Vaux's dialect survey to generate interactive maps of how people speak across the continental US. What is your generic term for a sweetened carbonated beverage? [url]
• Phonemica is a project to record the thousands of different Chinese dialects in order to preserve the richness of the language for future generations. It's run by volunteers who want to collect spoken stories, and it was started with an Indiegogo fundraising campaign. [url]
• There are several barriers that prevent various English dialects from becoming their own languages. Modern literacy and the increasing global mobility of people make it harder and harder for new languages to split off and develop. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: chinese, dialects, english, language, linguists, literacy, mandarin, phonemica, speaking, voices
Companies: indiegogo

DailyDirt: Learning A Foreign Language

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Apparently, Japanese is the most difficult foreign language for native English speakers to learn. Not only does it have different written and spoken codes, it also has three different writing systems. Furthermore, Japanese syntax is left branching, which is the complete opposite of English syntax, which is right branching. Learning a foreign language is never easy (although some people seem to have an easier time than others), but it's not impossible with enough time and effort put into it. Here are a few more links about learning foreign languages.

• A father spoke to his son in only Klingon for the first three years of his life. He was apparently interested in whether his kid, who was just going through his first language acquisition process, would pick up Klingon just like any human language. And, yes, the kid did start to learn it. [url]
• What it takes to learn Chinese, or any other foreign language, is simply lots of hard work. You don't have to be talented. Just follow the "10,000 Hour Rule," and practice, practice, practice. [url]
• Scientists in China think they've figured out a better way to teach Chinese. Using network theory, they developed a learning strategy that exploits the structural relationships between Chinese characters, which are actually composed of a fairly limited number of sub-characters. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: education, english, klingon, language, learning, mandarin, syntax