University of Heidelberg

Research Program

Language belongs to the basic infrastructure of processes of cultural contact and transfer and thus plays a crucial role in all aspects of the shifting asymmetrical flows which form the object of the Cluster’s research – by supporting or hindering them, facilitating or distorting them. The main contribution of the present project to the Cluster’s research agenda consists of shifting the focus on language itself as the very object of cultural transfer and concentrating on the flow of linguistic knowledge between cultures.

Within the wide field thus defined, the project deals with a phenomenon of paramount importance for pre-modern cultures, the institutionalization and evolution of academic, literary linguistic varieties (“classical” languages) – and focuses specifically on the case of Literary Chinese and its career as a high prestige language in pre-modern East Asia.

Over the course of the Han dynasty (traditional dates 202 BC – AD 220) Literary Chinese emerged as a linguistic variety distinct from both Ancient Chinese (or Old Chinese) and spoken Chinese (vernacular). By the mid second century AD it was bound to a core corpus of canonical texts and it acquired a well defined grammatical and lexical basis and a standardized system of writing. A language of culture and administration in the Chinese empires through the centuries, Literary Chinese has spread very early to neighboring cultures (Japan, Korea, Vietnam), where it has been adopted and has served a similar purpose until modern times. Concretely, the project focuses on various aspects of the resulting flows of a complex array of institutions, practices, and objects associated with the study of this linguistic variety in its original setting, such as textbooks, learning aids, lexica, canonical texts, curricula, academic institutions (the imperial academy and later on private academies) and the system of imperial examinations. It also tackles the dynamics of these flows, which have likewise been complex, involving waves on intensive direct contact associated with such diverse phenomena as the spread of Buddhism or the export of Neo-Confucian ethics, as well as long periods of independent evolution.

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