On Literary Language and the Construction ofContemparary Chinese

Since the 1990s, large number of network language, “symbolic” translated words, oral and dialect words have gotten into modern Chinese, coupled with the incorrect resurrection of abandoned classical Chinese words, which manifested the gradual deviation of modern Chinese from the literary language and a significant decline in the quality of modern Chinese. Therefore, it is necessary to have modern Chinese to be more standardized through approaching the conventions and standards of literary language again, and it’s time to make modern Chinese to get back to the bidirectional movement of “literature of national language-national language of literature” put forward by Hu Shi. Furthermore, linguistic research and dictionary compilation should take literary works as language materials and corpus. The purity and health of modern Chinese need the conscious maintenance and observance of all writers, which is also the responsibility and obligation of linguists. Dictionary compilation should not “record words at sight”, but let those vulgar and barbarous words perish on their own.