Geneva, 21 April 2022 (TDI): The UN observes the Chinese language day annually on the 20 April. Since April 20 is marked as the UN Chinese language day, a Chinese language video festival was organized.
It was organized by the UN department of public information in order to promote and develop the cultural diversity of official languages and multilingual characteristics to promote all the six official languages of the UN.
The festival was attended online by Tatiana Valovaya, the Director-General of the UN office in Geneva. Shen Haixiong, the President and Editor-in-Chief of China Media Group, and Chen Xu, the Ambassador of China to the UN Office in Geneva attended the online event and delivered remarks.
The UN Director-General thanked the Permanent Mission of China to the UN as well as China Media Group for organizing the event. UN has been celebrating this day for the past decade to enhance its cultural diversity and strengthen its multilingualism.
Chen Xu said that without understanding the glorious Chinese culture it is hard to explain its unique spirituality and the development of modern trends in China.
The video festival was launched in February. A collection of nonnative Chinese with a theme of China chic and a video contest was arranged for the world to see.
It was followed by an award ceremony to showcase the elegant beauty of China. Entries were received from 48 countries to participate in the video competition of 950 videos.
14 videos were shortlisted for 9 awards given by various people of excellence. Scholarships were awarded to 6 young Ambassadors provided by Tsinghua University. Video festival denoted its theme to the tradition and trends and youth and interaction.
Chinese Language: An overview
There are six official languages in the United Nations, these are French, Arabic, English, Russian, Spanish, and Chinese. In 1946, the Chinese language was established as the official language of the United Nations.
After the restoration of the law of full rights of China in the UN in 1971, it was functional as their official language. China is one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world.
In early 1900, a program was conducted in order to create a unification of the national language based on Mandarin. The language was launched in order to create a modern standard of Chinese.
In 1956, Pinyin, a Romanized system was introduced in order to adopt it as an educational tool to help achieve the pronunciation in the Bejing dialect.
A formerly prescribed system in 1979 was introduced for diplomatic documentation purposes and facilitation for foreign and English-speaking countries for its comprehension.
Old Chinese vocabulary is comprised of many words which are not being practiced in the other Sino-Tibetan languages. Some of the words have been acquired through trade and early interactions in which the nearest relatedness is with Indo-European languages.
Chinese received many traits and aspects of cultural assimilation from the Austro Asiatic and Austro-Tai people whom they gradually conquered and absorbed or rejected.
From the first century AD, Chinese borrowing from the Indo-Aryan language is noticed as a result of its association with India specially for its relatedness to Buddhism.
Since Chinese is one of the most ancient languages in the world there are some very interesting facts that are related to its diversity and unification at the same time. Chinese follow different calligraphy patterns.
Chinese characters were first seen in 1250 BC. They were engraved in animal bones. The Chinese language is widespread in South Asian countries. It is the only pictographic language and it does not carry any alphabet although it consists of 50,000 characters.
