CATEGORIZATION OF LANGUAGE NOMINATIONS IN THE SOCIOLINGUISTIC SPACE OF THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA

Abstract

The article generally presents the languages' sociolinguistic categorization of the people’s Republic of China. The languages' Socio-political nomination of any region are derived from the factors such as social, political, historical, ethnic and linguistic system. The result is to create terminology not with ontological, but with discursive nature. Therefore, in each special case it created a kind of category structure with a unique semantic connections between categories, which leads to a fundamental non-equi-valence of the meanings behind similar nominations in different languages and cultures, which make difficult to adequate translation and transmission of these meanings. The article analyzes prototypical nominations of languages within Sino-Tibetan language space, studies the meanings behind them, shows their specificity in comparison with other language spaces. The main attention is paid to the nominations designating the standard Chinese language in its variants, dialects and national minorities languages. The terminological field of nominations is regarded as fundamentally discursive, that is, as a projection of different types ideologies transforming ontological entities.

Keywords

• социолингвистика
• семантика
• языковая политика
• языковое планирование
• категоризация
• социо-политические категории языков
• социальные функции языка