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The Politics and Sociolinguistics of Chinese Dialects

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Book cover Language Attitudes and Identities in Multilingual China

Abstract

Having set the scene in general in the last chapter, we will now clarify some basic sociolinguistic concepts necessary for studying language attitudes and identities in multilingual China. Firstly, we discuss the problematic issue of distinguishing between language and dialect in the specific context of Chinese languages. The general rules for language-dialect distinction often cannot be applied to the case of Chinese dialects. In particular, I argue that two often cited criteria for defining Chinese dialects as dialects rather than languages—sharing a written language and having an established writing system—cannot withstand scrutiny. Then a historical and sociolinguistic overview of Chinese dialects is given, with a focus on the special status of Cantonese in mainland China. Also included in this chapter is a discussion of the language policies regarding Chinese dialects in three different but historically related contexts: mainland China, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Considering issues of Chinese dialects in mainland China as locally anchored as well as globally relevant is a perspective indispensible to the current study.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Terms in brackets are those more frequently used overseas by ordinary people and in previous research literature.

  2. 2.

    The oldest existing rhyme dictionary, published in 601 CE, the Sui Dynasty and revised in the Tang Dynasty.

  3. 3.

    The Sinitic/Chinese languages are tonal languages, which means changing the tone of a syllable changes the meaning of the word.

  4. 4.

    Xiamen is the romanisation according to Hanyu Pinyin , the phonetic script constructed in the 1950s for transcribing Putonghua. “Amoy” is the transliteration according to the dialectal pronunciation of the name of the city, which has been in use for centuries possibly due to early contacts between the local and the foreigners. These dialectal transliterations such as Hakka, Teochew, and Swatow are more frequently used in the overseas research literature, while the Hanyu Pinyin counterparts—Kejia, Chaozhou, and Shantou—are used instead in research done by Chinese scholars from the mainland of China, and increasingly by others too.

  5. 5.

    See Footnote 8.

  6. 6.

    Some other dialects, such as Shanghainese and Teochew dialects, are also used in regional broadcasting, but not as extensively as Cantonese.

  7. 7.

    It is a member of the Nanfang (South) Daily Group which is one of the top ten media corporations in China (Lu and Lan 2009). Southern Metropolis Daily started distribution in Hong Kong from December 2010.

  8. 8.

    For example, see the website of 粤语协会 (Cantonese Association), URL: http://www.cantonese.asia/

  9. 9.

    Some researchers distinguish between the subcategories of diglossia. The readers may refer to Don Snow’s work (2012), Revisiting Ferguson’s defining cases of diglossia, for an in-depth discussion. In this book, the term diglossia is adopted mainly for its sense of power contrast between the high and low varieties, functional compartmentalisation, and the theoretical absence of native high-variety speakers.

  10. 10.

    The island of Hong Kong was ceded to Britain in 1842, and later other parts of present-day Hong Kong were ceded or leased to Britain according to the 1860 and 1898 Sino–British treaties (Postiglione 1988).

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  1. School of Foreign Languages, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China

    Sihua (斯华) Liang (梁)

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Liang (梁), S. (2015). The Politics and Sociolinguistics of Chinese Dialects. In: Language Attitudes and Identities in Multilingual China. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12619-7_2

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