Jeffrey Weng

National Taiwan University, Dept. of Sociology, Faculty Member

University of California, Berkeley, Sociology, Graduate Student

Stanford University, Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Post-Doc

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I am Assistant Professor of Sociology at National Taiwan University. My research centers on the politics of language, race, and nation in China.
Supervisors: John Lie, Mara Loveman, Wen-hsin Yeh, and Pamela Crossley
Address: Berkeley, California, United States

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End of an Era: Transforming Language and Society in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, c. 1870-1950

European Journal of Sociology, 2020

Scholars have generally taken a "diffusionist" view of the rise of national standard languages-th... more Scholars have generally taken a "diffusionist" view of the rise of national standard languages-the state pushes for the wider adoption of such languages, and other forces (principally economic modernization) facilitate its diffusion. But such a view is too mechanistic and Eurocentric, and an examination of other, less-familiar cases lends itself to a revised interpretation. Amid Western imperialism and the rise of nationalism in East Asia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a massive shift in language practices took place between about 1870 and 1950, as regional hegemony shifted from China to Japan. Bound for two millennia by their common use of Classical Chinese, elite literati in China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam all moved away from that abstruse lingua franca and turned to the creation of new national vernaculars. I argue for a more "integrationist" perspective: language nationalization was a state-led and top-down process directed at remaking society.

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Uneasy companions: language and human collectivities in the remaking of Chinese society in the early twentieth century

Theory and Society, 2020

How we think national standard languages came to dominate the world depends on how we conceptuali... more How we think national standard languages came to dominate the world depends on how we conceptualize the way languages are linked to the people that use them. Weberian theory posits the arbitrariness and constructedness of a community based on language. People who speak the same language do not necessarily think of themselves as a community, and so such a community is an intentional, political, and inclusive production. Bourdieusian theory treats language as a form of unequally distributed cultural capital, thus highlighting language's classed nature. The rise of standard languages thus reflects a change in the class structure of a nationalizing society. In contrast, I move beyond the familiar Western cases on which these theories are based to reveal the shortcomings of both these theoretical approaches. China, with an exceptionally artificial national standard language that was promulgated by the state in an extremely top-down process, highlights the importance of intentionality in both the design of the language and the social function it was supposed to play. Building on Weber and Bourdieu, I argue that even egalitarian language standardization projects, such as the Chinese case, can result in unintended new hierarchies of privilege and power, outrunning the best intentions of their designers.

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What Is Mandarin? The Social Project of Language Standardization in Early Republican China

Journal of Asian Studies, 2018

Scholars who study language often see standard or official languages as oppressive, helping the s... more Scholars who study language often see standard or official languages as oppressive, helping the socially advantaged to entrench themselves as elites. This article questions this view by examining the Chinese case, in which early twentieth-century language reformers attempted to remake their society’s language situation to further national integration. Classical Chinese, accessible only to a privileged few, was sidelined in favor of Mandarin, a national standard newly created for the many. This article argues that Mandarin’s creation reflected an entirely new vision of society. It draws on archival sources on the design and promulgation of Mandarin from the 1910s to the 1930s to discuss how the way the language was standardized reflected the nature of the imagined future society it was meant to serve. Language reform thus represented a radical rethinking of how society should be organized: linguistic modernity was to be a national modernity, in which all the nation’s people would have access to the new official language, and thus increased opportunities for advancement.

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End of an Era: Transforming Language and Society in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, c. 1870-1950

European Journal of Sociology, 2020

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Uneasy companions: language and human collectivities in the remaking of Chinese society in the early twentieth century

Theory and Society, 2020

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What Is Mandarin? The Social Project of Language Standardization in Early Republican China

Journal of Asian Studies, 2018

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Jeffrey Weng

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