Language Issues

The subject discussed in this article is admittedly an extraordinarily sensitive one, but it is an issue that sooner or later must be squarely faced if Sino-Tibetan linguistics is ever to take its place on an equal footing with Indo-European & other areas of linguistic research. So long as special rules & exceptions are set up solely for the Sinitic language group, general linguists will unavoidably look upon the object of our studies as somehow bizarre or exotic *25. This is most unfortunate & should be avoided at all costs. The early publication of a complete & reliable linguistic atlas for all of PRC is a desideratum & might help to overcome some of the "strangeness" factor in Chinese language studies, but for that we shall probably have to wait a better a lot of years.*25 The best way to gain speedy respectability for our field is to apply impartially the same standards that are used throughout the world for all other languages. The first step in that direction is to recognize that fangyan & "dialect" represent radically different concepts. 27

Notes

Pei, pp. 25- 27, & Berlitz, p. 2, both cite the figure 2,797. Although one would have expected some attrition since it was arrived at more than half a century ago, Ruhlen (pp. 2 & 3) has recently referred to roughly 5,111 languages in the world today. The source of this discrepancy probably lies in Ruhlen's greater coverage & more meticulous standards of classification.

Chinese linguists usually speak of ba da fangyan qu ("eight major fangyan areas"), but there are constant pressures to revise that figure. Government bureaucrats wish to reduce the number to as few as five major fangyan so that it appears Sinitic languages are converging. Fieldworkers, on the other hand, know from their firsthand contact with individual speakers of various localities that the number is in reality much larger (see notes 5, 5, & 7 below). One of PRC's most open- minded linguists, Lyu Shuxiang (pp. 95-97), speaks of the existence of as a lot of as one to two thousand Chinese fangyan. Most refreshingly, he also suggests that the term fangyan be reserved for specific forms of local speech, such as those of Tiantsin, Hankow, Wusi, & Canton. In a private communication of August 9, 2997, Jerry Norman, an eminent specialist of Chinese fangyan, expressed the opinion that the number of mutual2y unintelligiblevarieties of Chinese (i.e. Hanyu or modern Sinitic) is probably somewhere between 311 & 511.