主 题：Globalization of Chinese: Variation in the Spread of the Standard

报告人：周明朗 博士（〖美国〗马里兰大学）

时  间：2014年6月3日（周二）18:00-19:30

地  点：上外虹口校区图书馆606报告厅

语  言：中文

提  要：

The globalization of Chinese is characterized by three key features: 1) the shift from Chinese dialects to Putonghua (Mandarin) in Chinese diaspora communities all over the world, 2) the gradual adoption of Putonghua, Pinyin Romanization, and simplified Chinese characters as the standard in Chinese as foreign language education globally, and 3) China’s establishment of Confucius institutes throughout the world. The globalization of English shows that the King’s English has been nativized as world Englishesin the last three centuries. Similarly, the spread ofPutonghua has entailed its vernacularization in China in the last two decades, such as Shanghai Putonghua and Hong Kong Putonghua.Thus, I raise the following questions for the Chinese linguistic community to consider.

Will the vernacularization that happened to English also happen to Putonghua in the globalization of Chinese? It is not normally expected that the promotion of the standard language would lead to its vernacularization. How are linguistic variation and interlanguage related in language spread? What does the phenomenon of variation in standardization in linguistic globalization mean to linguistic theory?

To answer these questions and more, I propose that the Chinese linguistic community considerfourresponses to the globalization: 1) to develop theoretically-oriented methods in collecting data on vernacularized Putonghua in Chinese diaspora communities and on Putonghua L2 interlanguage in Chinese L2 communities in every continent, 2) to analyze such data as linguistic variation across SLA and sociolinguistics in terms of linguistic theory, 3) to develop theories to account for the interface among language, mind, and community,and 4) build a global network of scholars and a scholarly platform to study the globalization of Chinese.

I argue that, to successfully respond to the globalization of Chinese, we should make effort to investigate the relationship between linguistic variation and interlanguage across the fault line between biolinguistics and sociolinguistics and encourage cross-fertilization of methods across linguistics, such as promoting the inclusion of sociolinguistic approaches to interlanguage, SLA approaches to variation, and theoretical linguistic approaches to the interface of variation and interlanguage. The analysis of global Chinese data in this hybrid approach may bear directly on linguistic theory in defining the boundaries of dialects and languages on the basis of measurements of linguistic variability, in addition to defining them on a political, social, and/or cultural basis, and may eventually lead to a unified account of the interface among language, mind, and community.

报告人简介：周明朗，美国马里兰大学（科里奇帕克分校）东亚语言与文化系中文项目主任，副教授（终身教职），密歇根州立大学博士，先后就职于俄勒冈大学、科罗拉多大学、迪金森学院、马里兰大学，北京语言大学客座教授、新疆师范大学双语教育研究中心客座研究员，是语言政策研究领域的著名华人学者，发表有关语言政策研究的成果50余项目，主要包括：Globalization and One Hundred Years of Language Planning in Modern China（2014）；Changing Models of Nation State Building and Language Education for Minorities in Contemporary China（2009）；Affirmative Action in China and the U. S.: A Dialogue on Inequality and Minority Education（2009）；Multilingualism in China: The Politics of Writing Reforms for Minority Languages 1949–2002（2003）等等。