In recent years, the phenomenon of Europeanization in modern Chinese has become noticeable, especially in academic writing. It’s also becoming more common in spoken Chinese, a trend that concerns some linguists. This influence is hard to avoid in academic writing, even when we write in languages other than English, since many concepts were introduced from Western societies.

On this issue, I think it can be accepted to a certain extent, because almost every language has absorbed something from other languages throughout history. Languages are constantly evolving through internal development and external influences. As far as I know, Japanese was formed by adopting Chinese characters and part of the pronunciation of Chinese in history, which is why speakers of some dialects, such as Wu, may feel that Japanese pronunciation is easier for them. (European languages are another example, but I don’t have enough knowledge to explain.)

And modern Chinese itself is also an example. Pinyin, a set of modern Chinese pronunciation rules, was formed by adopting the Latin alphabet. Without it, we might find it more difficult to learn our mother language, much like people in the old days, when only a small minority of the population possessed knowledge. It is precisely because the cost of spreading knowledge has dropped—due to the use of Pinyin, the simplification of characters, and the popularization of compulsory education—that among those born after the 1980s, there are almost no illiterate people.

I think the form of Pinyin is a kind of Europeanization in modern Chinese, which is an active and instrumental outcome, different from the Europeanization of grammar. It helps people from other countries to learn Putonghua (Mandarin) more easily, while at the same time, we can understand the pronunciation of European languages with the same advantage. Based on the corrections to my last four posts, I found some expressions that I thought were very Europeanized actually are not. Basically, I’m willing to adopt some interesting expressions from different languages. At the same time, I intentionally maintain the characteristics of Chinese itself when writing novels, for example, by using fewer conjunctions like ‘因为 (because)’ and ‘所以 (so)’, and relying on context to convey the meaning.