The "Mandarin as a Simple Global Language" Narrative: Category Errors, Descriptive Frameworks, and the Risk to Hungarian Grammatical Autonomy

This theoretical position paper examines the widespread narrative that Mandarin Chinese is a “simple global language.” It argues that this framing is not a descriptive fact but a metalanguage-level category error caused by the export of Western grammatical ontologies. Rather than eliminating complexity, Mandarin redistributes it across operators, positional licensing, constructions, and discourse-level constraints. The paper further discusses the risks of Mandarin functioning as a lingua franca under such misaligned descriptive frameworks, especially with regard to grammatical concept interference in Hungarian. The work proposes an operations-first descriptive ontology as an alternative. This document is not a textbook, teaching aid, or methodological guide, but a theoretical discussion paper intended for linguists.