Abstract
How we think national standard languages came to dominate the world depends on how we conceptualize the way languages are linked to the people that use them. Weberian theory posits the arbitrariness and constructedness of a community based on language. People who speak the same language do not necessarily think of themselves as a community, and so such a community is an intentional, political, and inclusive production. Bourdieusian theory treats language as a form of unequally distributed cultural capital, thus highlighting language’s classed nature. The rise of standard languages thus reflects a change in the class structure of a nationalizing society. In contrast, I move beyond the familiar Western cases on which these theories are based to reveal the shortcomings of both these theoretical approaches. China, with an exceptionally artificial national standard language that was promulgated by the state in an extremely top-down process, highlights the importance of intentionality in both the design of the language and the social function it was supposed to play. Building on Weber and Bourdieu, I argue that even egalitarian language standardization projects, such as the Chinese case, can result in unintended new hierarchies of privilege and power, outrunning the best intentions of their designers.
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Notes
My use of “autonomy” here points to assumptions about language’s democratic nature, owing to its apparent imperviousness to consciously made “internal” modifications (i.e., to its vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation), as opposed to “external” modifications (changing a language’s role in society—e.g., designating a language as the official language). This is distinct from Bourdieu’s usage, which addresses the autonomy of fields of power.
In this article, I loosely use “groups of people,” “human collectivities,” and “social aggregates” as equivalents for social groupings that might be rooted in any number of intersecting symbolic and social boundaries, such as class, nationality, and ethnicity.
Keith Tribe, in his translation of Economy and Society, uses boldface to indicate emphasis marked in Weber’s original text, avoiding the confusion that italics might create, given that italics are also conventionally used for words in the source language (German) (Weber 2019, p. x).
The Chinese intellectuals’ imaginings of Western linguistic egalitarianism may have been exaggerated, at least in the rhetoric of their advocacy: well into the twentieth century, Bourdieu (1991, pp. 62–63), discussing France, was arguing that educated elites, in an endless pursuit of distinction over others, often ended up making the official language more difficult.
No language can be demarcated purely on linguistic criteria. The conceptualization of “Chinese” as a unitary language with many “dialects,” as opposed to a family of related but mutually unintelligible languages, is a political decision and not a linguistic one (Norman 1988, pp. 1–3).
All Chinese languages are “tonal,” meaning that the tones are highly significant. Changing the tone of a syllable will change more than its emotional expression—it will shift its meaning altogether, from, say, “sugar” (táng, uttered with a rising tone) to “hot” (tàng, with a falling tone). The fifth tone of Old National Pronunciation was derived from a category of syllables that, centuries ago, had ended in the stops –p, –t, and –k, a characteristic preserved in the more conservative dialects of the south, including Cantonese. This characteristic was lost over the years in many northern dialects, including that of Beijing, which redistributed these fifth-tone syllables more or less randomly among the four remaining tones (Chao et al. 1977, p. 81; Kaske 2008, pp. 413–414). Adding a fifth tone, therefore, is highly confusing—speakers used to four tones must redistribute an unsystematic and unpredictable subset of syllables from the usual four tones into the fifth tone.
The nickname Shuren Hui was a reference to the Qieyun, a rhyming dictionary published in 601 CE by the lexicographer Lu Fayan, who wrote in the preface, “We few men decide, and it is decided” (wo bei shu ren, ding ze ding yi).
These numbers also exclude considerations of the retroflex suffix r, as well as merged and unstressed syllables (Duanmu 2007, p. 5).
Not all syllables exist in all four tones.
These alphabetic symbols were originally used in the 1913 Committee meeting to denote character pronunciations, and were called zhuyin zimu (sound-annotating letters), and later also Guoyin zimu (National Pronunciation letters). They are still in current use in Taiwan in Mandarin-language pedagogy and computer character input. In 1930 the government renamed them zhuyin fuhao (sound-annotating symbols) to avoid giving the impression that they were a replacement for Chinese characters (DeFrancis 1984, p. 242). They are often informally called bopomofo, after the first four symbols of this transcription system.
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Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2016 American Sociological Association Annual Meeting in Seattle, and at the 2019 International Convention of Asia Scholars in Leiden. I thank John Lie, Mara Loveman, and Wen-hsin Yeh for their helpful advice in the writing of this article. Incisive comments from Katherine Hood, Jin Xuan, and Gina Tam were indispensable in the revision process. Additionally, I am grateful to my fellow members of the 2016–2017 Haas Junior Scholars Program for Doctoral Candidates at the UC Berkeley Institute of East Asian Studies for a highly productive discussion of an early draft of this work: Kira Donnell, Sujin Eom, Grace Kim, James Lin, Ti Ngo, Gustavo Oliveira, Dongmin Park, and Kristen Sun. Thanks also to the 2017–2018 participants in the Li Ka Shing Foundation Seminar series at UC Berkeley for comments: Brooks Jessup, Peiting C. Li, Jonathan Tang, Paulina Hartono, Camila Yadeau, Matthew Berry, Joseph Passman, Coleman Mahler, Caleb Ford, and Shoufu Yin. I am grateful for the helpful and detailed comments from the Theory and Society Editor and reviewers. The research for this article was supported in part by a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (SES-1603086). The writing of this article was supported by a Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (DD052-A-16) and a UC Berkeley Metro New York Leaders Fellowship.
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Weng, J. Uneasy companions: language and human collectivities in the remaking of Chinese society in the early twentieth century. Theor Soc 49, 75–100 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-020-09377-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-020-09377-2