Dialects in China usually fall into seven to 10 broad categories according to their types and the regions they belong to. The picture above shows six of them.

 

Dialects enrich Chinese language and cultural heritage. However, many of them are now on the verge of extinction. This means that there is an urgent need to research and record these dialects.

 

Evidence
Dialects in China usually fall into seven to 10 broad categories according to their types and the regions they belong to. This, however, is a simplification of the much more complicated situation on the ground and glosses over the complex ways in which they evolved.
 

Over the summer, a number of fieldwork projects were carried out, in order to present the distribution and spread of various dialects in map form. Among these projects, one led by Xing Xiangdong, a professor from Shaanxi Normal University, plots a map of dialects in Northwest China. The project aimed to map variations in dialects and highlight the ways in which they evolved, with detailed information and careful map entries, thus presenting valuable evidence for research on Chinese language history.

In addition, dialect maps offer new perspectives on linguistic theoretical studies. Xing said that these maps can reflect the current distribution of dialects while demonstrating detailed evolutionary processes, providing first-hand evidence to aid in the analysis and the interpretation of laws governing linguistic evolution. These maps can also aid studies of language contact theory, grammaticalization, phonetics and phonology, and sociolinguistics.

 

Perfection
Systematic investigations on Chinese dialects began with linguist Zhao Yuanren’s research on Suzhou dialects back in the 1920s. It was not until the 1940s that scholars began to make maps of dialects. Report on Investigation of Hubei Dialects published in 1948 included 64 dialect maps, which can be regarded as a good starting point for related studies.
 

After the Reform and Opening Up, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and Australian Academy of the Humanities launched a large-scale joint project that aimed to plot Chinese dialects, and published the Language Atlas of China in 1987. In 2012, Zhang Zhenxing, together with his peers, finished editing the second version of the atlas. The new version contained five comprehensive maps, 36 Chinese dialect maps, as well as 38 dialect and minority language maps.
 

Zheng said that before the popularization of computers, map plotting was all done manually. The older generation of scholars first conducted fieldwork and then draw the maps by hand. Then they would mark administrative units, based on which different dialects were classified and labeled according to their features. New technology has greatly aided the map plotting process. Cao Zhigeng, editor of Linguistic Atlas of Chinese Dialects, said that the original data contains more than one million pieces of information, which would be too complex to be dealt with manually.
 

Databases played an indispensable part in Cao’s research project. For one thing, they can better aid in the preservation, modification, extraction, comparison and analysis of dialect information. At the same time, they are the basis of computer graphics. Cao’s research team created a “Chinese dialect geographic information system” by using the National Fundamental Geographic Information System and ArcView9.1, improving map plotting efficiency.

Xing pointed out that although technology has made research more convenient, it cannot altogether replace manual work. Researchers have to take their fieldwork seriously and collect first-hand materials as they did previously, Xing said.

 

Efforts
In recent years, studies of linguistic geography in China have been gaining momentum, thus bringing the creation of dialect maps into full swing. Today, Shanxi and Jiangxi provinces are carrying out similar mapmaking projects aimed at deepening dialect research.
 

Zheng and his peers have conducted fieldwork in about 50 spots that speak various Suzhou dialects in the broader area of southern Jiangsu Province, northern Zhejiang Province and Shanghai since 2009. They have collected information for more than 2,000 diagrams as well as audio data of these dialects. Zheng said that previous research materials lacked corresponding audio files, making it hard to conduct further analysis of experimental phonetics, and their research is making up for this flaw.
 

In addition, Zheng suggested that technology can be used to bring new breakthroughs to the traditional paper-based dialect maps. Audio materials and information collected from different age and gender groups should also be shown so that language resources can be best preserved.

 

Zhang Qingli is a reporter at the Chinese Social Sciences Today.