 this session, which we have, yes, we have now reached the point where we can start the session. So welcome to all of you. Thank you very much for attending this seminar, which is jointly presented by the, on behalf of the SOAS China Institute and the History Department at the School of Oriental and African Studies University of London. Our speaker today is Dr. Gina Tham, who works for Trinity University in San Antonio in Texas. Dr. Tham's special interest is something that fuses a number of historical, anthropological, and also political interests. And those of you who have taken a look at her publications will know that she has been working on issues of civic and perhaps also ethnic and subethnic identity in China since the Mao period. Also, we have a number of articles which have been published on political issues such as elections, such as events in Hong Kong, or the situation leading up to the events in Hong Kong that we're familiar with, but also in a broad sense of belonging and historical identity. And it's perhaps where this lecture will fit in best, namely in the complex interface between subethnic identity and linguistic identity, because if we talk about Chinese, both in language, in culture, and in broader national terms, ethnic terms, we will find that there are subgroups which sometimes communicate with each other better than with other subgroups within China. So it's very much like being in Europe more or less. So what we do find is that in Dr. Tham's research, the Cantonese area has a certain appeal. So we'll might come across that in a moment. And you're always welcome to introduce your own interests to the speaker and to the rest of the community this evening in the upcoming discussion. But first of all, I would like to pass the word to Dr. Gina Tham who has something to say on languages and linguistic belonging in China this evening. Thank you very much. And Gina, please begin. Thank you so much for that very, very kind introduction. Thank you, Lars and Aki and Andrea for having me here. Thank you to the SOAS China Institute and the Department of History for hosting me this evening or as it is here, mid-morning. I'm really so delighted to be here. So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen if you'll give me just a moment. I hope that is visual to everybody. And I can go ahead and start my talk as soon as I figure out how to do this. I thought I had it all taken care of. And there we go. Okay. So as Lars said so kindly, I will be talking a little bit about my book, Dialected Nationalism in China, which looks at the interplay between very sort of broadly language and identity in 20th century China. And to start our talk off, I want to start with a story from a few years ago from the city of Hong Kong. So in 2016, the Hong Kong Department of Education sent out a packet of reference material to instructors teaching the Chinese national language Mandarin to schoolchildren. Unexpectedly, this was an unassuming packet of short articles, shouldn't have made news, but ended up making headlines across the city. And the reason was because one of the articles in this giant packet of language pedagogy materials started with the argument that Cantonese, the Chinese language most frequently spoken in the city of Hong Kong, could not be considered a mother tongue. So like Mandarin teaching textbooks here. The author's argument here, which was not even the focal point of his article, centered the linguistic categorization of Cantonese, they're centered on the linguistic categorization of Cantonese, right? He argued that it was simply objective truth that mother tongues are languages whose speakers belong to one ethnic group, or nationality. Cantonese speakers are not their own ethnic group, but part of the Han Chinese ethnic group, this person argued. And there's only one language that can represent the Han ethnicity and the Chinese nation. And that is Mandarin, or put in the People's Republic, we would call it Putonghua. So Cantonese, on the other hand, he called, this is sorry, he called a Fang Yan, a term that if we sort of broke it down, I'm always hesitant to break down Chinese words into their individual characters. But here, I think it's somewhat useful. So Fang would be place, Yan would be language. And it is one of dozens, if not hundreds, spoken throughout China. Here's a map of sort of broader Fang Yan regions in China to get a sense of the linguistic diversity here. But this doesn't even really capture it, I don't think, because within each of these regions, right, we can also break it down, which I think this map does here, of like many, many, many more some mutually intelligible and some mutually unintelligible languages. So I think Lars metaphor with Europe here is actually really, it's helpful, I think, as in thinking about language in China. Now, the term Fang Yan, we will almost always in English translate as dialect, indeed, that's how I translate it in my, like at the cover of my book, not throughout my book, but the cover of my book. And then to the consultant who wrote this packet of materials, who argued that Cantonese is not a mother tongue, he thought dialect was a fair translation. He clearly believed that Cantonese, like most of the world's dialects, is nothing more than a linguistic variant, a very different thing than say Putonghua, the other language worthy in his esteem, the only language worthy in his esteem of being called a mother tongue. Now the claim that Putonghua alone could be considered a mother tongue, elicited a pretty fierce backlash in Hong Kong as journalists, everyday citizens, even the chief executive of Hong Kong declared that Cantonese is indeed a mother tongue, right? There's there's even a protest and people had signs that say, like, can't mother speak Cantonese and therefore it could be a mother tongue, right? But their push backs, a lot of them focused also in particular on the definition of Cantonese or how we categorize Cantonese as a Fang Yan, and whereas the argument they made is that is not that it could be considered a mother tongue, but it's also a Fang Yan, it's that Cantonese is a language. Let's take one particular example, a detractor, the graphic artist Ato, he wrote several books on Cantonese idioms, many of which frequent this adorable little character here, primary school chicken. So here in this sort of series of images, this is these are two of about five of them, where he stands in front of a sketched out chalkboard teaching his readers the so-called objective definitions of Fang Yan, which he also translates as dialect, right? And language. According to primary school chicken, dialects are mutually intelligible with both its core language and other related dialects. Cantonese, on the other hand, is not mutually intelligible with Mandarin. Similarly, little primary school chicken says, right? Dialects have much of their grammar and syntax in common with the language they are a variant of, whereas Cantonese has its own grammatical patterns and vocabulary. By this definition, he comes to the sort of the end of his little thing here, right? The relationship between Cantonese and Mandarin is not one of language and dialect. It is one between language and language, right? Something similar to the relationship between French and Portuguese. Similar languages to be sure, but first and foremost, languages. Now, certainly, most linguists would agree here with primary school chicken. I mean, they wouldn't say, I agree with primary school chicken, but right, the logic here is something that a lot of linguists would agree with in the general sense. When we think of dialects, we often think of them as being subordinate. Calling something a dialect only makes sense if it is a dialect of something. Moreover, many linguists will stress that one of the sort of ways we can distinguish between language and dialect is mutual intelligibility, right? Languages are not mutually intelligible, whereas dialects are. And like, obviously, when we talk about linguists, this gets much more complicated, but generally speaking, right, this is sort of commonly agreed upon logic. When we look at China, however, such criteria do not apply to all or even most Chinese Fungan, and it certainly doesn't apply to Cantonese and vis-a-vis its relationship with Mandarin. It is thus really interesting that the presumption that Fungan are dialects is so prevalent. We see it from governments like the government of the PRC. The consultant in this sort of story about Hong Kong is from mainland China, but it's something that we see through state rhetoric. It's something that we see through state rhetoric in places like Singapore, so it's not just limited to China, nor is it limited to governments. We also see it from educational institutions, international organizations, even translation companies. I don't want to call out this translation company, so I sort of pulled out their name here because they're representative of very, very, very common on translation service websites of calling Cantonese dialects, right? So beyond this disagreement of terminology, however, I find it even more interesting that a debate over the technical definition of a language and a dialect would have made people, would have given rise to such emotions, right? This was a really emotional debate. And the reason, I think, is because the stakes here is not about who's right and who's wrong and who has the right definition of dialect and who has the wrong definition of dialect. By calling something a language or a dialect, we do a stow upon its significances and limitations that can extend beyond the narrow definition of the category itself. Calling Putonghua a national standard and Fang Yan variants implies that Putonghua can represent China or a Chinese identity in a way that a Fang Yan cannot. This isn't, and this isn't just some navel-gazing interpretation here. This isn't just me saying this. These presumptions of a hierarchy that goes just beyond linguistic definitions are commonly stated in official rhetoric. For instance, a frequently used textbook on the history of language in China says that Mandarin is the only language that allows the Chinese nation to be preserved, develop, and progress, extending way beyond just sort of linguistic technicalities. News articles frequently feature quotes of schoolchildren reciting, we are Chinese. We therefore speak Putonghua. This is an image from the city of Shanghai and the little poster here that she is holding says, So where does this come from? This widespread insistence both within the PRC and outside of it, that Chinese Fang Yan ought to not only be translated as dialects, but also imagined with all of its connotations as subsidiary, as less important, or even conflatable with Mandarin. And I say that because oftentimes we're seeing, I see a move in a lot of different areas where we just calling Mandarin Chinese, right? And therefore of saying like we don't need another Chinese language, right? Because we have Chinese. An example is at Stanford University, they changed the name of their modern Mandarin class to modern standard Chinese at the same time that they're really cutting back if not outright getting rid of their Cantonese language program. So the purpose of this talk is to explore how this happened, why this happened, and more importantly, why it matters at all. I'm going to try and convince you all of the stakes of this. More specifically that this talk will show how the presumption that Fang Yan are nothing more than dialects, a presumption that very much affects the relationship between language and identity today, resulted from battles over competing understandings of the Chinese nation that began in the late 19th century and were solidified in the early years of the PRC. So as for an outline of this presentation, first I want to talk a little bit about conceptualizations of language and dialect and and Fang Yan and and Yan in China before the 20th century. After that, I'll talk a little bit about the construction of the Chinese national language in the early years of the Chinese Republic, focusing on how battles over what should constitute the national language sparked a major shift in how Fang Yan were imagined, a shift in thinking about them from thinking about them as local languages that were not necessarily subordinate to dialects that were imagined as subsidiary to the national standard. Third, I'll talk a little bit about how these linguistic hierarchy between national language and Fang Yan became normalized and baked into Chinese educational institutions, academic institutions and bureaucratic structures from the later years of the Republican period going through sort of the first decade of the PRC. Finally, I'll end by talking just a little bit about what's happening today. Now, as you can see from this outline, most of the story I will tell today takes place in the 20th century. But the word Fang Yan has existed in written records for millennia as a common term referring to local languages of particular regions in the area in areas that today we consider part of China. Most historians will point point like sort of when you read histories of Fang Yan in China, the first book that that most people point to is this one, the Fang Yan or local speech. But from the first century AD, it's a compilation of words recorded in different regions throughout the territory of the Han dynasty, which was what was that was first century AD, right? Now, importantly, while the word Fang Yan here denoted local languages that didn't mean that it carried the hierarchical implications of the word dialect or sort of the like evolutionary implications of dialects that they stem from languages. Perhaps because of this that it didn't have those connotations. When early European people, sojourners, became to travel to China in the late 16th century, there was not really a consistent term used to describe these languages. Matteo Ricci, the first European Jesuit to live in China, used the Latin word vernacular. And when we look at English translations, I always when we look at English translations of his work, this usually gets translated as colloquial languages. Later missionaries added the word vernacular in English and dialect to the growing list of terms. By the mid 19th century, the rapidly expanding population of Protestant missionaries, given imperialistic license to settle throughout the Qing Empire, tended to use these English terms or their French or German corollaries interchangeably. To the best of my knowledge, the first person to actually translate Fang Yan as dialect in a written source like put these two words side by side and say that they're paired was Herbert Giles in his Chinese English dictionary of 1892. There are dictionaries before this, but generally speaking, either Fang Yan doesn't appear or it is not translated as the English word dialect. This is the first one I found, although I'm happy if somebody found an earlier source, I'd love to know it. But nonetheless, this publication of his dictionary didn't necessarily settle the debate or lead right away at least to a consistent translation. We can attribute a lot of this inconsistency to the fact that a translation is only as good as the translator's knowledge. And before the 19th century, Europeans and Americans knew very little about China. Faced with the unknown, they drew parallels between their scattered observations and known phenomena at home. When no match really fit, they simply approximated, often without giving it a lot of thought. And I know this because some missionaries get really mad that other missionaries are like, you're using these terms interchangeably. One particular person who got bad about it was 19th century Scottish missionary Carstairs Douglas. He was stationed in the city today we call Shaman. And he in his dictionary of the Amoy vernacular looks at the languages around him and notes that they were mutually unintelligible, a lot of them with one another, and the language spoken in the imperial capital. He also observed that the local Shaman language in where he was was spoken by members of all classes, not simply the lower classes. As such, he argued that colloquial was wrong. It implied that they were only spoken by the lower classes and dialect was wrong because it implied they were branches or auxiliaries. Douglas ultimately settled on the term vernacular of, he also says spoken language of to describe these local languages. But he writes a lot about this with a lot of reservations and qualifications. But he is one of the few that really breaks this down, I think. But to me, there's another reason for this disagreement about what to call fangyan, a reason that to me was much more fundamental. For many European and American observers, a necessary component of a cohesive nation was a singular language. But when they looked at Qing China, they couldn't really agree on what they could just call Chinese, right? What was the Chinese language? Some argued it was the formal written language that appeared in elite texts. They called it classical often, or high classical sometimes. They also have this term Wenli that they use. But in any case, they often compared it to Latin. And so that some argued this is the Chinese language, right? And the argument was that that like sort of literate people throughout the empire could understand it. Others argued that a Chinese language had to be an oral language. So they argued that it was the language of the imperial capital. There was pushback against that, though, because a lot of people didn't speak it. At the end of the day here, because European and American observers disagreed on what constituted the Chinese language, or if there even was one, there was no clear consensus on how they could say these local languages related to it, and that affected their translations. And what this means is by the end of the 19th century, their debates about vocabulary and definitions, often quite contentious, all converged on one agreed upon point. The fact that China's linguistic landscape didn't fit their vocabulary indicated that the Chinese nation itself had not yet entered the modern world. By the end of the 19th century, Chinese elites begin to voice similar kinds of concerns. A half a century of war and imperialism had left Chinese elites anxious about their country's waning power on the world stage and their government's unwillingness to meet those challenges. Many of these elites traveled abroad to Japan and Europe where they faced head on the very nature of a newly globalized world shaped by Western imperialism. There, many of these Chinese elites came to the conclusion that on the one hand, they did need new technology and warships and perhaps even government structures. But they also agreed that these were insufficient to make China modern enough to be recognized in survive in this new world order. A lot of them came to the conclusion that China really did need a language to unify the citizenry. So as we know today, China has a national language. And the story of how it was determined is a well-worn one. As I was working on this project, I'm sure a lot of researchers here in the audience know that when you start working on a topic, there are things that people like to tell you about your topic. This is one of the things people like to tell me about my topic. When I was working on this is, where did the national language come from? And the story that I got a lot when something like this, there was a conference at the beginning of the Chinese Republic to choose the national language. Good representatives come from North and South. And they voted on a national language. And Beijing won the battle to serve as the nation's linguistic representative. I did a lot of my archival work in Guangzhou and other southern provinces. And there there was a lot of lamenting at the end of the story that their own mother Tong lost the status of national language by only a handful of votes. Sometimes we like two votes. We lost by two votes. Now with a story like this, it might be easy to presume that this was the moment this conference was when we see this shift of fangyan to dialect from languages that people spoke to something hierarchically subordinate to an overarching national tongue. But like any good historical story that's often told, this one is a mix of historical events laced with strategic mythmaking. As we just noted or as we've noted in this talk, Beijing's language would eventually be chosen to serve as the basis of the Chinese national language. And there was indeed a conference. There were a lot of conferences actually in the first couple of decades of the 20th century. And one of them, I guess they had something, I don't think vote is the right word, but they did all sort of try to come to a consensus on this, right? But to me, this retelling misses a lot of stuff. For instance, it misses the fact that what we call Putonghua today was not actually China's first national language. There was another one. And that's what I want to talk about briefly here. But what I find most misleading about this particular story is the presumption that this was a contentious process, because everyone there was just kind of advocating for their own fangyan. So like this people from this provinces were like, our language should be the national language, right? That everybody was thinking about it in those terms. And that the operative question here was which fangyan do we choose? And what's sort of underlying this assumption here is that this belief that everybody at this conference was just there to pluck one language to serve as the national language. But to me, if we look at how these debates unfolded, and in particular how China's first national language was founded, we find that that's not the key question being asked. We find that the operative question for language reformers was much less, which fangyan do we choose? And much more, what does it actually mean for a language to represent a nation that is so linguistically diverse? To me, a few men sort of in the late Qing articulated this thinking more than this man, Zhang Bingling. Zhang is something of an enigma to contemporary scholars. He's not really conservative. He's not really a reformer. He's not really a radical, but he's also at once all three. And so we are the dichotomies that we're so used to applying to late 19th and early 20th century China, just don't work with him. And among the reasons he was so famous and influential was because he popularized the idea among with many others, that the China's new nation had to be of and for ethnic Han Chinese people, that that's where the locus of power needed to be. The locus of power needed to not be with the Manchurian ruling class of China's Qing dynasty. So we cared a lot about who had political power. One of the places that he forcefully argued this was in his work new fangyan or new dialect, very clearly sort of hearkening back to that work almost to millennia before. This was published in 1907. And it was a collection of articles that on the one hand sort of like tried to create like a diachronic history of particular terms in local languages. But in the introduction and conclusion, he talks a lot about how this was important for understanding what a sort of Chinese language meant. And he sort of outlines that a goal here was to prove that all fangyan had this shared core. And that was where this unified Han Chinese past was. And sort of relatedly he sought to prove that while all fangyan had a connection to this shared core, some preserved it better than others, right, that some had a better deeper connection to the sort of origin of the Han people and their language than other fangyan who he believed had sort of been been adulterated by outsiders more so than others. This work directly informed Zhang's prescriptions for a new Chinese national language. He believed it should be a newly constructed language that embodied the historical path of the country's diverse fangyan. Such a construction, of course, would be the base language upon which it would be built. Guided by his anti-mantry politics, he opposed Beijing fangyan as that base, arguing that northern fangyan were no longer purely Chinese contaminated by centuries of contact with northern Han non-Han groups. Instead, he suggested that the Chinese national language be based loosely off of the language spoken closer to the center of China. After 1911, proposals like Zhang's seemed somewhat attuned to the new needs of the new nation, as many saw the capital as too closely, like culturally closely tied to the fallen Qing dynasty. His ideas attracted prominent supporters, including many people who were at that February 1913 conference that is sort of the center of these myths about the national language. And they did have a really contentious meeting. People say that people threw tea cups. I don't know if that's true, but that is a rumor about this conference. But they eventually come up with a language that in some ways I don't think Zhang would have been happy with, but on the other hand, sort of was inspired by his idea of how a language represents a nation. So it was about 80 to 90 percent similar to the phenology of Beijing, but the remaining 10 to 20 percent of its phenology comprised of characteristics taken from other fangyan. In particular, there was a focus on a particular sort of characteristic, phonological characteristic of a lot of Southern languages like Cantonese or Fujianese, which is a stop-ending. So I want to draw attention to this episode, because it shows that many of the first constructors of the Chinese national language believed that no one particular fangyan had the ability to represent the nation in its entirety, rather a language that had once represented the nation's present, while also embodying its shared ethnic past, had to be something that they created. And here's why fangyan were so important. Because these men's vision of a national standard was one that represented the diverse Han ethno-racial identity in its entirety, it had to account for all of China's fangyan. They're not branches or non-standards or subsidiary versions of this monolithic Chinese-ness, rather, they're important pieces of a puzzle. So in 1913, we have our first Chinese national language, a new invention for the new nation. After a few years, however, this 1913 language started to get a lot of critics. Those who had been tasked with the practical work of promulgating it quickly sought shortcomings, casting doubt on the feasibility of enforcing a language that had very few native speakers. Articles mocked it as a blue-green mandarin, neither donkey nor horse. And even those who were on board with this bold experiment in language creation began to slowly doubt the practicality of this experiment. Take, for instance, this man, Zhao Yunren, who in the Q&A, if you want to talk about Zhao Yunren, I could do that all day. Zhao was a graduate of Cornell and Harvard, and he was so committed to this hybridized national language that he made a recording of it in 1921. He was goaded into it, but nonetheless he did it. But by 1924, he was writing letters to people, and he had what he called a green letter. It was sort of like a standard, here's what's going on in my life letter that he sent to his friends and family. And he was basically essentially saying that he really did believe that national language should be pure Beijing fangyan. He's like, this is what it has to be. And this led him in 1925 to join several other reformers to formally propose that Beijing's language be taken wholesale as the national standard. Later in life, he explained that the original hybrid national language was ultimately never going to succeed because it was going to be difficult to promulgate. Although I will say he hedged a little bit, when pushed on this in his oral history, it might have worked. So I think he's still held out a little bit for this. But in other reflections, he says things like, for 13 years, I was the sole speaker of this idiolect, meant to be the national language for 600 million speakers. Okay, so in 1925, we have the language of Beijing was made the national language, and this dream of a hybrid national language fades away. Nonetheless, the story shows that for a couple of decades, one of the most prominent visions of the Chinese national language was an invented one, one that encapsulated China's shared cultural like this imagined shared cultural core based on the belief that no singular fangyan was a natural national representative. And perhaps because this earlier vision of China's national language was so powerful, even after it failed, it still influenced how people thought about what language in China should be. State actors and their collaborators could thus not take for granted that simply naming Beijing's language the national language or goyu on the slide here, it says goyu, which we could translate as national language. Just saying this wasn't going to make it so. There was clearly a sort of like, there was an emphasis that this was not an effective way to find a language or like to pair a language with a nation. So because of that, they actually had to do work to convince the general public that one fangyan really could represent the nation in its entirety. Inversely, they had to make clear that the connotations inherent in the word dialect, its presumption of hierarchy and dependency became integral to what fangyan were. Now this transformation of Beijing fangyan into national language in the eyes of the public was partly done through policy. First, there was a declaration that the national language should be taught in schools. They also encouraged national language use in radio and cinema and supported magazines like national language weekly that defended government policy and offered short little language lessons. By the 1930s, what had mostly been encouragements started to become threats in some areas. One example of this is cinema. In the 1930s, Chiang Kai-shek's government attempted to censor cinema in other Chinese fangyan besides the national language. In particular, it was very clearly targeting the thriving Cantonese movie industry in Guangzhou. Now on the one hand, these policies weren't terribly effective at getting people to speak the national language. Most children did not attend school in 1930s China, and among those that did, the central government really just didn't have the reach to regulate what language teachers used in the classroom. Nor was this really a priority for everybody. There were a lot of literacy drives where sort of unified national language was just not a priority. I actually interviewed a linguist and stamen who grew up in the 1930s and was sort of a pretty prominent person in the 1950s in creating like Mandarin promulgation sort of like after school classes for teachers like crash courses for teachers in the 1950s. And he said he learned the national language in the 30s, but he knew that he was a rarity, right? He was like, I don't really know many other people like me who learned the national language in the 30s. And looking at things like the Cantonese movie ban, it certainly sparked fierce debates among filmmakers and cultural critics, but it was really difficult to enforce. So there was like a lot of back and forth in magazines and newspapers in the 30s and 40s about this. But what actual filmmakers seem to have done was either move their production to Hong Kong, right, where this was not an issue, or just they just aired their films without sending them in for government approval. Keep in mind this was in the middle of the Second World War, in the middle of the Japanese invasion of China. So quite frankly, the government probably had other priorities. But despite the fact that the government could not enforce these policies, I do think that their mere existence mattered because it enforced a hierarchy. Whether people spoke it or not, whether people took it seriously or not, Beijing's Fong Yan had a new name, literally the language of the nation, right? Boyu. It became a household term. It was used in newspapers discussed on radio, repeated in children's textbooks. Regardless, in other words, regardless of who spoke it, the national language policies normalized a hierarchy by lionizing one language as the national standard and implicitly defining everything else as non-standard. And sometimes this hierarchy was reforcing ways that weren't even explicit, done in ways where the act of doing, the act of creating the hierarchy, was hidden behind claims of objectivity or science, something that we see that very much echoes back to that beginning anecdote that I started with. The clearest example of this was the discipline, oh sorry, went to the wrong slide here, was the discipline of linguistics. Linguistics in China underwent a huge transformation in the early decades of the 20th century, galvanized in particular by the May 4th movement, a series of protests in 1919 against Japan's acquisition of Germany's colonies in China that dovetailed with ongoing calls from educated elites for complete upheaval of China's core cultural institutions and intellectual frameworks. In the midst of this movement, academics, inspired by the May 4th praise for science, right, was like sort of one of the mascots of the May 4th movement in particular in its aftermath, began to eagerly develop new university programs meant to create modern empirical knowledge about the country, its landscape, and its people. Beginning in the early 1920s, a group of Chinese scholars began to advocate for a more scientific study of languages at Chinese universities. These men, to my knowledge almost all of them are men, many of whom received their doctorates in the United States or Europe, claimed the traditional ways of, and they would call them traditional, right, of studying Chinese languages were outdated and unscientific and as a result, the only proper way to study Chinese languages was to use methodologies of comparative linguistics. Drawing upon decades of American and European presumptions about the way languages relate to one another, these men felt it was simply objective truth that human languages existed on a taxonomic tree all connected to a singular root. I want to let Professor of English Lin Yu Tang in 1924 explain, but before I give his great quote here, he is responding to somebody who was arguing that essentially there was real value in earlier frameworks and knowledge production before the 20th century in thinking about fangyan as something very different than just the word dialect, right, that they have this sort of long different history and this was his response, it was one paragraph. There should be no confusion as to the definition of fangyan. The world's languages are connected to one system called a yinxi family of languages so in the brackets these are his translations into English, right, language families are then divided into yin or languages and within each language there are divisions of fangyan or dialects which he translates directly. We ought to declare that when we speak of fangyan today we are using it with the meaning from modern linguistics. What Lin is saying here is that any study of Chinese fangyan needed to graft onto models prescribed by scholars of linguistics in the United States and Europe and this meant that their methodologies needed to presume that Chinese language is related to one another, something like this. So this is a 19th century model, it's really small. I know it's hard to read. What I want to get across here is less sort of what it actually says than what it looks like, right. You'll notice so all of these itty bitty little branches here, I don't know if you can see my cursor, but at the very end of all of these branches, right, they're itty bitty little twigs and these are all labeled as dialects. So you'll notice here that as Lin explained, dialects stem from or even evolve from languages and for Lin this was the only proper way to study fangyan, to treat them as evolving from a language. Now a research model to actually study fangyan in this because like Lin Yutong was not was not actually going out there and doing surveys. But the person who didn't develop and executed these this methodology was the aforementioned Dàoyuan Ren. After working on China's language form in the early 1920s, he published China's first full length fangyan survey. Arguably, there were some that were earlier by a Swedish linguist, but generally speaking, we sort of we focus on Dàoyuan Ren's study of the modern dialect, which is how he again translates it here. After working, or sorry, for this study, he asked representatives from 32 different localities in the area near Shanghai, sort of this this area over here, right, to pronounce a list of over 3000 characters. If I remember correctly, it was like 3125. He then isolated each character's initial. So like this beginning consonant here, the final, the subsequent vowel or vowel or consonant combination, and then the tone, the intonation, like, ooh, this is a high flat tone. Jiao then arranged the data onto comparative charts that juxtaposed the relative pronunciation of each phoneme with the same phoneme in other surveyed areas. Again, I know it's hard to read. I just want to get a visual of what these charts look like. I'm going to break them down a little bit in the next slide, I promise. Now, Jiao fashioned himself a scientist and he believed that any scientific methodology meant collecting quantifiable data sets, relying upon empirical observation and using replicable methodologies. And Jiao's model here fit the bill. Since his phonological data was derived from a predetermined set of characters, right, and Jiao could compare the phonology of several different fangyan side by side. So here's the survey location here. Here are the sample characters here. And here is sort of like how they would be pronounced in these various places. You'll notice, however, there's a lot of stuff here I didn't label. And that is because Jiao also believed that he needed to create a sort of unified field of comparison that had a constant, right? So that this comparison had something that anchored all of the data together. He gave a lot of different reference points. And if we want, we can go through these slides a bit more in Q&A. But to me, the most relevant one here is this one, which is the phonology of the national language. Now, Jiao chose these constants to both contextualize all his data and to provide a reference point for his readers. But paired with a model of linguistic taxonomies, the use of constants had a hierarchical implication. So I do want to make clear here. Jiao was not saying that all of these fangyan stemmed from the national language, right? He's just saying this is a phonological system that my readers will be familiar with to anchor where we're at, right? But I think that what goes unspoken here is that when people look at this, this implies a hierarchy, right? It rests on the assumption that surveyed fangyan could really only be made legible and comprehensible through the existence of other reference languages. And like I said, he has a bunch of other ones here too. But after 1930, you find it significantly more common to just compare it with the national language, right? Sometimes you will also see people compare it to reconstructions of ancient phonetics. But generally speaking here, the national language after that first survey that Jiao did, that was the most common one. That was the most common reference. So with little explanation, Jiao and his colleagues made the phonology of the national language their constant. And I think that this had important implications, right? It's used as a constant perhaps unintentionally, but nonetheless powerfully helped the cinch the nation, the notion that China's national language arguably a fangyan just like any other, had not just a unique political status, but a unique scientific status. In a methodology where all fangyan are compared to the national phonology, it was granted the same status as other linguistic root constants that's occupying a higher rung on a taxonomic hierarchy. So what's the takeaway here? First, the expectation in the early 20th century that in order for China to be a nation, it needed to have a national representative language created the broad presumption that there could only be one Chinese language. Second, the creation of a national language that took one fangyan as its standard allowed for one fangyan to gain a cultural and political significance that other Chinese languages across the country didn't have. And third, that cultural and political significance was emphasized through a number of venues from education and media to academia. Nonetheless, there are some really important caveats to these generalizations. In the Republican period, the ability to reinforce this hierarchy was uneven, not everyone was exposed to this media or education. And in newspapers and periodicals, there were some articles that were like national language is the most important thing. There were also a lot of others that were like, meh, it's something that we have to have, but it's not really all of that all that important, your fangyan is important too. Moreover, while speaking the national language was often tied to patriotism, it was very rarely tied to political loyalty. The one exception would probably be the Cantonese movie ban. And finally, and this is to me the most important part, for everyday people, from the best I can tell, this just didn't affect their lives all that much. Most people just went on speaking their local language. Yet today, as I already introduced, the notion that Mandarin is the Chinese language is normative, pervasive, and importantly political. Today, it really does affect people's lives. And to understand how this happened, we need to look at language policy after 1949. So just have a few more anecdotes and then I'll go ahead and wrap up. After the creation of the People's Republic of China, the Chinese Communist Party renamed Boyu as Putonghua, or the common speech, though they like the government they overthrew also based this language on the phonology of Beijing, right? So here's some announcements like, yeah, here we are. And like their predecessors, they also viewed Fangyan as hierarchically sordid to the national language. Unlike their predecessors, however, the new communist state integrated academia with pedagogy in a way that did not happen in the Republican period, making the hierarchy between national language and Fangyan a central part of how Putonghua was promulgated on a mass scale. I want to just take one example from 1956 to 58. That year, the government commissioned a huge nationwide survey of the country's Fangyan, like collected researchers from across the country, asked them all to participate. I interviewed a bunch of them. They were all in their early 20s and they're like, yeah, fun, a job with each researcher given. And it was a very standardized methodology. So they were given particular charts, right? So this is a character list. And they're basically like, here is this chart. Everyone do it the same way, right? Ask people, find a particular kind of representative, ask them to pronounce this and record it both in this chart and also on little cards. They had little cards here. This was modeled on the surveys that Zhao Yunren created in which researchers recorded the pronunciation of a series of set characters in the local language and took the national language as its constant. So this is a sample card. I didn't actually find a card somebody filled out. This was like in an explanatory essay telling them how to use the cards, right? So you put the location of where you're surveying. You put what the character is. And then you write it in the international phonetic alphabet, right? But also in Beijing Fangyan. So this is always comparing it to the national language. Another big difference with this survey, however, is that it had an explicit purpose. And the explicit purpose was to make teaching materials to teach the national language. What they had to do after they filled out this survey, they had a very short time period to do this in. It was like one summer. And then after that, they were supposed to create handbooks. Here's an example of one, but there are lots of them. And this is actually kind of not even a great example of one, because this is authored by one person. Usually they were authored by the team. But this was the best photo I could find. But they had names like how people from such and such a region learn to speak Poutonhua. And in like the introduction to these handbooks, a lot of them are like, here are the main problems that a person from such and such a region will have learning Poutonhua. And here is how you correct them. And so I think this is important because these are teaching materials. And in these teaching materials, local languages that people speak are framed as problems, as incorrect, and in some cases as obstacles to national unity. Now, not only were Fungan framed as problems or obstacles in sort of the 1950s, speaking them also became increasingly politicized. This becomes clear when we look at rhetoric after 1958. That year was the rollout of the Great Leap Forward, a sweeping economic policy meant to demonstrate the people's superhuman endeavors in economic production and cultural rejuvenation. The Great Leap Forward spirit was first and foremost applied to grain and steel production, with the central government calling upon its citizens to double or quadruple grain production or catch up to Britain in terms of steel production, et cetera. But the movement's rhetoric imbued almost all areas of life, including national language promulgation. So we get a lot of rhetoric in 1958 that's like, we're going to have a great leap forward towards Poutonhua promulgation. And they started having these exhibitions teaching Poutonhua achievement exhibitions. Some of them were local, some of them were national, so this picture is from a national one. And it was meant to showcase successes in language promulgation. And here is the opening speech of one in 1965. There are those who believe when the Liberation Army is at our defense, can it be considered doing revolution, or to participate in the socialist education movement is to do revolution. But as for promulgating Poutonhua for the revolution, is that placing its value too high? Actually, in this age of our great revolution, whether it is a large-scale movement or everyday activities is all part of revolutionary work. To do educational work is to do revolution, to do cultural or cinematic work is to do revolution, to be a clerk, a service person, a ticket seller, a train attendant, or radio broadcaster is all to do revolution. The great leap forward rhetoric in other words equated speaking Poutonhua with other nation-building efforts, like developing oil fields or even winning wars. What goes unstated, however, is that speaking Poutonhua both represented and facilitated doing revolution within the great dangerous fervor of the great leap forward, then not speaking the national language essentially amounted to not supporting the revolution's goals. Now, again, like I did in the Republican period, I do want to stress that there's a huge gap between rhetoric and practice here too. Propaganda only goes so far, and people of course almost entirely continued to speak their local languages. But I do think this politicization through rhetoric still mattered. It filtered down and imbued pedagogy, media, and even the very language we use to talk about these things. Now, at this point, oh sorry, I had an extra slide there. At this point, you all may be asking yourself, who cares? Why does this even matter? Calling something a language or a dialect doesn't seem like an earth-shattering event. But I'd argue that this really is important, and it's about much more than what we call something. The words we use to name a category bounds observable things to a series of assumptions, ideas, and cultural touchstones. And as such, they frame our thinking and they guide our actions. To presume that Fong Yan had all of the same connotations as dialects is to force China's diverse linguistic landscape into a hierarchy in which all but one are subordinate. It also is significant because the assumption of Fong Yan's subordination is not limited to linguistic structure alone. Calling one language a national standard and everything else variance implies that the national language alone can represent a unified sense of national identity and citizenship. Ultimately, to speak a language, a language, right, is to grasp and own a particular kind of cultural power. To speak a dialect is to settle for an obstruction of identity that is limited in its scope and diminished in its significance. Perhaps because of the inherent power imbued in the term language, the framing of Fong Yan as dialects has always had its critics. I already talked about one from Hong Kong. We can talk about Hong Kong a lot more in Q&A if you would like. But to end this talk, I just want to offer a quick glance at one example of the kinds of pushbacks we see in these linguistic hierarchies. This poster here comes from the city of Guangzhou in 2010, where a protest gathered in response to a decision by the municipal government to increase television offerings in Kutonghua and reduce its programming in Cantonese. In July of that year, protestors gathered in Guangzhou's People's Park with a Dorned with T-Shirt singing praises for Guangzhou and spontaneously broken into verses of canto pop songs. The picture here shows a man at a protest, his sign reading, I love Cantonese. I don't speak stewed winter melon. I want to draw attention to several elements of the sign. The first is the use of the term stewed winter melon, which is homophonous in Cantonese. They sound very similar in Cantonese, Putonghua and Baodonghua sound very similar in Cantonese. My Cantonese is terrible, so I'm not going to imitate it here. The second, however, is that his heart of his I love Cantonese is in fact the flag of the People's Republic of China. His appeals to patriotism in speaking Fangyan reminds us of how since the early 20th century, Chineseness really was believed to include China's linguistic diversity. Because Fangyan were authentic representations of Chinese national identity, diversity could be patriotic. This protestor in other words took the political implications of language speaking and flipped the script, reclaiming Chineseness for Cantonese. In sum, what counts as a language and what is merely a dialect is a battle over a place in a cultural hierarchy. It is a battle over whose language is more important and who gets resources like economic cultural resources and who has the power to even sort of define what it means to be Chinese. Our language, the very lens through which we see the world carries enormous significance in how we see ourselves as people. It is no wonder then that the history of how Putonghua became a language and Fangyan became dialects is about much more than semantics. It is a story about what it means to be Chinese and who has the right to represent it. Thank you very much. Go ahead and stop the share screen here. Thank you very much, Gina Tam, for this very interesting these flashlights into the creation of Putonghua as in fact China's only language, which is something that I've been able to follow as well. I mean, I started learning Chinese, actually Wen Yanwen, a classical Chinese in the mid-80s and I did my first journeys through China in the mid-80s and I definitely remember, even with my very limited Putonghua at that time, that people in Shanghai, people in Hunan, people in Guangdong, they definitely did not have a proper grasp over that language, whereas our students today, they do speak it and I think they are actually the first generation who would actually they are the ones who anybody could claim that they know how to speak Putonghua as their school language, I would say. That's a very important point to make. I'm saying this because I have received the first few questions from our audience and from the questions I'm assuming that not all of us know Chinese, the spoken and written languages that we call Chinese and therefore I would like to read out a couple where you perhaps could explain a little bit about the specific, sorry I'm switching on my camera here, so the specific differences between Chinese as a language in writing, sorry in its spoken form and in writing as opposed to some of the other languages which only exist in phonetic format. So the first one is I wanted to know if Tang poetry was also written in Cantonese or in other fangyan and connected to that, that takes us into the modern era. When we say by Hua Wen movement as part of the new culture movement, are we talking of Cantonese as well? Is the grammar of all Chinese fangyan the same? How does one script represent all the different fangyan? So one relating to a different time period, namely the Tang and the other one to the current era or perhaps the republican era, so the relationship between written language and spoken language and if you look at the signs then of course they were written in Cantonese usage so yes over to you. Sure great questions and yeah I didn't touch much on written language because this project felt unwieldy already but I'll do my best to answer these questions. So let's start with the Tang poetry. This is another thing that doing my archival research in Guangzhou and in Hong Kong. I got asked about a lot or told about a lot and so I'm actually sort of working on a paper right now that digs into this a little bit more than my book actually does as far as this question of sort of how do we connect current languages to these sort of cultural and historical touchstones like Tang dynasty poetry. So I'll start with sort of where like why people say this and the main reason people say this right is that essentially when we go back in time a long long time ago a lot of people who lived in sort of the Tang dynasty earlier and later they did organize characters and they organized words according to phonetics and they would create phonetic charts and rhyme tables right that that that that grouped like sort of characters together based upon rhyme and that's a lot of evidence I'm not a historical linguist right I'm a historian and I'm a modern one at that but historical linguists will use that to say basically like well hey if these two characters were homophonists then that means that we have a we have a sense of what this phonetic system looked like 13, 14, 1500 years ago right and so when we do that the distinctions that we the phonological distinctions that we find in southern fangyan Cantonese is one of them right in particular I mentioned that that glottal stop in in Chinese we call it a Ruxiang right this is this is so essentially right like you'll have say two characters in Mandarin I'm just sort of pulling this out like as a hypothetical that might be pronounced sure but in Cantonese one might be pronounced sip and one might be pronounced she right and that that stop ending is a distinction among sort of cat like characters in this category that doesn't exist in a lot of northern fangyan and you find that in these like in Tang poetry and in these rhyme tables right that those that distinction of the of the Ruxiang exists then and that is why you'll have a lot of and the other thing is that when you read them aloud they just seem to rhyme better in a lot of southern fangyan although I will say I remember giving a talk once where I talked about this being specific to Cantonese and I had all of the people be like well I'm from Suzhou and we say this like we say that Tang Dynasty poetry is best preserved for us and and I'm from like Xiamen and we say that right so this is not there's there's a lot of this is a contentious issue but it does seem to be focused on people who speak southern fangyan right of which there are many right and so it's just that they rhyme more there was actually a video of a student from Hong Kong reciting a Tang Dynasty poem that went pretty viral in the mainland because they're like this sounds better right and so to me that is different from saying it was written in Cantonese or written in a particular fangyan and I think the reason is is that like people have terms for local languages but when we think Cantonese right like that is a that is a language that people speak today and I don't think that we can confidently say that it is the same language that people spoke 12 1300 years ago right and I think that slippage is really important because on the one hand I think it's important that we be clear about what we're talking about but it's also important because the reason that so many Cantonese speakers say this I think is really telling I think it really is is revealing of how much people's fangyan means to them in terms of their Chinese identity because it connects you to a past right it connects people to a past and so I that's sort of the best the best answer I can give to that right for a longer answer than I think you probably expected but I think it's really fascinating as far as the second question right so by Hua Wen this also gets really complicated so like there they're on the one hand there are let's start here there are a lot of vernacular newspapers in particular right around the time of the Russo-Japanese war because they focus a lot on that from like 1901 to 1908 there's just a ton of them and a lot of them come from and they're called like by Hua Bao and they and they come from a lot of them are in southern areas like there's a Ningbo there's an Anhui there's a Guangzhou there's a lot of these by Hua Bao so sometimes you'll hear by Hua like like refer to Cantonese right or refer to Ningbo or so these kinds of things and so but like once we get past the May 4th movement this question of like what is by Hua becomes enormously contentious right and it's something that they like people recognize that like is by Hua this sort of like talking as we speak but literary language that essentially Lu Xun is writing in right or is it um which which uses generally grammatical patterns that are not specific to Cantonese right they're using like the the particles uh the the subject verb sort of order is not Cantonese it's it's it's pretty similar to what we would have as Mandarin with some exceptions some of this also comes from Shanghainese too right um but and so you have a lot of like elites and scholars recognizing that they're like this isn't vernacular language because vernacular language would be sort of like a transcription of what Fang Yan are and that's not what these are and in actually the 1930s and 40s you have a Cantonese literature movement that attempts to create a Cantonese specific by Hua written language right um and so so the answer here is that it's just really complicated um and it's contentious right I think we often say that like by Hua is a thing and I think that if we look back at these sources we see it's not a thing like it what it is is it's it's a foil to Wen Yan Wen which is also not a unified thing right these are just things that are defined against one another um so the last part of your question how does one script represent all different Fang Yan um I think a lot of Cantonese speakers will say um like it I mean it doesn't it doesn't right like there are characters that are used grammatically in Cantonese that I could find a a print oh hi sorry my my kitten is is talking to there there are characters like that that are used in sort of Cantonese grammar that I could pronounce in Mandarin if I wanted to um but that doesn't mean that it's a common character in Mandarin right um and so it's still part of this broader Chinese script um but it is it is like it is essentially just sort of like using different characters for different meanings if that makes sense um a lot of things that will be very common in Cantonese characters is you'll put the little like like for those who are for who read and write Chinese right like the little like mouth radical um to a character say like this is how it's pronounced but it means something different right um as sort of like a rebus uh essentially with a little with little quotes upon right um and so um but then you also have sort of like invention of new characters with digital technology you can do these kinds of things um and so it's it's really not static it's really contentious um and I realize that's not a terribly satisfying answer but I think that's the best I can do thank you very much Tina there are more questions coming your way so it's uh uh here's one uh what was the relationship between the bio of written textbooks textbooks books newspapers and so on and the intended spoken boy in the 1930s and 40s was by what meant to be a written corollary to boy that's a great question um it's something I've been digging into recently actually um and the answer once again is this is something people argued about right um because there were some who argued these need to be the same thing and there were some hard who argued that they needed to be different um and the the argument sort of centered on essentially like how how unified do we want to be and in which contexts so on sort of one side of things people people would say like we need to have a unified oral language that we teach in schools right but if we limit like if we limit and like literature to that we're really limiting literature and so a vernacular literature needs to draw on things that are not this standardized language right um there are others who argued that like actually these need to converge right like that that that that actually needs to happen right um and then there are others who argued that like it doesn't matter all that much because boy you is a spoken language whereas by far is a written language um and therefore like this like the distinction doesn't really matter because you can pronounce all of the things written in baihua in boy you but when you have sort of like a a language you're teaching kids in schools you are teaching them a particular grammar and a particular set of vocabularies and that does come that's going to be limiting right it's going to leave things out and so then you have people who are like split the difference it's like well you know like we can have some more diversity with our literature here um but maybe a bit less um and they're coming at it from all sides here some of this is political in the sense that like it is a kmt ccp split right like sometimes you'll have the ccp arguing for more linguistic diversity this is in the 30s and 40s not when we get in the 50s but in the 30s and 40s you'll hear it have people from the ccp being like more diversity boy you is oppressive and elitist right and then you'll have people from the kmt and being like no standardization is good right but it doesn't always sort of fit cleanly along these political lines um sometimes it is uh sometimes you'll have there's like there's really heavy debates within ccp camps about this about what was the role of unification what was the role of a boy you was it just to like like as a practical language so people can communicate with one another when they can or was it supposed to imbue literature so that that I think is the best answer I can give I think thank you next question yes if you have the energy okay so we have more did you find any parallels between the national language movement in 20th century china and similar campaigns in say 19th century europe um and he's citing english french spanish um when he comes to the standardized versions spoken in the metropole so in the capital city areas yes so to me when I when I think about sort of like historical continuities or historical connections right to me there's there's two ways I could go about this right one is that do these things rhyme in a way that is sort of useful for bringing out ideas in both of them the other is there are there actual genuine like connections at the time um and the answer is both I think and also but but in with sort of a caveat here so um when you like I talked about in sort of the national language movement that there was this push back against like pick a fang in service the national language there were certainly some who argued that's what they should do and they were they the examples that they brought up most often were french france and japan um those were the two they talked to they're like france picked a national language based upon um the language of the capital japan picked a national language based on the language of the capital that's what all the all the cool kids are doing um and that's what we should do too right um and then there's pushback and saying like that doesn't exactly work for us right um and so I and and the idea of sort of like a national language conference right is something that is also being borrowed here in particular from japan they have a national language conference um to determine what this would look like um right right sort of a couple of a few years before china does and so there's there's there's explicitly explicit borrowing here right um however um how like the second question here right is how how useful are these metaphors if we're not looking for specific connections and I think that one of the things that that these these like metaphors tend to erase um is how how much like our our words and models for talking about language in china are built on the european experience and it doesn't fit very well um and and so like when when we in the 19th century when europeans and americans were looking at sort of like that's because china is not modern and obviously that's a that's a really orientalist racist argument here um but if if we're looking at it from um like as today I think this is one of the reasons that it is useful to make china as method right as as to is to look at china's experience as ways that we can expand the way we think about this process because there is there are really unique things going on here um in part because of the sheer amount of linguistic diversity but also because even though right there are like distinct ways like I when I if I wrote out kentany's right now um for a mandarin speaker they'd probably understand a fair amount of it but a lot of it they wouldn't right because there are there there's particular grammar and particular vocabulary usages here um but at the same time right we're we're dealing with one script that has astounding continuity um if we look at sort of world historical examples um and that makes things a little more complicated uh in in sense of looking at other kinds of corollaries so that's I think the best answer I can give you is sort of separating out the two ways that we talk about parallels yes okay thank you very much we're being asked to hurry up more or less because they're we're getting closer to the time limit um but let me just select um now we have um there's so many good questions um by the way feel free to reach out to me if you have other questions I'm more than half maybe that's that's the probably the best the best the most useful way that we can communicate between our viewers and the our audience and you as the front of all knowledge um now we'll have um let's see this is not on a hierarchical basis but um okay so here we have one that actually goes beyond the han languages so how do languages like Tibetan Uyghur and Taiwanese indigenous languages fit into the fangyan constructions are these languages slotted into a different category are han languages in han is in quotation marks categorized differently differently differently than spoken languages spoken primarily by peoples who aren't han so this is this is uh yes exactly I was gonna say that's a great question um and I'm gonna answer this historically and contemporarily um so historically this was actually one of the sort of main ways that and I have like a section of a chapter of my book about this about how fangyan come to be defined as han and it comes from people who linguists who are studying languages of people that they categorize and that like are self categorized as not han right one of the examples of this was a linguist named Lee fangui um he did his his um his dissertation research at the University of Chicago and he um is one who makes like who essentially like goes and looks at han language borrowing in non-han languages um and he um and essentially to make the argument that like even though there's a lot of parallels here right what matters is that they are defining themselves as not han and we can't consider their language a fangyan it's another language right so there's this twinning of language and ethnicity that happens in the 30s and 40s through the 50s um my my advisor my dissertation advisor wrote a wrote a book about this um in the 30s and 40s um about where the ethnic classification system a lot of it like sort of bases on like how do we categorize groups of people based on language right um that that that like you know sort of like this was less of a focus on Tibetans and Mongols but that comes in a little bit later right but like they can't be considered speaking fangyan of Chinese because they have different languages okay um and I'll I'll just very quickly um contemporarily however um this distinction becomes really significant um because uh in 2001 China passes its first very first sort of language law like I talk about a lot of policies in my book but a law that has like enforcement teeth um and they categorize fangyan and um like languages of indigenous peoples in China they call them ethnic minorities differently um and that those languages have a different role to play in society um in that like like Mongolian and Tibetan um people have the right to learn that in schools which is a right not afforded to Cantonese speakers that said um a pushes like like like like advocations in these non Han regions um for more indigenous language instruction often are met with um crackdowns uh in China that that protests to to save the dialects or save the fangyan don't quite have um so there's overlap here right but I but they are treated differently both in terms of law and also in terms of discourse yes if I could just add one uh to to these languages and that's a little bit historical but it's uh important in the context of the team it's of course Manchu and if you uh if you know how Manchu's transliterated Chinese then you will see that they actually distinguish between the northern pronunciations especially in the later period and those of the Jiangnan and so so you get that that's one way that pronunciations were being preserved in in a phonetic spelling and somebody who picked up on this was of course a Giles because Giles when he created the his transliteration system that was based on the the Manchu transliteration so the Manchu's regarded their language as the national language that's that's actually where you first get the idea of the Goryu that's that that can also mean Manchu because it's one of the languages so so when it comes to negotiating between what what is a national language you know it depends very much on the the idea of what the what Manchu sorry what a language is you know what it's meant to represent um yes Paul Kassel wrote about this um I can't remember it's like Spenny Martin Serralla also wrote about this too um it's it's very thoughtful stuff yeah so uh yes so uh non-hand languages and hand languages I mean they they can actually share the same national you know they can represent a nation as well although they are only spoken in one part or by one part of the population okay so um let me just see um how do you describe the often common written links in that people would read the same characters between those from areas with spoken disconnections so um yes so this is um I I think I think I know what this means but this is um I passed this to you the the common written links yes so how in in what sense there's actually language the written language unified China that's I think that's what it means and I mean this is this is I think what you're pointing to here is a limitation in our vocabulary um and in the sense that we I think because it's taken us so long to take China seriously as a model for understanding human languages we don't have a great um way to talk about it right like what will often happen sorry uh what will often happen is that people will just distinguish between written language and spoken language right like these are just two different things um even historians and I myself am guilty of that you know when you write a book you can't do everything perfectly and this is something that my book is guilty of is that I I talk just about spoken language I don't talk about written language and therefore create this artificial distinction um largely because it's it's really difficult to try and combine these two um a lot of I think what a lot of scholars will do is they'll just make a distinction between sound and script and just say these are two separate things um I also find that really unsatisfying uh because they're clearly connected right um what to me what it says is that when we like um and here's an example right is that we often make comparisons with Europe um I'll I'll like even to make my students understand right I'll I'll say things like imagine if the Roman Empire just like didn't break or broke up and then got back together again and created a modern nation and that's the kind of linguistic diversity we have China today there's a really imperfect metaphor and one of the reasons it's a really imperfect for a number of reasons but one of the reasons is really imperfect um is that this unifying script really is it like creates a kind of continuity both historical and geographical that we don't have in other areas of the world um so the way I would describe it is I I want better ways to describe it um I that's I think the best answer I can give is that I just don't think we have the right vocabulary to talk about it and I don't know that I've created it myself yes okay actually just latching on to your last example this is a short question was there ever a discourse in China about having a multi-language nation state following a model for example like in Switzerland that's a great question um and so there's a lot of experimentation here and the the short answer is is yes um in the sense that in particular sort of a lot of early thinkers in the in the Chinese Communist Party in the 30s and 40s talked about this they talked about linguistic self-determination um and they talked about how essentially right like um some would just say that like we need to we need to celebrate all of this linguistic diversity and that we can we can make that work right some would argue that there needed to be a kind of common language so that we had this term common language before it becomes the word that we use to describe Mandarin um Putonghua to describe sort of like if you have like a sailor from Jiangnan and a sailor from Qingdao and they get together right they figure out how to communicate with each other it's sort of like I'm I'm sure that in the audience there are like Spanish speakers and you go to Portugal and you figure it out right it's imperfect it's awkward it's clumsy you make mistakes but eventually you can kind of get your way around right um and I think that that is is how like a lot of people imagined China could be um and that gets that gets buried it gets it gets rejected um in terms of the idea that like essentially for for nationalism it gets rejected for the idea that really like a nation needs to have a national language and and this gets really cinched in the 1950s Stalin writes a tract on Marxism and linguistics and it essentially says that like nations have languages and that is how it should be um and this gets translated into Chinese this is more complicated than that but like that's that's kind of a basic premise here it's translated into Chinese and that just gets constantly cited like there there's a there's a there's a periodical on Chinese language that gets published out of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and that they just everybody cites that tract right and they're like this is this is how it has to be this is normative um and that is where I think you see the end of this kind of thing that said again the constitution um or the the Chinese language law in 2001 guarantees the right for non-Han languages to be learned but again there's so many impractical terms there's a lot of crackdowns and Putonghua is named in the constitution as the national language right and so so that I mean that that really but there was yeah there was a lot of discussion of that there's also a brief moment where people were talking about Esperanto um and so um so yeah there's a lot of experimentation in these early decades of the 20th century yes thank you um I have one question here yeah okay there's a comment by a linguist um saying that um linguists adopt the term variety to bypass the language slash dialect dichotomy so that's the um is that perhaps a um um a way of getting out of this so you you you don't speak of Fang Yan it's a variety it's a variant if you like speaking in terms that we're not now from the covid crisis you know variants of viruses so you have variants of languages of spoken languages that's really fascinating yeah and so I I think that um so there's um there's a gosh I'm trying to remember if it's as I don't think he's technically a linguist I don't want to get his title wrong but um expert we'll leave it there um who who proposed gosh a couple of decades ago um the the use of the term top-elect um as like a sort of like anilogism to deal with the fact that Fang Yan doesn't have a neat corollary in in other languages right like as in like that term like the that that um so Lydia Leo will call these a super sign right where we term we pair one language one word in one language with another in another language right um and so the dialect Fang Yan super sign right this this expert essentially says that um as um is essentially says that like we should come up with a new translation for the term Fang Yan and it should be top-elect um and and sort of like just like literally taking the sort of like language of place thing um to and I think the reason that I I am wary of that is because while um I and I appreciate this comment right the linguists come up with ways of realizing that these that these corollaries are really imperfect right that there aren't really good ways of defining dialect and language and these kinds of things um I to me as a historian I'm less interested in what is the absolute correct term than why are people calling it this right and so I I think that I I I use throughout my book um basically I use whatever term the people I'm talking about use right so like when Jaoyun Ren translates his book study of the modern root dialect I translate it that way because that's the term he's using right um when he uses the word Fang Yan I use the word Fang Yan right when when and and so I just sort of um and then when I when I have to just make a decision I tend to use local language um but I I do so with the explicit understanding that the stuff is political right that that we are and I think that that is where historians come into this right is that we are not we understand that science is political or and not to say that scientists don't right but that is that is sort of the the approach to which which we take things right is that um and that giving it giving it a new term doesn't really solve the problem of things like resources and power um it it really just kind of like is is is I I think doesn't necessarily move away from reinforcing these power dynamics that really affect people's lives um and so that is that is I think how I would respond to that understanding however that sometimes we have to use words um and that all of them have benefits and drawbacks if that makes sense yes thank you I would just just like to characterize the rest of the question so there's some that are clearly um linguistic so asking for linguistic explanations so all of you who are listening who are watching this please send your questions directly to our speaker but others are more political um and then there's a third category which um focuses on the um on the um spoken quality of the regional languages and the ones that I can fish out here are um in Nanhua they are they are the dialects of Taiwan they are that of course includes Minnanhua and Fuzhouhua and then and then we have the Nanjing dialect and we have the Kejiahua and the differences between Kejiahua and the companies I think you refer to that earlier on that there's a very possessive um try attempt to defend the original pronunciation of Chinese as as one of theirs and that's of course the um I remember the discourse that the Haka and the um the the companies have you know which one is actually closer to the language of the the song for example so but can I take a moment to talk about Haka or Kejia because I think this is super fascinating um because because we had talked about um about ethnicity as well so um so there there is a really heavy attempt I there was I think there was a comment in here specifically about that um about about Kejiahua um that that is actually the fangyan or language or ethnolect or whatever word we want to use here right like thing I'll stick with fangyan for now that is the one that is closest to like the historical language of of of of of like the the Han ethnicity right like that one's that one's the closest that one's the oldest that's another term I'll hear a lot is that this is the oldest Chinese language um and so um one of the reasons this becomes a real fixation for Haka scholars is because in the early 20th century there is an attempt by local Cantonese to call the Haka not Han um and so you see a huge pushback from Haka elites um who they'll found research institutions a lot of this is happening also in the that we didn't even get into the fact that there's a lot of connections among overseas Chinese right that that is that is a whole other dimension of this that I didn't even get to get directed um but um it's so fascinating um but essentially what they're like is like not only are we Han Chinese and here is the linguistic data to prove it right we are more Han Chinese than than the than the Cantonese right and and you see a lot of that kind of discourse here and so there is an explicit attempt to use language to defend belonging to an ethnicity in this method and I think that that's why these questions of sort of like which fangyan is closest to this particular historical source means so much to people because it is about a claim to an ethnic identity thank you so um are there because we are now within minutes of the end of the official program are there any other questions um um Andrea maybe or no from the close from the uh panel you know from the panel um sorry if you if you were to have a question I was just sorry I'm gonna absorb by reading all the questions yes so many there's so many great questions and show such expertise I'm really I'm really honored that that people with such expertise are engaging this is really exciting all right I mean there's one maybe maybe um for to to end with it what is your opinion um about the future of fangyan in China that's a that's a great question um and so I I think uh I mean so I as historians we're very wary of giving predictions um we don't like to do it because we understand that that people like to say history rhymes um I don't even love that I I think that like um that that certainly we're connected to our past but um the the future throws us curves balls that we just don't even see until they happen and then all of a sudden we're rethinking our past right um certainly um when I talk to linguists in China um there's a sort of reservation that fangyan with the exception of very few with sort of economic resources um are likely going to start fading into one another if not into the national language this is also something that state actor state is inevitable and will happen I don't know if that will happen um digital technology has also like given space to real creativity um but um and and it's unclear how this will happen the the what I will say is that languages regional x dialects fangyan whatever we want to call them that survive historically do so because they have support right because and so you know we often like you'll often hear sort of this reservation of languages die um I I think um and I'm going to quote here a wonderful um um anthropologist um uh Hoof works on Tibetan um and Gerald Roche who says no languages are let to die right that that is that is a choice that we make um and I don't know what choices people are going to make in the future doesn't look great at the moment um but things can change very quickly um but I what I what I will say is that any future of of fangyan in China is going to depend on on the decisions that we make right um if we look at historical corollaries right I think um the direction we're going now is not towards linguistic preservation um but then you look at places like like like the UK right like Welsh right which has seen sort of a revival because they've gotten the support they've gotten institutional support um in a way that that that local languages in China don't so I think that's the best answer I can give there thank you thank you very much um we have um no time left I I um yes you got me into uh uh territory which I'm quite interested in so that we will need that we will need to leave that for a more private occasion but um I'd love it for the time being I think I think we've reached the end of the um evening or the midday for you but um um is there any very urgent request from the audience or from maybe from the organizers from the um so as China Institute um in that respect no okay in that case thank you very much and thank you so much for having me this has been such a delightful conversation yes so thank you for having been uh the guest of so us and um um we would like to see you as a in person not on Zoom or in any other form here in London to continue our conversation so thank you very much and to everybody else in the audience um have a very nice evening bye bye thank you so much thank you thank you Gina bye bye bye