On the History of Chinese Dialect Partition & Its Methods
Li Lan
Chinese Journal of Language Policy and Planning ›› 2018, Vol. 3 ›› Issue (2) : 38-49.
On the History of Chinese Dialect Partition & Its Methods
The paper discusses the issues of Chinese dialect partition from seven aspects. Section One presents some common terminologies regarding Chinese dialect partition and its debate. Section Two then identifies the complexity and challenges of Chinese in dialect partition. Section Three summarizes the work of Chinese dialect partition between 1912 and 1949 during the period of the Republican China, whereas Section Four presents the partition work in 1950s and Section Five the partition work in the 1987 version of Chinese Language Atlas. In Section Six, a comparison of six means of dialect partition in Hunan province is made. It indicates that the six methods have encompassed all the methods being used today and that the results are quite similar though the sources of data collection are different. It is thus concluded that the different methods all bear a large degree of validity. In the last section, the author further presents the views regarding the use of mathematical statistics, of uniform standard of partition, and of Swadesh 207 method of classification for Chinese dialect partition.
Chinese dialects / dialect partition / partition methods / partition principles / partition criteria
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