On why re-examining our “dialects” is about resisting hierarchies, opposing discrimination, and pursuing linguistic justice, rather than cultural “orthodoxy”.
This is a translation of my blog post originally written in Chinese (the version I posted on Douban was featured in the website’s weekly newsletter). Glossary: Zhongyuan Mandarin is a variety of Mandarin Chinese spoken in Henan and parts of Shaanxi, Shanxi, Gansu, Hebei, Jiangsu, Xinjiang, and Shandong. It’s sometimes known as Henanhua.
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Like many people from the Zhongyuan Mandarin-speaking region, I grew up internalizing a hierarchical linguistic imagination of Henanhua (I’m not from Henan, but I use Henanhua here interchangeably with Zhongyuan Mandarin) as “rural,” “uncultured,” “unsophisticated”. Sometimes, this hierarchy isn’t just imagined; it manifests as real discrimination in everyday life. I’ll always remember our family’s first trip to Beijing when I was around ten years old. On the subway, my mother asked a woman in Henanhua: “Which stop for the Beijing Book Building?” The woman burst out laughing at my mom’s accent. Unpleasant encounters like this are probably not common at all: most people wouldn’t be so blunt. But this incident stayed with me for decades; it was my very first impression of Beijing.
I also internalized this stigmatization myself. My high school Chinese teacher couldn’t speak Putonghua (standard Mandarin); he would read to us Xu Zhimo’s Farewell Again to Cambridge in Henanhua. Later, when I was in university, I turned this anecdote into a sort of comic sketch: I would imitate him reciting the poem in Henanhua in our dormitory entertainment session, and everyone would laugh. It was not until when I studied in Europe did I realize what was behind the comedic effect. When I told this story to a French friend, who spoke very good Chinese, and when she heard the Henanhua version of the poem, she didn’t find it funny at all, nor strange in any way. That made me realize that the comedic effect we attach to poetry read in Henanhua – the contrast between a “rural” dialect and a “refined” art form – is a social construction.
And this construction is in fact relatively recent. Its direct roots probably lie in the way China, since the reform and opening-up, has integrated into global capitalism in an uneven and spatially hierarchical way, which in turn deepened regional disparities. The Pearl River Delta and Yangtze River Delta regions achieved rapid growth through FDI and export-oriented manufacturing, while the central and western regions mainly supplied cheap labor for these industries. This uneven integration produced a whole series of imaginaries about “backward” and “advanced”, “urban” and “rural”, spanning from economics to culture. Mandarin hegemony does exist everywhere, but the cultural imaginations attached to dialects and languages differ. For instance, Wu languages are endangered in some places (precisely those hubs of export-oriented manufacturing that have drawn large numbers of migrant workers from the interior), but Wu itself has not been stigmatized the same way Henanhua has. Henanhua speaking regions have played a different role in the economic structure: at least in the first decades of post-reform growth, its primary role was to supply cheap labour for coastal regions.
When I began to re-examine my dialect, I realized that although I can speak Zhongyuan Mandarin, most of the time I’m really just speaking Putonghua or standardized Mandarin with the intonation of Zhongyuan Mandarin. Many everyday words that don’t belong to the standardized language – I can understand them, but don’t actively use them myself. Among the older generation in my hometown, the moon is 月明地儿 (“the bright thing in the sky at night”?), the sun is 天天地儿 (“the thing that makes day”?), morning is 清起来 (“when it gets clear”?), evening is 黑家 (“when it turns dark”), and yesterday is yan (夜？)门儿 (“a night before”?). Behind such vocabulary lies a whole non-standard, sensory knowledge system. Its disappearance is not only the result of the economic processes I mentioned earlier, but also of modernization’s drive toward homogenization and standardization: the erosion of vernacular epistemologies, the disappearance of the semantic worlds closely intertwined with nature and everyday life. Modern society demands a unified “standard language” — the language of education, of examinations, and of scholarship. The language I use to write this blog post. But how about the so-called 土话 (“rural, native, or rustic tongues”), the words that express feelings and perceptions in alternative ways?
With the rise of social media, there seems to be a kind of revival of dialects. In decentralized, grassroots content production, dialects seem more visible than in traditional media. The artistic use of Sichuanese, in particular, has become extremely popular and has a strong presence in popular culture (why that is, is another topic). Recently, I’ve really enjoyed watching a Bilibili channel that talks about Henanhua in Henanhua. I’ve learned quite a few interesting things from it — for example, how to write certain everyday words whose written form I never knew, or how some so-called “tuhua” expressions can actually be found abundantly in classical literature.
However, I’ve also noticed that content about Zhongyuan (the Central Plain, often considered the “cradle” of Chinese civilization) culture easily falls into the trap of orthodoxism, marked by a strong sense of cultural conservatism. The narrative often goes like this: Zhongyuan Mandarin is the true orthodox form of Chinese culture — it has always been the “elegant speech”(雅言, or the language used in classical literature), the “official tongue” (官话, used in the imperial bureaucratic system), the “reading pronunciation” (读书音, the phonological standard used to read out classical literature).
I find this kind of dialect revivalism off-putting. It shifts the project of rethinking Henanhua away from resisting linguistic hierarchies rooted in socioeconomic inequality, toward constructing another hierarchy based on cultural orthodoxy. Sometimes, it claims to oppose certain forms of “southern” linguistic ethnonationalism that dismiss northern accents as “barbarized Chinese” (胡化汉语, suggesting that northern accents have been influenced by nomadic or non-Chinese cultures) yet it ends up reproducing the same logic. Even though these linguistic activisms in a way aim to challenge the Putonghua hegemony, their claim to “orthodoxical status” risks reproducing a fascist idea of “cultural revival” – the pursuit of purity and the desire to eliminate foreignness or impurity.
That should not be our starting point or end point in rethinking Zhongyuan Mandarin. Our goal should be to resist stigmatization, to oppose the use of language as a tool of social discrimination, and to respect the diversity that has always shaped our linguistic world. Any language or dialect can be poetic: not because it was once approved by elites or emperors in history, but because it forms part of how we live, how we connect to our families, how we express our feelings. For me, culture is not a “heritage,” not something fixed and preserved from the past. It is the way we live. As long as someone speaks it, as long as someone writes poetry in it, it is our living culture.
Chenchen Zhang 