Romanizing Southern Mĭn: Missionaries and the promotion of written Chinese vernaculars
This chapter analyzes the promotion of written vernaculars in southeastern China by Western missionaries during the late nineteenth century. For example, in the city of Xiamen, the missionaries' ideological support of vernacular literacy was translated into an ambitious project of teaching an alphabetic orthography of the regional vernacular to local illiterates. The promotion of written vernaculars by missionaries was a strategy that radically broke with Chinese cultural conventions. The analysis of the language planning strategies and the underlying language ideologies is based on a close reading of missionary writings such as mission journals, letters, and prefaces to dictionaries. The chapter concludes that missionary language planning, despite great successes during its period of greatest application, only left a small historical legacy. Moreover, it is shown that outsider groups such as missionaries played an important role as early promoters and users of written vernaculars in China.
