The standardization of minority languages has little room in language policy and language planning because models of nation-state building are generally not designed to accommodate minority languages, while standardized minority languages often lead to challenges for the state. This chapter reviews how various ideologies, such as nationalism, nationism and patriotism, interact with nation-state building and globalization in shaping approaches to the standardization of minority languages. As a case study, it examines how China, adopting the Soviet model of multinational state building, technically standardized minority languages in a two-track multilingual system where standardized Chinese functioned as the main track and standardized minority languages functioned as the satellites of an eventual linguistic integration. Since the failure of this model in the 1990s, globalization has created opportunities in China through transnational institutions, such as UNESCO and ISO, and technical revolutions, such as the Internet, for bottom-up efforts at the standardization of minority languages. The case shows a trajectory from the state monopoly of the agency of standardization to the diversity of the agency among the state, local communities and the global community. This development appears to be the future of the standardization of minority languages in multilingual nation-states in an age of globalization.

In 1324, about fifty years after the establishment of the Yuan dynasty, a rhyming book entitled Zhōngyuán Yīnyùn 中原音韻 ‘Rhymes of the Central Plain’ was published. The phonological system seen in this book is completely different from the Qièyùn system, but it shares many basic phonological characteristics with Modern Mandarin. Therefore, in the study of historical phonology, the Chinese of the Zhōngyuán Yīnyùn is referred to as Old Mandarin. The Zhōngyuán Yīnyùn documents a phonological system that had already existed in the north of China for centuries. Like the Qièyùn, it was not based on the phonology of any single dialect; the phonological distinctions could be from a variety of prestigious forms of Mandarin dialects at the time. This new standard represented an important turning point in the phonological history of Chinese. The Zhōngyuán Yīnyùn provides a complete phonology of the standard language based on the Zhongyuan dialect as indicated by the title of the book; however, the well-established phonological characteristics of the Zhōngyuán Yīnyùn suggest that the origin of Mandarin phonology should have been from a much earlier time.