ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Inventing Ethnicity: Dialect Atlases and Language Surveys in Modern China, 1925-1950

• In Event: New Insights in the History of Chinese Science 2

English Abstract

This paper examines how early twentieth-century dialect atlases, language surveys, and acoustic measurements of speech constructed new forms of ethnic knowledge during a period of drastic political and epistemic transformation. Between the 1920s and 1940s, Chinese linguists actively adapted experimental methods developed in Europe and Japanese ethnographic research in Manchuria to create new categories of ethnicity based on speech sounds. Framed as neutral documentation of regional speech, dialectological surveys produced visual and acoustic representations (such as dialect atlases, phonetic tracings, and statistical tables) that reconfigured relationships between speech, literacy, and group identity.
Drawing on survey manuals, field journals, and early dialect atlases, this paper shows how language surveys rationalized cultural and linguistic differences at a moment when the boundaries of "ethnic group" were still fluid and contested. Rather than viewing ethnicity as a preexisting cultural or biological category, I argue that dialectology and speech science transformed earlier racial epistemologies into a new discourse of "ethnicity" that nonetheless remained subordinated to a unified national subject. In this framework, measurable differences in speech were rendered secondary to a civilizational ideal grounded in a shared written script, allowing racial hierarchies to persist under the guise of ethnic equality. In conclusion, by situating Republican-era dialectology within a global history of language sciences and surveys, the paper highlights how plural scientific worlds, competing classificatory regimes, and contested truths intersected in the making and remaking of racial and ethnic knowledge in modern China.

Author

• Qi Hong, University of Toronto