Chinese Dialects Bibliography

A Bibliography of Articles on Chinese Dialects

Chambers, J. K. “Dialect Acquisition Dialect Acquisition.” Language, Vol. 68, No. 4 (Dec., 1992), pp. 673-705 Chao, Yuen Ren. “Contrastive Aspects of the Wu Dialects.” Language, Vol. 43, No. 1 (Mar., 1967), pp. 92-101 Chao, Yuen Ren. “Languages and Dialects in China.” The Geographical Journal, Vol. 102, No. 2 (Aug., 1943), pp. 63-66 Hamed, Mahé Ben. “Neighbour-Nets Portray the Chinese Dialect Continuum and the Linguistic Legacy of China's Demic History.” Proceedings: Biological Sciences, Vol. 272, No. 1567 (May 22, 2005), pp. 1015-1022 Juhl, Robert A. “Phonological Evolution of the Chinese Rhymes: Wei to Liang.” Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 94, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1974), pp. 408-430 Norman, Jerry L. and Coblin, W. South. “A New Approach to Chinese Historical Linguistics.” Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 115, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1995), pp. 576-584 Pulleyblank, Edwin G. “Qieyun and Yunjing: The Essential Foundation for Chinese Historical Linguistics.” Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 118, No. 2 (Apr. Jun., 1998), pp. 200-216 Pulleyblank, Edwin G. “How Do We Reconstruct Old Chinese?” Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 112, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1992), pp. 365-382

Articles for Review: Hamed, Mahé Ben. “Neighbour-Nets Portray the Chinese Dialect Continuum and the Linguistic Legacy of China's Demic History.” Hamed explores the interconnections between Chinese dialects in the context of a “neighbor-net”, a system based on changes in vocabulary, rather than morphology, over time. He acknowledges seven major dialect groups, grouping northern and southern Mandarin into one group and supporting the Gan and Xiang dialects as transitional dialects displaying traits of both the dialects in Northern and Southern China. The neighbor-net is portrays the interconnectedness of major dialect groups in a sort of web diagram based on a fixed list of words common to all the dialect groups under consideration. Hamed suggests that lexical overlap between dialect groups is either a result of heavy lexical borrowing of one dialect from another, or perhaps from the dialect continuum created by diglossia and migrations across dialect boundaries. Similarly, dialects such as Min which exhibit a stronger demarcation can be explained by the geographical isolation (e.g. rugged terrain) in which they developed apart from neighboring dialects. This article is reminiscent of the discussion on dialect continua in J.K. Chambers and Peter Trudgill’s “Dialectology”. The cumulative effect of dialectal differences but the existence of a chain of mutual intelligibility helps to explain how migrants of one dialectal affiliation could without much difficulty assimilate to and adapt the dialect of a neighboring region, blurring the boundaries between different dialect groups. Norman, Jerry L. and Coblin, W. South. “A New Approach to Chinese Historical Linguistics.” Norman and Coblin examine the history of Chinese historical linguistics by analyzing Bernard Kalgren’s model, which is based on the Qieyun rime-books. Because the Qieyun is an inventory of sounds and does not represent the spoken dialect of any particular place or time, Kalgren’s linguistic model is not without its shortcomings. In fact, modern vernacular forms of Chinese derive not from the codified Qieyun, but rather from a living, spoken form of early Chinese. Therefore, Norman and Coblin suggest adopting a more realistic approach in the study of Chinese linguistics. They also feel that dialectal study, especially the dialects in southern China, has been largely ignored in by Kalgrenian’s methodology. Kalgren’s old model perhaps represents the traditional, prescriptive way of thinking about linguistics, while the more modern methodology envisioned by Norman and Coblin represents the new wave of descriptive study which is now gaining much popularity.