AS DIPLOMATIC incidents go, it was not a big one, but for many people in Hong Kong and southern China it felt like the latest in a long line of slights. In May, Nintendo—a Japanese toy company— launched its most recent video games of Pokémon, a franchise of cute furry creatures, and announced that the names of the creatures would henceforth be written in characters that adhere to Mandarin pronunciation, not Cantonese. This, said the company, would help to provide unity across the greater Chinese market. On May 30th, a group of demonstrators gathered outside the Japanese consulate in Hong Kong to protest. Behind Nintendo’s announcement is a bigger linguistic and political issue. As part of its broader nation-building programme, the Communist Party has, since 1949, been trying to unify the country under the banner of spoken Mandarin. It has recently been pushing the project harder, and many companies are going along with it. Just as the British authorities tried to get rid of the Gaelic languages in Scotland and Ireland in the 18th century, the party has long been worried about separatist Tibetans and Uighurs using their language as a rallying point for independence. But central authorities are also now worried about any regional languages (which it insists on calling dialects) among the Han majority helping foster too much regional identity. Most worrying to the party is Cantonese, a language spoken by the same number of people who speak Italian (about 60m) in southern China and Hong Kong. In recent years it has mandated that many news broadcasts in Guangdong province switch to Mandarin from Cantonese.

This linguistic homogenisation is being enforced, however, just as a number of forces are pushing in the opposite direction. Technology is empowering regional languages, of which there are hundreds, and enhancing the centrifugal effect of migration, modernity and social change. Young people, empowered by mobile phones and computers, are changing the way they use their own language and breaking out of the straitjacket that has restricted communication for millennia. The trends in language mirror broader tensions between centralising, top-down forces trying to prevent dissent, and bottom-up trends among an increasingly empowered populace. They are adding to social fault lines that the Communist Party fears may threaten national unity.

Linguistically, China wants to be like America—a country where language and script are unified. In reality it is like medieval Europe—a continent full of different languages, nominally united by a written lingua franca. Before the 20th century, regional Chinese literati could communicate on paper in classical Chinese, but barely in conversation, just as European scholars communicated in Latin. The fracturing of Europe, politically and religiously, led to the emergence of written regional vernaculars like English and German.

But China never fractured—at least not permanently. And without an alphabetical writing system, no one in China could write down regional languages as the English or French or Germans could. When China adopted a common spoken vernacular as part of its modernisation in the 20th century, it was a form of one particular northern dialect called Mandarin—as though Europe had thrown away Latin and decided to enforce French across the continent.

The British decision on June 23rd to leave the European Union is the legacy of Europe’s age-old divisions. Once Geoffrey Chaucer was inclined, and able, to write in English, it was a straight road to English nationalism and, by extension, Brexit. The Chinese push for linguistic unity is, economically, to facilitate education and development. But politically it is to prevent Hong Kong or Guangdong (or Tibet or Xinjiang) gaining so much regional identity and independence that they want to do a Brexit of their own.

Like Latin, classical written Chinese was a dead language, spoken by no one. A century ago, when language reformers began to introduce a common nationwide spoken tongue of Mandarin, they also abandoned the classical written language and replaced it with one that mirrored the spoken form, thus trying to synchronise their speech and their script. Some revolutionaries, including Mao Zedong, initially wanted to scrap Chinese characters altogether and replace them with an alphabet. They settled instead for a simplification of the characters and a standardisation of how they are pronounced and written in Roman letters, known as pinyin. Yet despite major success in literacy programmes, there are still 400m people in China who do not speak Mandarin, and some 100m who the government says cannot read at all. The actual number is undoubtedly higher.

Part of the reason is the complexity of the Chinese script, says David Moser, author of “A Billion Voices”, a new book about the Chinese language. There are few and confusing links between the form of a character and its sound. Some, but not all, characters have a phonetic clue to how they should be pronounced, each regional language pronouncing a character differently. But the pronunciation never really mattered. All that mattered was that national unity was engendered from each region being able to understand what the character meant, however it was pronounced. This has been good for control, since it has given emperors (and party secretaries) a script for official pronouncements that can be read anywhere in the country, in any era. China claims to have a high literacy rate, though its definition of literacy is the subject of intense debate. Even so, its beautiful but complex writing system has hardly helped the drive for literacy.

Early in the technological revolution, many thought the complexity of inputting characters into computers might kill them off completely. But the opposite has happened as software experts have developed a fast and efficient way to write characters with a keyboard. Just type “chang” or “mao” in pinyin and choose from a selection of 5 or 6 characters pronounced that way, easing the burden of having to recall the characters cold.

Although that has helped to launch 700m Chinese people into cyberspace, it has not helped the party’s efforts to synchronise written characters with Mandarin pronunciation. Last year Jackie Chan, a Hong Kong film star, famously launched a phonetic firestorm in mainland China with an advert for shampoo where he flicked his bouffy hair and exclaimed how “duang” it was. Everyone wanted to tweet it and text their friends how “duang” their own hair was, too, but they could not, for “duang” has no character to go with it. It is one of many slang or dialect words and phrases that you can say but not write using Chinese characters. (It translates roughly as “boing” in English.)

Characters may be beautiful and ooze history but they still have trouble absorbing anything new, unconventional or foreign, or representing anything said in slang or dialect. Europeans solved this problem by starting to write not in Latin but in their local language. Cantonese is the only Chinese language that has come close to accomplishing this (helped greatly by the separateness of Hong Kong under British rule). A host of special characters represent unique syllables of Cantonese, enabling books and magazines to be printed in Cantonese rather than Mandarin, and fuelling the party’s ire at Hong Kongers intent on asserting their distinct identity. But the fact that other Chinese regions have been unable to do so has helped central authorities avoid European-style fragmentation. The tweeters have got round their Jackie Chan problem by simply writing “duang” in Roman letters. “Chinese people are now approaching language more as a phonetic phenomenon than as a graphic one,” says Victor Mair of the University of Pennsylvania. “Pinyin allows anyone to read and write anything they can say.”

The inflexibility of Chinese script is a source of some frustration to members of an increasingly empowered younger generation used to saying and doing what they want. They do not accept a canon of unchanging characters handed down from antiquity. They want to make up new ones and use Roman letters, and they believe the language police cannot stop them. Meanwhile, just as Mandarin is becoming more entrenched nationwide, the internet—harder to censor than radio or television—has given a boost to other types of linguistic free thinking and a platform for regional languages, from hip-hop artists rapping in their local dialect to satirical videos lampooning local pop icons . Such linguistic creativity is “cognitively transformational”, says Mr Mair. It is changing the way people think, he says, and enhancing a subversive streak apparent everywhere among Chinese young people.

The other part of the linguistic revolution is that computers and mobiles mean that children are spending less time slogging away at the rote learning of characters. That used to mean that students had little space left to think of anything else. It is often said that by the time a child has mastered writing characters, he has lost the ability to use what he has learned to be original. Now, though, people no longer need to learn so many characters, as they just need to be able to recognise them, once typed using pinyin on a roman-letter keyboard.

This means Chinese people, young and old, increasingly have “character amnesia”, says Mr Mair. No longer emphasising the writing of characters by hand can free up cognitive resources for other things, he says, like thinking for themselves, and is part of the empowering of the Chinese mind that could have political implications. The inflexibility of the Chinese script has always reinforced the inflexibility of the Chinese state. The reason Xi Jinping can have total control over China is because the education system underpins all the mechanisms of the police state, says Mr Mair.

Criticism of China’s writing system has also provoked debates among Western scholars. Thomas Mullaney of Stanford University has accused those who say Chinese characters are a stumbling block to literacy of being “Orientalist”, a fighting-word in modern academe. But, says Mr Moser, it is Chinese people themselves who have always been the most critical of their own script. And now they are able to go beyond the script, using alphabets, emojis, invented characters and foreign languages, or bypassing the written word altogether by speaking into their phones and computers—in their own languages and dialects.

The growing use of pinyin, and the continued tension between spoken regional “dialects” and Chinese characters, will continue, even though, for reasons of national and cultural pride, it now seems unlikely that characters will ever be replaced with an alphabet. With the help of technology, more people are thinking for themselves, outside the boxy prison of Chinese characters—one more part of the steady empowerment of the populace that is challenging orthodoxy in Beijing. The Mandarinisation of the nation will continue; the use of a standard language is undeniably helpful in educating the poorest and helping them engage with broader development trends in the country and across the world. But even if the party achieves linguistic unity under Mandarin, says Mr Moser, it may still find social and political unity as elusive as ever.