Language Log

« previous post |

Jeffrey Weng, "What Is Mandarin? The Social Project of Language Standardization in Early Republican China", Journal of Asian Studies, 77.3 (August 2018), 611-633.

Abstract

Scholars who study language often see standard or official languages as oppressive, helping the socially advantaged to entrench themselves as elites. This article questions this view by examining the Chinese case, in which early twentieth-century language reformers attempted to remake their society's language situation to further national integration. Classical Chinese, accessible only to a privileged few, was sidelined in favor of Mandarin, a national standard newly created for the many. This article argues that Mandarin's creation reflected an entirely new vision of society. It draws on archival sources on the design and promulgation of Mandarin from the 1910s to the 1930s to discuss how the way the language was standardized reflected the nature of the imagined future society it was meant to serve. Language reform thus represented a radical rethinking of how society should be organized: linguistic modernity was to be a national modernity, in which all the nation's people would have access to the new official language, and thus increased opportunities for advancement.

The first two paragraphs of the article:

The artificiality of China's standard language is no secret. Nonetheless, much of social and sociolinguistic theory until now has been devoted to unmasking the artificiality and arbitrariness of standard languages. But the arbitrariness of the Chinese standard was never hidden from public view. This language, which this essay will refer to simply as “Mandarin,” was deliberately designed in the early twentieth century to be distinct from any existing spoken vernacular. This new language, though based on the speech of Beijing, was different from it and every other regional or local speech in China, and it was designed to be the standard for the entire polyglot Chinese nation. Whereas Beijing speech was a language of a particular place spoken by a particular group of people, Mandarin was intended to be, within China, the language of all places and no particular place. Thus universalized, Mandarin could facilitate nationwide communication that previously had been stymied by the nation's extensive multilinguality.

The creation of a Chinese standard language, therefore, was a state-led nation-building project, meant to mold a motley collection of peoples into a unified national society. But what was to be the nature of this new society? One of the main goals of language reform in China was to create a standard language that was easier to learn and thus more widely accessible. This desire for a more accessible standard language represented a substantial departure from the previous language situation, in which the official language—Classical Chinese—was so difficult to learn that access was restricted to a small segment of society. The promulgation of a national standard language in the early twentieth century therefore represented an attempt to extend educational meritocracy from small segment of elites to all of society. I argue that the creation of a new language was intimately connected to the goal of a new social order.

The following paragraph has copious, up-to-date citations, the full details of which are given in the author's ample List of References.

In so arguing, I diverge from the approaches taken in a small but growing body of scholarship in addressing the question of Chinese language reform. Historians in the past few years have been particularly active in this area, reflecting a resurgence of interest in language in China that began in the United States with the landmark works of the linguist and sinologist John DeFrancis (Reference DeFrancis1950, Reference DeFrancis1984, Reference DeFrancis1989). David Moser (Reference Moser2016) has offered a fresh overview of how Mandarin came to be China's national language. Recent studies have also addressed the social history of the origins and growth of Mandarin, documenting the experiences of everyday people in their encounter with the new national language in sound, on the screen, and in print (J. Chen Reference Chen2013b, Reference Chen2015; Culp Reference Culp2008). Other historians have discussed the intellectual history behind the vernacular language movement and the promulgation of Mandarin in China before and after 1949 (Kaske Reference Kaske2008; J. Liu Reference Liu2016; Tam Reference Tam2016a, Reference Tam2016b). Among linguists, the study of Mandarin phonology has driven theory-building in generative linguistics (Duanmu Reference Duanmu2007), while work by sociolinguists has illuminated popular attitudes about language practices in China (C. Li Reference Li2004, Reference Li, Árokay, Gvozdanović and Miyajima2014; Peng Reference Peng2016). And one cannot overlook the rapid expansion of Sinophone studies and other significant work in comparative literature in the past three decades (Gunn Reference Gunn1991; L. Liu Reference Liu1995, Reference Liu2004; Shih Reference Shih2011; Tsu Reference Tsu2010; G. Zhou Reference Zhou2011).

A breath of fresh air!  "Mandarin" as a single language called into question.

I am in communication with a number of scholars (mostly young) who will soon be taking on the daunting challenge of deconstructing the whole idea of a monolithic Hànyǔ 漢語 ("Hannic"), which, faute de mieux, I sometimes call "Sinitic".  The notion of a mammoth, integral language called "Chinese" is long gone.

Selected readings

April 12, 2025 @ 11:03 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Sociolinguistics, Standard language

Permalink