Standing in front of their village, the Dong people sing love songs in their unique dialect.

On June 4^th, the Research Center for the Preservation and Development of Chinese Traditional Villages held its inaugural ceremony at Tianjin University. The famous Tianjin-based writer and cultural preservation advocate Feng Jicai spoke at the ceremony, imploring attendees to do their part to protect their country’s disappearing villages. “Even as we are sitting here celebrating this inauguration, many villages are disappearing,” said Feng, who currently serves as director of the Expert Committee of Traditional Village Preservation and Development in China.

Between 2002 and 2012, China’s natural villages, including traditional villages, decreased from 3,600,000 to 2,700,000. Along with these villages, numerous local dialects are vanishing. According to one expert, while the rate at which dialects are disappearing or becoming phased out is slower than the rate at which villages dissipate, this black and white statistic does not reflect the extent to which the physical living space in which dialects are spoken is becoming drastically compressed. The expert also commented that academia simply cannot keep up with the pace of change, explaining that current studies on dialects and records of where dialects are spoken trail behind quickly changing geographic realities. In the face of such abrupt obsolesce and extinction, steps clearly need to be taken to protect and recover regional dialects in China, the expert said.

Dialect from a geographical perspective

In Chinese academia, the field or discipline of ‘language geography’ or ‘geographic linguistics’ is something of an umbrella category, capturing research on the distribution of languages and the linguistic landscape, the cultural range and transmission of language and dialetcs, the formation of cultural districts, social customs and anything else related to cultural geography. “Although language geography has more than a century-long history, in China the field is still in its infancy,” said Beijing Language and Culture University Vice President Cai Zhiyun.

An ancillary discipline to linguistics, language geography is based on regional investigations of language. Its practitioners use linguistic atlases to illustrate and describe the geographic distribution of linguistic phenomena and ground their explanations for the appearance of these phenomena in an understanding of cultural factors. In addition, they try to ascertain and codify the development process and rules of regional dialects. Chen Zhangtai, the former vice director of the State Language Commission, noted the central importance of drawing linguistic atlases for studies on dialect(s) from a geographic perspective and for the discipline broadly.

Musing on the aims and strategies of his discipline, National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics Professor Ichiro Onishi commented that language geographers try to discern the geospatial variation in dialects, use their broad research paradigm to understand the relation between geography and dialects, and shed light on the forms of human existence.

Opportunities and challenges

With China’s increasing urbanization, population mobility has expedited the process of language integration. This poses higher demands on the field of language geography.

“A decade ago, I came to the conclusion that stepping up studies on language geography would be an inevitable trend in the overall pursuit of developing linguistics in China,” Cao Zhiyun said. “Today, Chinese dialects are confronted with an even worse situation than in previous years, so we really need to strengthen our research on them.” Cao pointed to China’s long history and the abundant linguistic culture that developed in tandem with this history and in the physical space where this history took place, emphasizing that these traits provide researchers with a wealth of material. At the same time, China’s current language situation is not simply just a development platform for language geography, but also poses huge challenges to the discipline.

Li Lan, a researcher from the Research Office of Dialects at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of Linguistics, noted that the Belgian scholar Willem A. Grootaers was among the first to introduce language geography to China as well as carry out language geography research in China. Li explained that because of China’s complicated geographical conditions and the sheer number and variety of dialects, there are few scholars studying language geography, making it difficult to further the field.

Continually building basic resources

Though the discipline faces some obstacles, language geography scholars have persevered unrelentingly, erecting bulwarks of scholarship like Linguistic Atlas of Chinese Dialects and Language Atlas of China.

Going forward, Cao recommended drawing up a dialect atlas for each province and dialect sector in order to better facilitate research, while Li noted that linguistics departments and organizations concerned with language geography need to do more to ensure funding, such as attracting bidding projects and directly supporting scholars research. “Without a broad support from both the government and society, we cannot improve the development of language geography in China,” Cao said, adding that at present the discipline “depends on only several people and a few of universities.”       

     

The Chinese version appeared in Chinese Social Sciences Today, No. 462, Jun.14, 2013

                                                                                                                           Translated by Zhang Mengying