This panel starts with the history of Mandarin dialects, the most widely spoken variety of Chinese. Richard VanNess Simmons’s paper explores the Mandarin spoken in Beijing before the Manchu conquest in the seventeenth century. He challenges the general view that the Ming and Qing constitute essentially one period in Mandarin history (Chen 1999: 10-11, Coblin 2000). Instead, he identifies three stages in the evolution of Beijing Mandarin in that period: one, from the start of its role as national capital in 1421 to the end of the Ming; two from the initiation of Manchu rule through the mid eighteenth century; and three, into and beyond the nineteenth century, which is the period when the city’s language was most clearly described by Western witnesses. Simmons’s discussion focuses on the end of the first stage into the beginning of the second, from the Mandarin that Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) used in Beijing after arriving there in 1601, to the dialect encountered by the Manchu’s after they seized the capital.

Fast forward to the nineteenth-century Min dialects, the most widely used for Church Romanization, Sixing Chen examines three translations of Aesop’s Fables to rethink the so-called “localization” in rendering Western literature into regional dialects. When translation flows from the linguistic center to the periphery in the late Qing — from Classical Chinese (H variety) to local dialects (L variety) — the process often reveals a form of incomplete localization: the retention of certain lexical from the H variety. This incomplete localization echoes the translation principles of vernacular Bibles: maintaining consistency in terms while ensuring the language remains intelligible to the masses. Core religious terms such as “God” remain consistent across dialect versions, reflecting the missionaries’ vision for written vernacular Chinese within the Chinese linguistic landscape.

Moving to the early twentieth-century Canton, where the Yue dialects frequently interacted with foreign languages, Yuqing Liu analyzes the appropriation of pidgin in two novels by Jianren Wu, a well-known Cantonese novelist. She argues that Wu’s novels demonstrate a significant transformation in the meaning of “pidgin,” from denoting a non-standard form of English to one that implies English spoken so proficiently that it poses a threat to the speakers’ national identity. Wu’s critique of the oral focus of pidgin English highlights the hierarchy between speaking and writing and serves as an attempt to restore the boundary between scholar-officials and merchants. By situating Wu’s multilingual novels within broader discourses on language, modernity, and nationalism, this paper reveals how linguistic anxieties in early twentieth-century China reflected deeper social and political tensions, highlighting the overlooked role of pidgin in shaping cultural identity in Chinese literature.

Back in contemporary times, Hunan is a unique linguistic niche characterized by complex language contact situations between Southwestern Mandarin and various other Chinese and non-Chinese varieties. This includes near-relative contact (Xiang, Gan, Kejia), distant-relative contact (Tujia, Waxiang), and non-relative contact (Kam-Dong, Xong, Biao Mien), each of which is predicted to produce different structural outcomes (Millar 2016; Braunmuller 2008). Robert Marcelo Sevilla examines the structural results of these contacts, including dialect leveling, grammatical hybridization, and structural convergence in Xiang, Tujia, and Xong respectively, within the context of population movements outlined in Perdue (1987), which finds that these movements and the resulting contact scenarios are a direct result of government policies which took place from the 17th century. He advocates for the establishment of Hunanese linguistics as a distinct field of study within the broader scope of Sinology and Chinese linguistics.

Instead of focusing solely on linguistic or literary studies, this panel offers an interdisciplinary discussion of various Chinese dialects. To foster a productive dialogue, Professor Simmons, the presider, will conclude the session with a 15-minute discussion, posing questions on multilingualism in China to both the panelists and the audience.