China’s lost language: the vernacular of Northeast Asia under Inner Asian rule, c. 1000–1644

• Applicant: Mårten Söderblom Saarela, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages ; Asian Studies
• Term: from 2018 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 403467253

This project investigates a kind of vernacular Chinese, strongly influenced by Inner Asianlanguages, and its use in government documents and books in continental Northeast Asiaduring and after Mongol Yuan rule (1279–1368). Scholars have long suspected that a so-called “Northern Chinese language” (Ch. Han’er yanyu 漢兒言語) existed in early second millennium North China as a common language among Chinese, Khitans, and Jurchens, but the issue has to date not been the subject of a full-length historical study. Thanks to a number of recent detailed articles and the discovery of new sources, it is now possible to subject the “Northern Chinese language” to a comprehensive historical investigation. The project will proceed from the “Northern Chinese language” documents themselves. By considering their authorship, purpose, audience, circulation, and function, the project will determine what historical factors brought the language into the written record and why it subsequently disappeared.The history of the “Northern Chinese language” is important because of its ethnically neutral character and the radical break that it represents with classical Chinese, the dominant written medium during the cosmopolitan first millennium CE. Unlike the so-called “Mandarin” or “official speech” (Ch. guanhua 官話) that eventually became China’s national language, the “Northern Chinese language” was neither associated primarily with the highly educated, nor with a specific ethnos. The “Northern Chinese language” was not, like Mandarin, bookish. On the contrary, it was popular and inter-ethnic.As such, the “Northern Chinese language” represents a road toward vernacularization that was ultimately not followed in Northeast Asia. Whereas modern national languages appeared in writing at the expense of the previously shared classical Chinese, the “Northern Chinese language,” for a time, appeared as the common language of a new transnational written culture. Its study, then, will show that the development of independent and at times antagonistic national languages was not the only possible outcome of the displacement of classical Chinese.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants