Studies in Colloquial Chinese and Its History: Dialect and Text presents cutting-edge research into issues regarding prestige colloquial languages in China in their spoken forms and as well as their relationship to written forms and the colloquial literary language. These include the standard regional languages and prestige dialects of the past, the influence of historical forms of spoken Chinese on written Chinese, the history of guānhuà and the history of báihuà, proto-dialects and supra-regional common languages (koines), and their relationship to spoken dialects. The various studies in this collection focus on the dialect groups with the most substantial written tradition, including Mandarin, Wu, Min, and Cantonese, in north, central and eastern coastal, and southern China respectively. The contributors explore the histories of these dialects in their written and spoken forms, presenting a variegated view of the history and development of the regional forms, including their evolution and influence. This edited volume expands our understanding of the underlying factors in the formation of supra-regional common languages in China, and the written forms to which they gave rise. It broadens our understanding of the evolution of written and spoken forms of Chinese from a comparative perspective, revealing the interrelationships of various areal forms of Chinese and historical koines in China.
Richard VanNess Simmons is a professor in the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong, and director of the Chinese Language Center; he is also professor emeritus at Rutgers University. His research focuses on the history, geography, and relationships of Mandarin and the Chinese dialects. He has done extensive fieldwork investigating and mapping China’s Mandarin and Wu dialects. His publications include Shanghainese-English/English-Shanghainese Dictionary & Phrasebook (2011), Chinese Dialect Geography: Distinguishing Mandarin and Wu in Their Boundary Region (2006), Chinese Dialect Classification: Theory and Practice (1999 and 2011), Issues in Chinese Dialect Description and Classification (1999), and The Sōushén hòujì: Latter Notes on Collected Spirit Phenomena Attributed to Táo Yuānmíng (365–427), an annotated translation (2022).
