Bilingual education in Guangxi bridges tradition, development
Each week, 68-year-old Huang Tianheng travels 12 kilometers uptown to teach a group of children wearing colorful traditional clothes to sing songs in Zhuang, a language used by China’s ethnic minority Zhuang people.
The choir at Qingle Elementary School, located in Nanning, capital of Southwest China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, has toured across China, and some members have even performed in Paris.
Zhuang people are one of the largest ethnic minorities in China, and most of them live in Guangxi, which has 11 native ethnic minority groups.
China has made efforts to preserve the languages and traditions of ethnic minorities while achieving development, by pushing for bilingual education in the region.
The Wuming district, where the elementary school is located, is the birthplace of Zhuang culture. Huang used to be the head of the local culture center before his retirement.
Now, teaching local children Zhuang culture has become his new job. At the Qingle Elementary School, bilingual education started as early as 1980s. A total of 330 students in the school are being taught in both languages.
Efforts to preserve the Zhuang language started decades ago. In 1952, the State Council, China’s cabinet, approved a plan to preserve the language. In 1982, Guangxi released a scheme for the Zhuang writing system based on 26 Latin letters, bringing standardization to the Zhuang written language.
More recently, in August, the region implemented regulations to increase Zhuang language usage in public areas and step up bilingual education and the training of bilingual teachers.
Apart from Zhuang, Guangxi has also opened bilingual courses in elementary and middle school for the Jing people, of which there are around 20,000 living in the area.
“With these efforts, Jing’s ethnic language has been better preserved and more young people can speak and write in the language,” said Su Weifang, head of the Jing Language and Cultural Inheritance Center in Guangxi’s Dongxing.