GoKunming Articles

Booming Southeast Asian trade necessitates bilingual graduates

By in News on

While visiting Yunnan in 2009, Chinese President Hu Jintao declared that the province must position itself as the country's economic and cultural gateway to Southeast Asia. The province has since undertaken massive infrastructure projects strengthening its links with Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia and Malaysia.

With transport connectivity increasing, Yunnan is looking to further capitalize on the growing trade boom it enjoys with members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

Yesterday the provincial government announced an initiative to train 100,000 college students to speak Southeast Asian languages by the year 2015, China News is reporting. The initiative will involve all of Yunnan's 28 colleges and universities.

The program will encourage students interested in studying foreign languages to consider those from ASEAN countries as viable alternatives to English. Officials are hopeful that students studying foreign affairs, economics, international trade and international cultural exchange will also participate in the initiative.

To promote the program the Yunnan Education Department and Yunnan Normal University will work together to host "Southeast Asia Week" as an annual event. According to China News, the week will host language contests between different university groups and promote study-abroad opportunities.

The demand for bi- and multi-lingual graduates is expected to rise sharply in Yunnan as several transport infrastructure projects come online. Kunming will open China's fourth largest international airport on June 28. The US$3.6 billion project is expected to handle 950,000 tons of cargo per year, connect Yunnan to Europe and the Middle East and increase connectivity within Asia.

Kunming's second railway station is also currently under construction and is expected to open in 2015. When finished, the station will connect Kunming via a high speed railway network to Vientiane, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore.

Image: New Century China


Share this article







I'm not as pessimistic as Yuanyangren. I know a fair amount of South-East-Asian students here in Kunming who, besides their own language and pretty good English, also speak Chinese and another South-East-Asian language.

When in Vietnam I heard a fair deal of Chinese, Lao and Cambodian. In eastern Thailand and southern Laos, a fair number of people could speak Vietnamese. People in eastern Burma were often also fluent in Thai as they often (illegally) cross the border to work in Thailand.

There are different reasons for this. First, culturally: except for Chinese, no language or nation is so much bigger than the other that it is not necessary for them to learn their neighbour's language (i.e. you don't have the France or Germany effect). Plus the fact that each country has a lot of immigrants and trade from neighbouring countries.

Linguistically: all of those languages are linguistically closer to each other than each of them is to English (tones, structure over flection, sounds ...), which makes it much easier for the speaker of one SEA language to learn the other. Also, you can pretty much consider Lao and Thai as one language.

Finally, you don't really need to know each language. One will do. Being a linguist myself, I know that knowing a fourth or a fifth language doesn't help. No company ever seeks polyglots. Most would rather employ two persons with different language skills.

That said, I indeed know very few Chinese who master any of those languages. They suffer from the France syndrome where their language is so overwhelmingly big that they do not need to know any others. This could prove a great opportunity for South-East-Asians who do master more than one language, in addition to Chinese.







@bluppfisk, despite many SE Asian languages being more similar to each other than they are to English, this doesn't mean that say, a Chinese speaker will become more successful at learning Thai than they would be at English. When I was studying Chinese at YNNU and YU the Thai and Lao students in particular had great trouble with many of the sounds in Chinese, even if they had studied Chinese for a year or more, they still couldn't pronounce the "c" or "z" sounds correctly and they would always come out as sounding like an English "j" sound. For example, "baozi" would be pronounced by a Thai as "baojew".

Login to comment