This book describes the development of Modern Chinese from the late nineteenth century to the 1990s.

Chinese Sociolinguistics examines the ways in which language contributes to shaping social, cultural, and ethnic identities in Greater China. This book is the first textbook to be exclusively devoted to the issues of language, society, and identity in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and overseas Chinese communities (the Greater China). The book includes topics on the role of language in Chinese culture; the linguistic indexing of socioeconomic class; dialects and regional language variation; the impacts of state policies; linguistic borrowings; bilingualism and bicultural identity; and language shift and attrition. The emergence of new forms of language as influenced by modern technologies and possible future developments is also discussed in this book. This book will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in Chinese sociolinguistics, particularly with a focus on language, identity, and society in Greater China. This book will also be of interest to members of the Chinese Language Teachers Association and the American Council of Teaching Foreign Languages (ACTFL).

This book deploys and develops the notion of voice in an investigation of China’s rapidly reshuffling society. The book is structured around two aspects of the voicing process in contemporary China: (1) stratification of voice, which addresses the stabilizing condition of voice; and (2) restratification of voice that draws attention to the dynamics of the system of which the order is reshuffling and not yet apparent. This structure allows us to unveil the hidden forces played out in the voice making process and to stratifying and re-stratifying process of contemporary Chinese society in which some people are making themselves heard whereas others are losing voice. Despite its importance and usefulness, voice has been under theorized in recent decades. The ambitions of this book therefore are to invest serious efforts in developing the notion and to position it in the center of the theoretical toolkits available to students and scholars within and outside sociolinguistics.

The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Linguistics offers a broad and comprehensive coverage of the entire field from a multi-disciplinary perspective. All chapters are contributed by leading scholars in their respective areas. This Handbook contains eight sections: history, languages and dialects, language contact, morphology, syntax, phonetics and phonology, socio-cultural aspects and neuro-psychological aspects. It provides not only a diachronic view of how languages evolve, but also a synchronic view of how languages in contact enrich each other by borrowing new words, calquing loan translation and even developing new syntactic structures. It also accompanies traditional linguistic studies of grammar and phonology with empirical evidence from psychology and neurocognitive sciences. In addition to research on the Chinese language and its major dialect groups, this handbook covers studies on sign languages and non-Chinese languages, such as the Austronesian languages spoken in Taiwan.

This book explores the history of the English language in China from the arrival of the first English-speaking traders in the early seventeenth century to the present. Kingsley Bolton brings together and examines a substantial body of historical, linguistic and sociolinguistic research on the description and analysis of English in Hong Kong and China. He uses early wordlists, satirical cartoons and data from journals and memoirs, as well as more conventional sources, to uncover the forgotten history of English in China and to show how contemporary Hong Kong English has its historical roots in Chinese pidgin English. The book also considers the varying status of English in mainland China over time, and recent developments since 1997. With its interdisciplinary perspective, the book will appeal not only to linguists, but to all those working in the fields of Asian studies and English studies, including those concerned with cultural and literary studies.

The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Linguistics offers a broad and comprehensive coverage of the entire field from a multi-disciplinary perspective. All chapters are contributed by leading scholars in their respective areas. This Handbook contains eight sections: history, languages and dialects, language contact, morphology, syntax, phonetics and phonology, socio-cultural aspects and neuro-psychological aspects. It provides not only a diachronic view of how languages evolve, but also a synchronic view of how languages in contact enrich each other by borrowing new words, calquing loan translation and even developing new syntactic structures. It also accompanies traditional linguistic studies of grammar and phonology with empirical evidence from psychology and neurocognitive sciences. In addition to research on the Chinese language and its major dialect groups, this handbook covers studies on sign languages and non-Chinese languages, such as the Austronesian languages spoken in Taiwan.

The past decade and a half has witnessed a great deal of renewed interest in the study of Chinese linguistics, not only in the traditional areas of philological studies and in theoretically oriented areas of syn chronic grammar and language change but also in the cultivation of new frontiers in related areas of the cognitive sciences. There is a significant increase in the number of students studying one area or another of the linguistic structure of Chinese in various linguistic programs in the United States, Europe, Australia and in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and other parts of Asia. Several new academic departments devoted to the study of linguistics have been established in Taiwan and Hong Kong in the past few years. The increasing research and study activities have also resulted in a number of national and international conferences, including the North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL), which has been held annually in the United States; the International Symposium on Chinese Languages and Linguistics (IsCLL), which has had its fourth meeting since it was launched by Academia Sinica in Taiwan in 1990; the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (lACL), created in Singapore in 1992 and now incorporated in Irvine, California, which has held its annual meetings at major institutions in Asia, Europe, and the US.