Faster turnover among the characters most used by the media

On May 22, 2006, China’s Ministry of Education and State Language Commission first published the “Green Paper on Chinese Language Development”—the “Report on the Language Situation”. It shows faster turnover...

On May 22, 2006, China’s Ministry of Education and State Language Commission first published the “Green Paper on Chinese Language Development”—the “Report on the Language Situation”. It indicates faster turnover among Chinese characters most frequently used in the media and slower growth in Internet terminology. Overall, Chinese-language development can be described as healthy and harmonious, combining a distinct identity with diversity.


Li Yuming, head of the Ministry of Education’s language and written information department, said that a study of 15 newspapers, 13 television channels and three online media outlets, covering over 732 million characters, identified 8,225 characters used by the media. Of the study’s top 7,000, 615 were absent from the 7,000-character “Dictionary of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese”.

A study of language and characters on the BBS forums of seven Chinese universities identified 9,793 characters, above the media average. Punctuation accounted for 55.07% of usage, exceeding characters at 44.7%, while Internet terminology was unstable. Large numbers of Internet terms appeared several years ago, but growth in their use has recently slowed.