The Chinese Language Revolution with Jing Tsu

Wednesday, March 02, 2022 | 6:30 p.m.

What does it take to reinvent a language? How do you take a language as complex as Chinese and adapt it to a world increasingly designed for the Roman alphabet? How do you convey tones, or handle mutually unintelligible dialects? In her new book Kingdom of Characters, Yale professor Jing Tsu tells the story of Chinese over the last century, as innovators fought to make the formidable language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology. Without their advances, China might never have become the dominating force we know today.

Kingdom of Characters is available through our Bookshop.org storefront.