4.1 Chinese Diglossia
Although Chinese is not one of the defining languages described in his classic paper on diglossia, Ferguson does note, “it [Chinese] probably represents diglossia on the largest scale of any attested instance” (1959:36). In reference to what he also calls
“the most extensive case of diglossia in history”, Don Snow explains, “in pre‐modern times, Classical Chinese functioned as the high (H) language variety in not only China, but also Korea, Japan, and Vietnam” (2010a:124).5 In the case of the Chinese diglossic situation in China, Classical Chinese (文言; wenyan) can be considered to function as the H variant of the language, and a variety of vernacular (白話; baihua) forms of Chinese can be regarded as L.
In “Modern Written Chinese in Development,” Ping Chen explains that wenyan functioned as H in China for approximately 2,000 years, until the language reform associated with the May 4th Movement of 1919 led to its abandonment as the standard written language (1993:506‐507). However, as Snow’s paper helps to clarify, it wasn’t until the 6th or 7th century that the Chinese language contact
situation developed into a “full‐fledged diglossic pattern” (2010a:127). Moreover, it was around the same time — Tang (618‐907 CE) dynasty — that baihua as a written vernacular began to develop (Chen 1993:507). Although development of a written L form is not necessary for the establishment of diglossia — it may even hinder
establishment in some instances, it is a unique characteristic of the evolution of diglossia in the pre‐modern Chinese language community. Baihua as written vernacular will be referred to again in a subsequent discussion of Ferguson’s prestige variable and its manifestation in the Chinese diglossia situation.
Consistent with defining characteristics of Ferguson’s variable of function, wenyan (H) and baihua (L) were clearly differentiated with respect to functional domain. As
5The term ‘pre-modern China’ usually refers to the historical period before formation of the Republic of China in 1912.
Chen points out in Modern Chinese: Its history and sociolinguistics, for most of China’s history, wenyan has played the role of H variant as “the classical standard written language for literary, scholarly, and official purposes” (1999:68). Baihua, on the other hand, has “served all low‐culture functions such as transcriptions of Buddhist admonitions, scripts for folk stories, and plays” (Chen 1993:507). Moreover, as will be discussed in a subsequent section — 5.1 Chinese Historiography and Language Use — of the present paper, throughout most of China’s history, there have existed clear conventions of language use and domain — with respect to wenyan, in
particular.
Distinct conventions of language use and domain tend to facilitate establishment of an obvious system of prestige, as described by Ferguson’s second variable. The classic diglossic asymmetrical relationship of prestige between H and L can be observed quite clearly in Chen’s description of the Chinese language contact
situation in which “wenyan was considered refined and elegant, thus ideal for high‐
culture functions, while baihua was despised as coarse and vulgar, suitable only for low‐culture functions” (1999:69). As Snow points out, much of the value placed upon wenyan as the prestigious variant arises due to its link to a system of written examinations (科舉; keju) establishment during the Han dynasty (202 BCE‐220 CE) for the purpose of selection of government officials (2010a:126). The importance of the link between wenyan and its use in imperial examinations is highlighted further in Chen’s astute observation that it is no coincidence that “the abandonment of wenyan as the standard written language occurred in less that two decades after the abolition of the state examination system” (1999:68).67
The use of wenyan as the language of examination in the Imperial exams, and the importance of the system of examinations for the appointment of government office
6In The Reform and Abolition of the Traditional Chinese Examination System, Wolfgang Franke dates the official abolition of the system of Imperial Examinations to approximately 1905 (1972:69-71).
7Chen connects the ‘abandonment of wenyan as the standard written language’ with events occurring during and directly after the May 4th Movement (1999:74-75).
obviously served to institutionalize wenyan as the H variant. Of course, quite often, in a diglossic situation, variables of standardization and acquisition are concomitants of the institutionalization process. Promotion during the Qin dynasty (221 BCE‐206 BCE) of a unified, standardized Chinese script and an unrelenting sponsorship throughout the history of pre‐modern China of early — first millennium BCE — wenyan texts such as the Analects and Mencius as prototypical resources for Imperial examination preparation led to increased grammatical, lexical, and phonological distance between wenyan and baihua (Chen 1993:506‐509; Chen 1999:67‐68; Snow 2010a:126). Increased distance between the H and L variants fixes differences in acquisition, as well. As what Snow calls “the first mechanism by which diglossia was created in East Asia,” the ever‐widening gap between wenyan and vernacular Chinese through a process of isolation and fossilization of the former and continual evolution and transmutation of the latter solidified the diglossic disparate relationship of acquisition in which L is assimilated naturally in the home, while H must be learned formally at school (2010a:126‐127).
The distance between wenyan and baihua in China was made even greater by the fact that as a logographic — as opposed to phonographic — writing system wenyan was almost entirely divorced from the phonetic details of vernacular speech (Chen 1999:67). As Chen notes, the logographic nature — lack of direct association between sound and graphic forms — of wenyan gave it, “a degree of accessibility across space and time” and “insulated it from changes in the vernacular language”
(1999:68). As a result, Chen explains, wenyan was able to “serve as the medium whereby Chinese literary heritage was preserved and continued, and information could be spread across a land of great dialectal diversity” (ibid.). Consistent with Ferguson’s description of the diglossic variable of literary heritage, the unique characteristics of wenyan as a logographic writing system and its place in the
Imperial examinations and selection of government office process have enabled it to reside at the heart of “a sizable body of written literature” that is “held in high esteem by the speech community” (Ferguson 1959:31).
There is a final point of interest that is, perhaps, unique to the diglossic situation in China. It is an issue that relates to Ferguson’s variables of function and prestige and one that seems to highlight an interesting divergence between the diglossic
language communities — Arabic, Modern Greek, and Haitian Creole — studied by Ferguson and the Chinese case. In his investigation of the three aforementioned language communities, Ferguson found that often “the superiority of H is connected with religion” (1959:31). He offers examples for Greek, Haitian Creole, and Arabic, showing that the H variant is used for all written records of scripture — the Bible and the Koran, respectively. In his discussion of the Chinese diglossic language scenario, however, Chen notes, “baihua served all low‐culture functions such as transcriptions of Buddhist admonitions, and scripts for folk stories and plays”
(1999:69). This observation is echoed in Victor Mair’s “Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular in East Asia: The Making of National Languages” in which Mair explains that in contrast to the majority of pre‐modern Chinese literature which was written in Literary Sinitic — wenyan — “beginning in the medieval period, however, an undercurrent of written Vernacular Sinitic [baihuawen] started to develop”
(1994:707).
According to Mair, “the earliest instances of written VS [baihua] occur almost exclusively, certainly with absolute and unmistakable predominance, in Buddhist contexts” (1994:709). It seems the Chinese diglossic scenario, at least in the instance of the language of religious texts, is quite the opposite to Ferguson’s description of the Greek, Haitian Creole, and Arabic situations. Obviously, as Mair’s paper sets out to establish, the use of baihua in early Chinese Buddhist texts may be attributed to several different factors. One contributing factor which is of greatest relevance to the field of Translation Studies is the recognition that since early Chinese Buddhist texts — approximately 1st to 6th Century CE — were translated from Indic originals, it is likely that use of certain baihua elements in these translation “was in direct response to the linguistic features of the Indic (and perhaps Iranian and Tocharian) prototypes” (Mair 1994:710).
Although it is beyond both the aim and the scope of the present paper, it may prove fruitful in future research to investigate the influence of translation upon the
establishment, maintenance, and resolution of diglossic language communities. In fact, Mair hints at a possible direction for such research in his assertion that:
Implantation of Buddhism into the Chinese sociolinguistic body also served to elicit in an active way vernacular, colloquial, and dialectical elements that belonged properly to spoken Sinitic languages but that had been rejected by the indigenous textual tradition as vulgarisms (Mair 1994:710)
As Harold Schiffman points out in his discussion of diglossia as sociolinguistic situation, belief systems about language that are present within speech
communities — beliefs about origin myths, faults and virtues of given language varieties, and language taboos, for example — constitute one example of a social institution that may affect maintenance and transmission of language (1998:211). In other words, it seems translation, in the case of the language used in Chinese
Buddhist texts, created an opportunity for baihua, an early L variety of Chinese,8 to establish a written function for itself within the H‐L diglossic continuum. However, the stability of the baihua religious text functional niche was vulnerable to stress exerted upon it through its subordinate relationship to wenyan within the
asymmetrical diglossic system of prestige. According to Mair, Chinese Buddhist writing eventually evolved to more closely approximate H‐variety style.
Interestingly, Mair adds that this is particularly true for “texts that were composed by native authors and were not translated from non‐Sinitic languages” (1994:712).
Again, translation seems to play a unique role in the establishment, development, maintenance, and resolution of diglossia in China.9
8Gurevich (1985) has shown that baihua found in early Buddhist texts contained a significant amount of wenyan elements and, thus, cannot be considered a pure baihua form (quoted in Mair 1994:712). Mair refers to the early form of baihua as a ‘Buddhist Hybrid Sinitic’ (1994:712).
9Connections between translation and establishment, development, and maintenance of diglossia in China have been alluded to in the present section’s discussion of baihua use in early Buddhist texts. For the case of translation’s role in the resolution of diglossia in China, Chen (1993) presents a detailed discussion of the influence of translation of Western languages on the shaping of norms of modern written Chinese.
5.
Parody, Translation, and Chinese Diglossia
5.1 Chinese Historiography and Language Use
In a seminal work on the topic, Chinese Traditional Historiography, Charles Gardner explains, “historical composition in Chinese has evolved a considerable body of conventional diction which requires special study for complete comprehension”
(1961:80). In Ah Q Zhengzhuan, Lu Xun devotes most of the first two chapters of the book to the narrator’s first‐person narrative that outlines the myriad difficulties he encountered trying to fit Ah Q’s story and personal details to the conventions of traditional historiography. In “The Inescapable Predicament: The Narrator and His Discourse in ‘The True Story of Ah Q’,” Martin Huang explains, “In the introduction, Lu Xun is consciously playing the conventions of traditional historiography against those of traditional vernacular fiction” (1990:433). In other words, Lu Xun offers his readers a critical investigation of the internal workings of the relationship between H (wenyan) and L (baihua) in the diglossic language contact situation. In a
conventional, condescending tone, Lu Xun’s narrator discusses in detail the problems of finding within the historiographical tradition a proper title for Ah Q’s story. As Huang points out, by meticulously explaining “why none of the traditional categories of biography fits his own ‘biography’ of Ah Q,” the narrator (and Lu Xun)
“ridicules traditional historiography” (ibid.). In the end, according to Huang, the narrator “finds a ‘new’ variety of historiography by which to identify, hence to authenticate, his own narrative” (ibid.). Throughout the process, the asymmetry of the H‐L relationships of function, prestige, and literary heritage is foregrounded, and ultimately challenged.
It is important to remember that significant changes in Chinese historiography did not occur until the turn of the 20th century. Prior to that time, traditional Chinese historiography wrote political and military history in an annalsbiographic form (Wang 2001:16). This enabled historians to focus, across various biographies, upon