Language Diversity in the Sinophone World

Historical Trajectories, Language Planning, and Multilingual Practices

Henning Klöter, Mårten Söderblom Saarela, Henning Klöter, Mårten Söderblom Saarela

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367504519
• eBook ISBN: 9781000201482
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Language Diversity in the Sinophone World offers interdisciplinary insights into social, cultural, and linguistic aspects of multilingualism in the Sinophone world, highlighting language diversity and opening up the burgeoning field of Sinophone studies to new perspectives from sociolinguistics.

The book begins by charting historical trajectories in Sinophone multilingualism, beginning with late imperial China through to the emergence of English in the mid-19th century. The volume uses this foundation as a jumping off point from which to provide an in-depth comparison of modern language planning and policies throughout the Sinophone world, with the final section examining multilingual practices not readily captured by planning frameworks and the ideologies, identities, repertoires, and competences intertwined within these different multilingual configurations.

Taken together, the collection makes a unique sociolinguistic-focused intervention into emerging research in Sinophone studies and will be of interest to students and scholars within the discipline.

Part I

Historical Trajectories

1 What Was Standard Chinese in the Nineteenth Century?

Divergent Views in the Times of Transition

Richard VanNess Simmons

Abstract

In late imperial China, the most widely spoken form of the Mandarin lingua franca called Guānhuà was the Nanjing-type southern Mandarin language with five tones. Prior to the nineteenth century, Western students of spoken Chinese generally studied this five-tone Mandarin, a practice which had started with the efforts of the Jesuit missionaries to learn Chinese. But in the mid-nineteenth century, many Westerners began to advocate that the language of Beijing should be the focus of their study. In the same period, however, the dialect of Beijing carried little prestige among the general Chinese population. By the end of the nineteenth century there was still strong resistance to a Beijing pronunciation standard among Chinese. By analyzing a complex interplay of ideological and social factors, this chapter counters the widespread view that the standard followed the location of the capital.

Introduction

The modern conceptualization of China’s so-called standard language in the Qing (1644–1911), and even in the Ming (1368–1644) dynasty, rests on at least three faulty assumptions that prevent an accurate view of the actual historical and linguistic situation. The first is that the national capital is a priori the locus of the spoken standard, which simply follows wherever the capital is established. The second, related, assumption is that the historical koiné known as Guānhuà (官話, ‘the language of the officials’), which came to be known as Mandarin in the West, was thus based on the Beijing dialect as soon as the capital moved to Beijing. A third assumption is that the common spoken standard was identical to the reading pronunciation standard for Classical Chinese. These assumptions have deeply affected the received view of sinophone history and are reflected, for example, in Benjamin A. Elman’s landmark study of the Ming and Qing Chinese examination system, in which he remarks:

Beginning in the early Ming, the dominant values, ideas, questions, and debates that prevailed in court and among officials were translated into a classical language whose pronunciation was based on the standard Mandarin dialect of the court (kuan-hua 官話) in the capital region in north China (after the Mongol invasion and after the Ming transfer of the primary capital from Nanking in 1415–21) and not on the dialects of the more populous and prosperous south, although a form of “southern” kuan-hua remained in use during the Ming in the parallel ministries that were maintained in Nanking as the southern capital…. Without a competing capital such as Nanking, Peking alone during the Ch’ing dynasty provided the standard language for officials.

(Elman 2000: 373–74; emphasis added)

The question of the vernacular phonetic basis for the recitation of classical language texts is a complex one. It is by no means simply the case that the pronunciation of the classical language was “based on the standard Mandarin dialect of the court.” A wide variety of factors came into play in determining how to pronounce a classical text, including local reading traditions, traditional rime books and rime tables, as well as each individual speaker’s dialect background.¹ Regional conventions and many types of local reading practice allowed for local pronunciation and recitation of texts in dialect. Many people must have also learned some form of Guānhuà pronunciation that could be used in recitation as well and that was also useful to know for mastery of the Mandarin-based lingua franca which was necessary for communication beyond one’s local community.

This lingua franca is the focus of the present discussion, which seeks a more nuanced picture of the linguistic and geographical basis of the “standard Mandarin dialect” in Qing times, the “standard language for officials” in the period, and Guānhuà in both its northern and southern forms.² This chapter examines these linguistic standards and varieties from the perspective of the mid to late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and uncovers a set of assumptions, practices, and attitudes that clarify the nature and shape of the “standard Mandarin dialect” of late imperial China.

We use the term “standard” in this discussion loosely to encompass a range of linguistic norms and attitudes that held sway, and slowly evolved, in China and the sinophone world from premodern times through the late nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century. Prior to the nineteenth century, the standard was a vague set of conventions for speaking and writing that the educated literati generally held to be most preferred and most useful for oral and written communication throughout China’s vast territory and across the many dialects and varieties of spoken Chinese. The various premodern conventional spoken norms were never precisely or rigorously codified by the government prior to the twentieth century. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, as the Chinese learned of national language standards that were being developed in Europe, Japan, and elsewhere, they began increasingly to call on the government to develop a national language standard for China too. This would ultimately come to be a governmentally codified standard.

To better understand the evolution of the traditional Guānhuà norms, and attitudes toward them, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we will look at the linguistic specifics that entered the debate regarding exactly what the modern official standard should be.³ The results of our examination bring us to the following conclusions:

1. The conventional pronunciation norm most widely promulgated in the Qing is a five-tone Mandarin that is best characterized as the southern type.
2. Various permutations of this norm were prevalent throughout the Qing and even persisted into the Republican period.
3. While the Manchu court may have preferred Beijing pronunciation,⁴ the city’s dialect was otherwise widely dismissed among the Han Chinese, including the literati elite.
4. Westerners clearly turned to Beijing as the standard only after the Taiping rebellion (1851–64).
5. Chinese acceptance of a Beijing standard did not come until decades later.

The Qing Standard and Its Characteristic Phonology

From the perspective of dialect evolution, Qing-period Mandarin was not a single language. Since well before the Ming, the Mandarin dialects already evidenced great diversity.⁵ The oldest and deepest split within the Mandarin dialects is that between northern and southern types. Though similar in many ways, there are clear and significant phonological differences between these two types, which will become clear as our discussion unfolds. In historical perspective, the southern type is older and more conservative, while the northern type is an innovative variety that made its first encroachment deep into Chinese territory only following the collapse of the Northern Song (960–1127) and the Jin (1115–1234) takeover of north China. Prior to that, the southern type was dominant in the central plains, including in Kaifeng, the Northern Song capital, until its speakers fled south with the dynasty. Later, the descendant of this southern type was widely spoken in the regions of modern Anhui and Jiangsu, the territories from which Zhū Yuánzhāng 朱元璋 (1328–98) marched forth to expel the Mongol Yuan (1271–1368) dynasty and establish the Ming dynasty. The language of the capital of Zhū Yuánzhāng’s new Ming dynasty, Nanjing, was a variety of this southern type, which thus can also be called the Jiāngnán 江南 (‘south of the Yangtze’) type.⁶ This Jiāngnán Mandarin carried forward the prestige of the southern Mandarin that had been established in the Song and came to serve as the exemplar for the Mandarin-based lingua franca spoken by officials in the Ming—Guānhuà.⁷

The prestige of the language is demonstrated by the preference for Guānhuà pronunciation and usage, particularly that of southern Mandarin, among the educated literati and others of elevated social status and mobility in their conversation and reading practices, as well as in their interactions across dialect and other linguistic boundaries. Our discussion below provides a number of examples that illustrate this preference and the various forms it takes. The wide geographical distribution and deep historical roots of Ming-period Guānhuà, dating back to its northern Song origins, added to the prestige that Mandarin gained through association with the Ming dynasty’s founding emperor. This prestige and the accompanying influence held fast even following the move of the Ming capital to Beijing in 1421 and through the end of the Qing dynasty.

Though it had taken deep root in the Ming bureaucracy right from the start, this preferred language of the officials is not explicitly identified as “Guānhuà” in written records until decades after the move to Beijing, in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. One of the earliest mentions is in the Sìyǒuzhāi cóngshuō (四友齋叢說; Collected discussions from the Four Friends Studio) by Hé Liángjùn 何良俊 (1506–73), who says that “Yǎyí [i.e. Wáng Chǒng 王寵 (1471–1533) of Suzhou] did not like to employ his hometown language; when speaking he always used Guānhuà” (Hé 1995–2002: 619).⁸ This concept of Guānhuà had coalesced around the language that had been spread throughout the empire by the Ming bureaucracy and military and that had come to serve as the lingua franca of government officials, merchants, soldiers and their officers, and others who traveled beyond their own local communities. While there is no evidence for a single, discrete term referring to this lingua franca prior to the late Ming, the idea of a correct and elegant reading pronunciation did have earlier characterizations. For instance, the imperially commissioned early Ming southern Mandarin rime book Hóngwǔ zhèngyùn (洪武正韻; Rectified rimes of the Hóngwǔ reign [1328–98]) makes note of “correct pronunciation” (正音) and “elegant vocalization of the central plains” (中原雅聲) in its introductory discussion (Yuè and Sòng 1983: 4, 6).⁹

In the mid-seventeenth century a non-Chinese ethnic group, the Manchus, swept in from the northeast to push out the Ming rulers and establish the Qing dynasty. By this time, southern Mandarin-based Guānhuà had become deeply and firmly entrenched as the prestigious lingua franca, or common koiné—the common supra-regional spoken language—of the native Chinese Han lite...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Language Diversity in the Sinophone World
• Part I Historical Trajectories
• Part II Language Planning
• Part III Multilingual Practices
• Index