Vernacular Language Movement
Authors: Weng Jeffrey 
Published: October 2020

The English term ‘vernacular language’ is more capacious than any of its Chinese equivalents. When discussing writing, the term is usually equated with baihua (白话), a word that now refers to the standard written language, but only gained that sense starting in the 1890s with the rise of vernacular newspapers. When discussing speech, the term now refers primarily to northern varieties of speech on which baihua was based, particularly the standard language, which in English is usually referred to by the terms ‘Mandarin’ or ‘Mandarin Chinese,’ which equates to putonghua (普通话 common speech) in the mainland, guoyu (国语 national language) in Taiwan, and huayu (华语 Chinese language) in Singapore. In these senses, ‘vernacular’ is defined in opposition to ‘classical’ or ‘literary,’ as in Classical or Literary Chinese (now usually called wenyan文言), a primarily written medium whose norms were established in the Spring and Autumn period (771–476 bce) and the Han dynasty (206 bce–220 ce). As the medium of the Confucian canon, the civil examination system, and the imperial bureaucracy, wenyan remained the prestige form of writing for roughly two thousand years until the end of the 19th century. On the other hand, when referring to speech, the vernacular language movement (baihua yundong白话运动) went hand in hand with the national language movement (guoyu yundong国语运动). This movement sought to create a standard spoken language to unify a polyglot Chinese nation that spoke hundreds of mutually unintelligible ‘speeches of a locality’ (fangyan方言). Though they are tantamount to distinct languages, these local speech varieties are usually called “dialects” in English in an acknowledgement of China’s cultural unity, though some advocate the term “topolect” as a more neutral equivalent of fangyan. Thus, the ‘vernacular’ represents an intellectual and political agenda for Chinese intellectuals who saw the ‘classical’ and ‘local’ as impediments to literacy, education, and thus modernization. Starting in the early 20th century, and spurred from 1919 onwards by the May Fourth Movement, progressive intellectuals advocated the vernacular in writing and in speech, arguing that it was closer to the living language of the people and thus appropriate for a modern nation in which being able to read was a necessity not just for a privileged few, but rather for the great bulk of the population. Baihua, which had simply meant ‘local speech’ until the 1890s, was redefined as the writing style found in ‘vernacular’ novels (xiaoshuo小说) of the past few centuries, which themselves were elevated in status from works of popular entertainment to literary classics. Guoyu, which during the Qing dynasty had referred to the Manchu language, was also redefined—under the influence of the Japanese neologism kokugo (国語)—as the nation’s language. The multiplicity of the Chinese terms for different aspects of the language in China thus emerged from the polemics of reform: baihua was not wenyan, guoyu was not fangyan. But the distinction between the components of each dichotomy was somewhat forced, given that baihua retained many wenyan expressions and guoyu incorporated elements of fangyan. While these ways of thinking about language have drawn legitimate scholarly criticism, they have become the conventional wisdom in contemporary China. Indeed, the revolution in the culture and practice of language in China may represent one of the largest such social transformations in history: Mandarin is now the language with the greatest number of speakers on the planet.