Linguistic reconstruction and the construction of nationalist-era Chinese linguistics

This article examines the introduction of the Stammbaum model of language relatedness in China. In it, I focus on the (self-proclaimed) earliest “scientific” studies of the Chinese dialects by Chinese linguists, which were conducted in the 1920s and 30s by scholars returned from graduate study in Europe and the US. I argue that with the introduction of the genetic model of linguistic relatedness, the objects and methods of traditional Chinese philology were not so much rejected as refigured. The historical Tang dynasty standard that had traditionally been the object of conservative and often prescriptive philological study was reconstructed and re-imagined as a “mother language” for the Chinese dialects. This linguistic imagining was part of a broader interaction with Wilsonian discourses of national political authority, through which the Chinese government and many Chinese people were trying to negotiate their post-Imperial political authority and identity. This paper proposes that the earliest scientific studies of the Chinese dialects reflect a hybrid dialectology, in which “modern” linguistic-scientific understandings of language provide a new conceptual framework for practices and categories inherited from traditional philology. This hybrid dialectology, by marking the boundaries of Chinese linguistics within the field of linguistics, helped to mark the boundaries of the Chinese languages.