Southeast Asia’s Sinitic “voices”, in all their heterogeneity, are most easily perceived through a comparative analysis. It has been a true pleasure to capture in one volume the perspectives of so diverse a selection of active speakers, passive speakers, rememberers, academics, and consultants. Their stories of language contact and linguistic change, whether based on original fieldwork, archival research, or a combination of both, reveal the Sinophone in new and unexpected ways. No less exciting is the incorporation of rarely quoted sources in Chinese and Southeast Asian languages. In this volume, we have attempted to expand the field of Sinophone Studies, infuse it with texts that rethink the limits of its original scope, and provide some directions for future scholarship. When taken together, the chapters of this book lay some of the groundwork to diversify the Sinophone conceptionally, regionally, and in disciplinary terms. In particular, we have advocated for the appreciation of regional languages (
Language sits at the core of the scholarly intervention we propose. A focus on Southeast Asia, on account of its diversity and long contact history with the Sinitic heartlands, is critical to this endeavour. To appreciate the significance of language change, lexical borrowing, creolization, and plurilingualism seen among Chinese-descended Southeast Asians, we have insisted on examining the region’s Sinitic and Sinitic-influenced languages in their historical, social, and cultural contexts. The individual chapters provide concrete instances of the insights thus obtained. In general, the Sinitic languages from China’s southern provinces that made their way into the Nanyang have become intriguingly locale-specific over time. This has been shown in detail for Timor Hakka (Chapter 2), Cambodian Teochew (Chapter 3), and Penang Hokkien (Chapter 5), and is the case for numerous other varieties. Shaped by their new geographies and prolonged interaction with (other) local languages, Cambodian Teochew now differs significantly from Singapore Teochew, Penang Hokkien from Burmese Hokkien, and Timor Hakka from Malaysian Hakka. These varieties – many of which are critically endangered – tell intimate stories of regions, communities, and even families.
While the chapters of this volume differ in the specific voices and accents they foreground, they are held together by a number of connections. They all underline plurilingualism as a dominant force running through Southeast Asia’s Sinitic landscapes. They also instantiate the counterpull between low-status regional vernaculars – both Sinitic and Sinitic-influenced – and languages of high prestige, such as Mandarin and the official languages of Southeast Asia’s nation-states. To widen the range of voices encapsulated in this book, we have provided space for the hybrid, the creolized, and the marginalized. Due in part to their resistance to standardization, the region’s “non-Mandarin” Sinitic varieties have incorporated multiple tongues, including other Sinitic, local Southeast Asian, and European languages. In addition to lexical and grammatical convergence, many Southeast Asian cities – where people from different Sinitic backgrounds were clustered together – also became sites of koineization; the mixing of dialectal features.
Some of the vernaculars emanating from these contact histories assumed important communicative needs in Southeast Asia and beyond. These were typically Sinitic-influenced rather than Sinitic, such as Chinese Pidgin English and Bazaar Malay. Such predominantly spoken languages should be envisioned, simultaneously, as the products and catalysts of language contact and the vectors and donors of new vocabulary. Chinese Pidgin English, for example, offers concrete instances of the multidirectional lexical trajectories underpinning eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Sino-European trade, exemplified by such words as cumshaw ‘present, gratuity’ from Hokkien kam sia
This volume’s pan-Southeast Asian scope has allowed for comparative insights. A number of commonalities show up across the region. These include broadly shared words, such as
The parallel linguistic developments of Sinophone Southeast Asia can be fruitfully analysed through word histories. All localized Sinitic varieties acquired new words for previously unfamiliar concepts (expansive borrowing), in addition to concepts for which the corresponding inherited word was lost – if not deemed inadequate – over the generations (replacive borrowing). This explains, among many other things, the presence of loanwords from Portuguese, Indonesian, and Tetun in Timor Hakka, including kapoŋ ‘bonnet, hood’ from Portuguese capô or Tetun kapó and pasat ‘market’ from Indonesian pasar or Tetun basar (Chapter 2). Another way of designating new concepts was through processes of compounding and semantic extension. Some speakers of Cambodian Teochew, for example, use the locally invented term tek2–5kɔŋ33kue52
In the opposite direction, most of the larger Southeast Asian languages have been enriched by loanwords from regional Sinitic varieties, which have generally become marginalized in recent times. The study of Cambodian Teochew (Chapter 3), for example, illustrates how the prolonged presence of Teochew speakers in Cambodia has left a linguistic imprint on Khmer, the official language, through such borrowings as Khmer (ʔaa) koŋ កុ
In addition to these instances of direct borrowing, new concepts were often designated through loan translations, in which the elements of local Southeast Asian languages were rendered word for word in the recipient Sinitic languages. The Khmer word phlaɛɓə˞ ផ្លែបឺ
An equally insightful category are loan blends, which combine a Sinitic and a non-Sinitic element. Such constructions are quintessentially Sino-Southeast Asian. We may recall the Cambodian Teochew expression hɔu11ka11dɔu11 ‘to give someone a gift’, consisting of Teochew hɔu11
As can be expected, lexical borrowing chiefly took place in the domain of cultural vocabulary. The transmission of function words is relatively rare, but we do encounter some examples in Southeast Asia. Cambodian Teochew pi33 ‘from’, for example, goes back to Khmer pi: ពី in the same meaning. In many Sinitic varieties spoken in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, the word tapi ‘but’ is used in addition to – or instead of – inherited equivalents, including by the graduates of Mandarin-medium schools. In some Sinitic-influenced languages, by contrast, we find local words rearranged in a Sinitic pattern. Baba Malay and Bazaar Malay, for example, display such constructions as ari satu ‘Monday’, dia punya ‘his; her’, and diaorang ‘they’, which are modelled, respectively, after Hokkien pai-it
Another area for theoretical expansion lies within the notion of textuality itself. While the analysis of literary works is relatively commonplace in Sinophone Studies, we have called attention to texts of a more vernacular nature – encompassing the domains of theatre, popular printing, and language learning – as equally legitimate sources underpinning the rich and varied Sinitic and Sinitic-influenced landscapes of Southeast Asia. Interconnections between spoken and written language came to the fore in multiple chapters, raising questions about the extent to which this binary is tenable in the first place.
Upon comparing the volume’s chapters, a number of observations can be made regarding the graphic variation of Sinophone Southeast Asia, which provides rich illustrations of Sinitic writing beyond Mandarin and other more-or-less standardized varieties. Amidst this heterogeneity, two broader phenomena vie for attention: 1) competing systems of romanization, and 2) the use of Chinese characters (Sinographs) to transcribe colloquial and/or non-Sinitic words.
In the first category, we may call attention to romanizations based on non-Sinitic orthographies, such as the Indies-style romanization of Mandarin words like tjha (
In the second category, we find Chinese characters that have defied standardization. These include Sinographs used to transcribe Southeast Asian or European words, but also inherited words from Sinitic varieties that historically lacked standardized characters. We have seen, for instance, variation in Southern Min varieties between the characters
Here, again, a combination of the spoken and written word is essential to arrive at a complete picture. An exclusive focus on the script may obscure regional or non-Sinitic influences, especially if the words in question are written in characters selected to approximate their sound and meaning (phono-semantic matching). The regional origins of
Our focus on language has foregrounded the intimate contact between Southeast Asia’s Chinese communities and the region’s other ethnic groups, their languages, and their cultures. This topic has also proven popular in the field of Chinese-Malaysian (
The focus of this volume, however, has been on the region’s quickly disappearing historical varieties.1 The language practices it has highlighted – as well as many more that remain undocumented – are dying out under the weight of standardism, linguistic repression, and a lack of self-confidence within the communities. The contributors of this volume have responded in creative ways to the scarcity of primary sources on Southeast Asia’s Sinitic varieties. In addition to fieldwork, their research has benefitted from online dictionaries, Wikipedia pages in different Sinitic varieties, unpublished MA and PhD theses, academic exercises, UN reports, newspaper articles, and websites, apps, and Facebook groups used by the communities, in a multitude of languages. At the same time, this volume has made clear how much still needs to be done. This makes the recuperation of Southeast Asia’s marginalized Sinitic voices all the more urgent, as they provide key ingredients to reconceptualize the Sinophone in all its diversity. Between the minutiae of assorted language practices – many of which are only seen as peripherally “Chinese” – and more legitimized “texts” lies its true potential as a conceptually enriching framework.
Although the book’s chapters have only tangentially touched upon religious customs, this is an additional line of evidence in which the Sinophone comes to the fore in all its diversity, as emerged from some of the unpublished presentations and discussions held during the workshop.