(The original was printed in Guang Ming Daily, April,3,2016)
From ancient time to thepresent, Chinese language has been composed of dialect and common speech. Today’s Mandarin, which is the product of the communication among kinds of dialects, is still a mixture of dialect and common speech.
People talks a lot about Mandarin’s predecessor which is called Hua Xia common speech. On the other hand, ancient people had already been aware of the exist of dialects. That is an objective phenomenon, and can not be changed by people’s consciousness.
Although the definitions of dialect and common speech differ from each other, and the Han nation was scattered over the country in ancient time, there is no doubt that people could communicate with each other by a common language. The most striking evidence is that the ancient states could communicate mutually without translators.
The dialect plays a very important role in people’s languages. Language and dialect are inseparable. There is not a clear delimitation between dialect and common speech in Chinese language. The interactions happened all the time in their development. They all have written and spoken language, but the latter can not be unified like the former.
Chinese dialects are the product of history development. Plenty of ancient Chinese factors are reserved in dialects due to the imbalance of language development. So we need to research dialects documents to explore them.
Chinese dialect has gone through thousands of years in such a big country, so it is a tough work to depict and explain the developing clues of that. It may require hard labour for years. Since the 20th century, many scholars had researched Chinese dialects of all times. These research can be divided into two classes: the investigations of the past and present. But some relative problems are still unsolved.
As a national language project, the protection and research of dialects are increasingly valued by people.“The Project of Protecting Language Resource” was initiated in 2015, which brings us the hope and future.
