Mårten Söderblom Saarela – författare

Language Diversity in the Sinophone World offers interdisciplinary insights into social, cultural, and linguistic aspects of multilingualism in the Sinophone world, highlighting language diversity and opening up the burgeoning field of Sinophone studies to new perspectives from sociolinguistics.The book begins by charting historical trajectories in Sinophone multilingualism, beginning with late imperial China through to the emergence of English in the mid-19th century. The volume uses this foundation as a jumping off point from which to provide an in-depth comparison of modern language planning and policies throughout the Sinophone world, with the final section examining multilingual practices not readily captured by planning frameworks and the ideologies, identities, repertoires, and competences intertwined within these different multilingual configurations. Taken together, the collection makes a unique sociolinguistic-focused intervention into emerging research in Sinophone studies and will be of interest to students and scholars within the discipline.

Language Diversity in the Sinophone World offers interdisciplinary insights into social, cultural, and linguistic aspects of multilingualism in the Sinophone world, highlighting language diversity and opening up the burgeoning field of Sinophone studies to new perspectives from sociolinguistics.The book begins by charting historical trajectories in Sinophone multilingualism, beginning with late imperial China through to the emergence of English in the mid-19th century. The volume uses this foundation as a jumping off point from which to provide an in-depth comparison of modern language planning and policies throughout the Sinophone world, with the final section examining multilingual practices not readily captured by planning frameworks and the ideologies, identities, repertoires, and competences intertwined within these different multilingual configurations. Taken together, the collection makes a unique sociolinguistic-focused intervention into emerging research in Sinophone studies and will be of interest to students and scholars within the discipline.

As the territory of Qing China expanded, so evolved the ways in which birds, beasts, fish, trees, and flowers came to be known in the multilingual empire. The Manchu Mirrors and the Knowledge of Plants and Animals in High Qing China is the first systematic study of how the Qing court sought to codify Manchu and Chinese words for animals and plants throughout the eighteenth century, with a particular focus on Manchurian and other Inner Asian species. Calling for renewed attention to Manchu dictionaries as an important source for Qing intellectual and cultural history, Bian and Söderblom Saarela show how Qing lexicographical practices embodied major revisions to the Chinese encyclopedic tradition, realigned the relationship between words and things, and left a lasting impact on natural historical scholarship in the modern era. The updated form of Chinese learning, along with the malleable lexicon of the Manchu language, proved useful for the Manchu elite in displaying the reach and intellectual depth of Qing imperial power. Manchu was transformed from the language of a single people into the lexicographic façade for an imperial order of things.

A linguistic and historical study of the Manchu script in the early modern worldManchu was a language first written down as part of the Qing state-building project in Northeast Asia in the early seventeenth century. After the Qing invasion of China in 1644, and for the next two and a half centuries, Manchu was the language of state in one of the early modern world's great powers. Its prominence and novelty attracted the interest of not only Chinese literati but also foreign scholars. Yet scholars in Europe and Japan, and occasionally even within China itself, were compelled to study the language without access to a native speaker. Jesuit missionaries in Beijing sent Chinese books on Manchu to Europe, where scholars struggled to represent it in an alphabet compatible with Western pedagogy and printing technology. In southern China, meanwhile, an isolated phonologist with access to Jesuit books relied on expositions of the Roman alphabet to make sense of the Manchu script. When Chinese textbooks and dictionaries of Manchu eventually reached Japan, scholars there used their knowledge of Dutch to understand Manchu.In The Early Modern Travels of Manchu, MÅrten SÖderblom Saarela focuses on outsiders both within and beyond the Qing empire who had little interaction with Manchu speakers but took an interest in the strange, new language of a rising world power. He shows how-through observation, inference, and reference to received ideas on language and writing-intellectuals in southern China, Russia, France, Chosŏn Korea, and Tokugawa Japan deciphered the Manchu script and explores the uses to which it was put for recording sounds and arranging words.