清末新政時期,清廷推動建立新的國民教育體系,通過建設統一的國家通用語言和文化塑造國民、培養國家認同。新的學制章程將指向漢語的"國文"和"官話"(國語)設定為基礎科目,同時確立了"書同文"和"語同音"的制度目標,由此改變了王朝時代"各語其語"的狀態,初步實現了教育領域內的語文統一。這一改革,得到了內地邊疆一體化、憲政改革等制度建設的助推,體現了漢語作為主體民族語言的文化優勢。與此同時,傳統的清朝"國語"——滿語、滿文仍保留了一定的生存空間。其時,革命派和立憲派的滿漢語言觀,也從輿論層面對官方語文建設有所呼應和影響。新"國文"、"國語"的強勢崛起,說明建設統一的國家通用語言文化乃民族國家時代大勢所趨,而新舊"國語"并存,則揭示了這一進程的不徹底性及族群制約因素。

During the New Deal of the late Qing Dynasty, the Qing court promoted the establishment of a new national education system to shape the Chinese nation and foster its national identity through the construction of a unified national language and culture. The new school constitution set the Chinese Han as the “national language” and “official language” as well as the basic language subject, and established the institutional goals to adopt “the same written language” and “the same spoken language”. The reform changed the previous state of “each ruler group speaks its own ethnic language” in the dynastic era and achieved the initial unification of languages for the sake of education. It was also facilitated by the inland-border integration and constitutional reform, among others, and reflected the cultural prestige of the Chinese Han, spoken and written as the main national language. At the same time, the traditional Qing “official language”, i.e. the Manchu language, still retained a large space for survival, when the revolutionary and constitutional view on the Manchu-Han language adoption also echoed and influenced the construction of the official language from the level of public opinion. The strong rise of the new spoken and written language Han indicates that the construction of a unified national language and culture could be the trend of the stages with ethnic rulers in Chinese history, while the coexistence of the old and new “national language” reveals the incompleteness and ethnicity in the reform process.