The language of Chaozhou songbooks

In the pre-modern era, women in the Chaoshan region of southeastern China had a tradition of learning and performing long narrative songs. From the mid-1800s into the mid-1900s these songs were widely produced by local publishing houses in inexpensive woodblock print books called Teochew songbooks (Chaozhou gece 潮州歌册). These song texts made considerable use of the Teochew language. This paper discusses the history of Teochew songs and songbook publishing, and then examines the language used in one typical songbook, The Case of Haimen (Haimen An 海门案). The paper suggests that the use of different language varieties in the songbook texts is best viewed as a translanguaging phenomenon, as the songbook authors fluidly drew on different linguistic resources and integrated them into a creative genre with its own style, rather than keeping varieties separate for different functions (unlike some other pre-modern texts that use regional Chinese languages). The paper also argues that while the variety of Teochew used in the text has a poetic style which differs in some ways from spoken Teochew, when compared to other pre-modern texts that used regional Chinese languages, the language of the songbooks is relatively close to the norms of spoken Teochew. Finally, the paper argues that in many ways Teochew songbooks are quite typical of pre-modern Chinese texts that use regional languages; in fact, Teochew songbooks exhibit almost all of the distinguishing characteristics commonly found in such texts. In the pre-modern era, women in the Chaoshan region of southeastern China had a tradition of learning and performing long narrative songs. From the mid-1800s into the mid-1900s these songs were widely produced by local publishing houses in inexpensive woodblock print books called Teochew songbooks (Chaozhou gece) that made considerable use of the Teochew language.

Duke Scholars

Author Donald Snow DKU Faculty