On October 16, professor Tang Xianqing came to School of Humanities in Southwest Jiaotong University with an academic lecture named“Areal Linguistics in Language Research——taking the districts of Hunan, Guizhou and Guangxi for example”. The lecture was hosted by Mr. Huangyang. Teachers and students showed a warm welcome to professor Tang.

The lecture started with professor Tang’s research about taking national languages and foreign languages into consideration on the foundation of standard Chinese, dialects and ancient Chinese. And then, professor Tang had introduced areal linguistics through the case of Zhu Xi and Zhou Libo.

Professor Tang had pointed out that the object of areal linguistics is language districts. The main concerns are the similarities and diffusion in shared features of languages and dialects in a certain area. The generation of areal linguistic is relevant to limitations of historical comparative linguistics. There are three points in establishment of areal linguistics. The first one is language districts must begeographically adjacent. The second one is some languages or dialects in a language district had shared areal features. The last one is the similarities existed in several languages in a district are based on language contact.

Subsequently, professor Tang had showed the core and periphery in language research from the view of areal linguistics. The language districts of Hunan, Guizhou and Guangxi have great potential in research. It broke the“single-language” model and set up a inter-regional form in language comparison. Besides, it enriched the examples on language contact, and helped to protect endangered languages in this area.

Finally, professor Tang had discussed with students about some language questions. Everyone had benefited from this excellent lecture.