UC Berkeley

Examining language and nation-building in China, this dissertation argues that language is malleable, not only in its function in society, but also in its form. Moreover, I argue that a change in form (pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar) can also facilitate a change in function. I show how language reformers in China sought to broaden literacy and education among the people by creating a language that was easier to learn. In detailing the course of Chinese language reform over the early decades of the twentieth century, I find existing social theory—particularly that of Bourdieu—unequal to the task of explaining the revolutionary transformation of language practices, not only in China, but also among its East Asian neighbors, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.

Pierre Bourdieu’s examinations of language, to be sure, do not produce a general theory of language so much as they incorporate linguistic thinking into a larger theory of symbolic power. Borrowing from structuralism’s contention that symbolic systems such as language are internally structured, Bourdieu argued that this internal structuredness enables the structuring of social experience. He treats language as a form of cultural capital, one that can be transubstantiated through the education system into social and economic capital on the labor market. Capital is unequally distributed in society, and this inequality gives rise to the structure of symbolic systems: in the case of language, the hierarchical distinctions we make in types of language that differ in prestige and legitimacy. Bourdieu argued that these symbolic inequalities enable the reproduction of social inequalities.

This reading of language’s role in society runs into problems when we look beyond its Western European empirical basis. In China in particular (and in East Asia in general) the abrupt break with longstanding language practices ended the social reproduction that they had long enabled. China, along with Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, had been bound for nearly two millennia by the use of Classical Chinese as a supranational lingua franca among the literate elite. This language defies the common Eurocentric understanding of writing as purely auxiliary to, dependent on, and representative of speaking—a notion today termed “phonocentrism.” Primarily a written medium, Classical Chinese can, of course be read aloud. But, because it is written in characters that only partially and vaguely correspond with specific sounds, the language can be read aloud using any number of regional pronunciation systems—including those that are only notionally based on forms of spoken Chinese, as in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam for hundreds of years. Thus, Classical Chinese as a medium of writing, to an extreme degree, stands independent from spoken language.

Under Western pressure and influence, intellectuals after China’s defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) saw Classical Chinese as an impediment to modernization. Phonocentrism ruled the day: following the Japanese example, reformers sought to narrow the huge gap between the written and spoken languages. Mandarin was the national standard that emerged from fractious debates among intellectuals. Pieced together from existing language practices, Mandarin drew from the idea of guanhua, the traditional lingua franca of imperial officialdom that was strongly influenced by the speech of the imperial court that had resided starting in 1368 in Nanjing. This city’s speech retained an influence on the language long after the Ming dynasty’s relocation of the capital to Beijing in 1421. Beijing’s own speech only really began exerting influence in the mid-nineteenth century. By the 1930s, after two decades of cantankerous debates among language reformers, the more or less final form of Mandarin was based primarily (though not exclusively) on the pronunciation of Beijingers with a “middle school education.” The new language’s written counterpart was modeled on the vernacular novels of the past few centuries and advocated by the leading intellectuals of the May Fourth Movement.

This new language differed from its predecessors not just in form but also in function. Unlike Classical Chinse, it was not intended just for an elite few. Instead, it was meant to be widely accessible, so as to unite a nascent and fragile post-imperial Chinese nation. It did so by hewing more closely to the everyday speech of modestly educated people. This conscious reflection of living practice by the new language was meant to make it easier to learn, thus raising literacy rates and enabling national strengthening. Thus, language standardization in China was an attempt at social leveling, contrary to the Bourdieusian contention that language standardization sustains an elite exclusivity that helps reproduce social inequality.

In this dissertation, I show how the sound system of Mandarin was designed to suit a nationalist vision of society, and how such a nationalized language represented a reimagining of how languages and peoples are linked. I also show how the materiality of language was implicated in this reform process when intellectuals sought to simplify the script by compelling equipment changes in the publishing industry. All of these changes, I then demonstrate, took place amid parallel linguistic shifts in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, whose own language practices underwent nationalizing transformations. Finally, I show how the changes in language policy in China produced the ever more stringent equating of language, ethnicity, and nation that we see in the country today.