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What Is a Chinese "Dialect/Topolect"? -- Reflections on Some Key Sino-English Linguistic Terms

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What Is a Chinese SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS Number 29 September, 1991 What Is a Chinese “Dialect/Topolect”? Reflections on Some Key Sino-English Linguistic Terms by Victor H. Mair Victor H. Mair, Editor Sino-Platonic Papers Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305 USA [email protected] www.sino-platonic.org SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS is an occasional series edited by Victor H. Mair. The purpose of the series is to make available to specialists and the interested public the results of research that, because of its unconventional or controversial nature, might otherwise go unpublished. The editor actively encourages younger, not yet well established, scholars and independent authors to submit manuscripts for consideration. Contributions in any of the major scholarly languages of the world, including Romanized Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) and Japanese, are acceptable. In special circumstances, papers written in one of the Sinitic topolects (fangyan) may be considered for publication. Although the chief focus of Sino-Platonic Papers is on the intercultural relations of China with other peoples, challenging and creative studies on a wide variety of philological subjects will be entertained. This series is not the place for safe, sober, and stodgy presentations. Sino-Platonic Papers prefers lively work that, while taking reasonable risks to advance the field, capitalizes on brilliant new insights into the development of civilization. The only style-sheet we honor is that of consistency. Where possible, we prefer the usages of the Journal of Asian Studies. Sinographs (hanzi, also called tetragraphs [fangkuaizi]) and other unusual symbols should be kept to an absolute minimum. Sino-Platonic Papers emphasizes substance over form. Submissions are regularly sent out to be refereed and extensive editorial suggestions for revision may be offered. Manuscripts should be double-spaced with wide margins and submitted in duplicate. A set of "Instructions for Authors" may be obtained by contacting the editor. Ideally, the final draft should be a neat, clear camera-ready copy with high black- and-white contrast. Contributors who prepare acceptable camera-ready copy will be provided with 25 free copies of the printed work. All others will receive 5 copies. Sino-Platonic Papers is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. Please note: When the editor goes on an expedition or research trip, all operations (including filling orders) may temporarily cease for up to two or three months at a time. In such circumstances, those who wish to purchase various issues of SPP are requested to wait patiently until he returns. If issues are urgently needed while the editor is away, they may be requested through Interlibrary Loan. N.B.: Beginning with issue no. 171, Sino-Platonic Papers will be published electronically on the Web. Issues from no. 1 to no. 170, however, will continue to be sold as paper copies until our stock runs out, after which they too will be made available on the Web. _______________________________________________ Victor H. Mair, "What Is a Chinese 'Dialect/Topolect?" Sino-Platonic Papers, 29 (September, 199 1) What Is a Chinese "Dialect/Topolect"? Reflections on Some Key Sino-English Linguistic Terms Victor H. Mair Department of Oriental Studies University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19 104-6305 USA Abstract Words like fangyan, htonghua, Hanyu, Guoyu, and Zhongwen have been the source of considerable perplexity and dissension among students of Chinese language(s) in recent years. The controversies they engender are compounded enormously when attempts are made to render these terms into English and other Western languages. Unfortunate arguments have erupted, for example, over whether Taiwanese is a Chinese language or a Chinese dialect. In an attempt to bring some degree of clarity and harmony to the demonstrably international fields of Sino-Tibetan and Chinese linguistics, this article examines these and related terms from both historical and semantic perspectives. By being careful to understand precisely what these words have meant to whom and during which period of time, needlessly explosive situations may be defused and, an added benefit, perhaps the beginnings of a new classification scheme for Chinese language(s) may be achieved. As an initial step in the right direction, the author proposes the adoption of "topolect" as an exact, neutral translation of fangyan This article is a much expanded and revised version of a paper entitled "Problems in Sino-English Nomenclature and Typology of Chinese Languages" that was originally presented before the Twentieth International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Linguistics and Languages 1 21-23 August 1987 1 Vancouver, B.C., Canada. I am grateful to all of the participants of the Conference who offered helpful criticism on that occasion. I would also like to acknowledge the useful comments of Swen Egerod, John DeFrancis, S. Robert Ramsey, and Nicholas C. Bodman who read subsequent drafts. Any errors of fact or opinion that remain are entirely my own. Victor H. Mair, "What Is a Chinese 'Dialect/Topolect?" Sino-Plaronic Papers, 29 (September, 199 1) What Is a Chinese "Dialect/Topolect"? Reflections on Some Key Sino-English Linguistic Terms The number of different living languages (Modern Standard Mandarin [MSM] yuyan) is variously estimated to be between about 2,000 and 6,000.~ If we take as a conservative approximation the arithmetic mean of these two figures, we may say that there are roughly 4,000 languages still being spoken in the world today. Of these, over a thousand are North, Central, and South American Indian languages whose speakers number but a few thousand or even just a few hundred. Another five hundred or so languages are spoken by African tribes and nearly five hundred more by the natives of Australia, New Guinea, and the islands of the Pacific. Several hundred others are the by and large poorly studied tongues of scattered groups in Asia (e.g. Siberia, the Himalayan region, etc.) . This plethora of tongues can be broken down, first, into major "families" (MSM yuxi) that are presumed to have derived from the same "parent" language. Thus we have the Indo-European, Semito-Hamitic, Ural-Altaic, Sino-Tibetan, Dravidian, Malayo-Polynesian, African, American Indian, and other families. The next level below the language family is the "group" (yunr). When classifying members of the Indo-European family of modern languages, for example, one usually thinks in terms of its main groups (Indic, Iranian, Hellenic, Romance, Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Baltic) and the individual languages belonging to them. Thus, in the Indic group there are Hindi-Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Singhalese, Assamese, and others. In the Iranian group, there are Pashto, Farsi (Persian), Kurdish, and Baluchi. In the Celtic group, there are Irish, Scots Gaelic, Breton, and Welsh. In the Romance group, there are Rumanian, Rhaeto-Romanic (Romansch), Italian, French, Proven@, Catalan, Spanish, and Portuguese. In the Germanic group, there are (High) German, Low German, Dutch, Frisian, English, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Icelandic. In the Slavic group, there are Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovene, Czech, Sloyak, and Polish. A similar classification scheme may be applied to the still somewhat hypothetical Sino- Tibetan language family. Among its groups are Sinitic (also called Han), Tibeto-Burmese, Tai (or Victor H. Mair, "What Is a Chinese 'Dialect/Topolect?" Sino-Platonic Papers, 29 (September, 1991) Dai), Miao-Yao, and so on. If we consider Sinitic languages as a group of the great Sino-Tibetan family, we may further divide them into at least the following mutually unintelligible tongues: Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese (Yue), Hunan (Xiang), Hakka, Gan, Southern Min, and Northern n in? These are roughly parallel to English, Dutch, Swedish, and so on among the Germanic group of the Indo-European language family. If we pursue the analogy further, we may refer to various supposedly more or less mutually intelligible3 dialects of Mandarin such as Peking, Nanking, Shantung, ~zechwan$~hensi: Dungar$ and so on just as English may be subdivided into its Cockney, Boston, Toronto, Texas, Cambridge, Melbourne, and other varieties. The same holds true for the other languages in the Sinitic and Germanic groups. Where Dutch has its Flemish and Afrikaans dialects, Wu has its Shanghai and Soochow forms. Likewise, Yue has its Canton, Taishan, and other dialects; Xiang has its Changsha, Shuangfeng, and other dialects; Hakka has its Meishan, Wuhua, and other dialects; Gan has its Nanchang, Jiayu, and other dialects; Southern Min has its Amoy, Taiwan, and other dialects; and Northern Min has its Foochow, Shouning, and other dialects. For the purposes of this article, we do not need to enter into the matter of sub-dialects. Another level of classification is the "branch" (yuzhi) which embraces several closely related languages of a group. Germanic, for instance, has two surviving branches -- West (German, Dutch, Frisian, English) and North or Scandinavian (Icelandic, Faeroese, Norwegian, Swedish). The Altaic group has a Turkish branch (Uighu., Kazakh, Uzbek, Tatar, Kirghiz, etc.), a Mongol branch (Kalmuk, Buryat, etc.), and
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