张晨晨：一点关于中原官话的思考 #

中文原文：一点关于中原官话的思考 – 徒然草

English version (Translation by author): Some thoughts on Zhongyuan Mandarin – Chenchen Zhang

一点关于中原官话的思考，为什么重新审视“方言”是关于抵抗等级、反对歧视、语言正义，而不是为了正统主义。

On why re-examining our “dialects” is about resisting hierarchies, opposing discrimination, and pursuing linguistic justice, rather than cultural “orthodoxy”.

和很多来自中原官话区的人一样，我们从小内化了一种河南话（我不是河南人，但是这里用河南话代替中原官话因为更加口语化）是“乡土的”、“没文化的”、“不高雅的”等语言等级想象。有时候，这种等级不只是是想象，它表现为生活中实实在在的歧视。我一直记得，10岁左右我们全家第一次去北京旅游。在北京的地铁上，我妈妈用河南话问一个女士：去北京图书大厦是那一站？那位女士因为我妈的口音放声大笑。这当然是个个例，大多数人不会这么直接。但这个事情让我记了几十年，是我对北京的第一个印象。

Like many people from the Zhongyuan Mandarin-speaking region, I grew up internalizing a hierarchical linguistic imagination of Henanhua (I’m not from Henan, but I use Henanhua here interchangeably with Zhongyuan Mandarin) as “rural,” “uncultured,” “unsophisticated”. Sometimes, this hierarchy isn’t just imagined; it manifests as real discrimination in everyday life. I’ll always remember our family’s first trip to Beijing when I was around ten years old. On the subway, my mother asked a woman in Henanhua: “Which stop for the Beijing Book Building?” The woman burst out laughing at my mom’s accent. Unpleasant encounters like this are probably not common at all: most people wouldn’t be so blunt. But this incident stayed with me for decades; it was my very first impression of Beijing.

我自己也内化了这种污名化。我高中语文老师不会说普通话，他会用河南话给我们念《再别康桥》。上大学的时候，我把这个轶事变成了一个段子，模仿他用河南话念《再别康桥》给同学听，大家都会哈哈大笑。再后来，我到欧洲以后和一个法国朋友讲这个事情，她是中文很好的法国人，但她听这个河南话版的诗歌根本不觉得好笑，也不觉得哪里奇怪。这让我意识到我们给河南话读诗附加的喜剧感（“乡土”的语言和“高雅”的艺术之间的反差）是一种社会建构。

I also internalized this stigmatization myself. My high school Chinese teacher couldn’t speak Putonghua (standard Mandarin); he would read to us Xu Zhimo’s Farewell Again to Cambridge in Henanhua. Later, when I was in university, I turned this anecdote into a sort of comic sketch: I would imitate him reciting the poem in Henanhua in our dormitory entertainment session, and everyone would laugh. It was not until when I studied in Europe did I realize what was behind the comedic effect. When I told this story to a French friend, who spoke very good Chinese, and when she heard the Henanhua version of the poem, she didn’t find it funny at all, nor strange in any way. That made me realize that the comedic effect we attach to poetry read in Henanhua – the contrast between a “rural” dialect and a “refined” art form – is a social construction.

这种社会建构并没有很久的历史，它的直接来源应该来自改革开放以来，中国以非均衡、空间等级化的方式融入资本主义全球化， 进而加剧区域格差。珠三角、长三角等地以FDI、出口导向制造业实现高速发展，中西部地区为这些产业输出低价劳动力。这种非均衡的融入方式造成了我们对“落后“与”发达”、”城市“与”乡土“空间的一系列想象，从经济到文化。普通话霸权虽然各地都存在，但是方言和方言的文化想象是不一样的。吴语虽然在某些地方濒危（这些地方正是出口导向制造业的重镇，需要大量的外来劳工），但是吴语本身没有被贴上负面标签。中原官话区则不同，在经济结构中扮演的主要是输出劳动力的角色。

And this construction is in fact relatively recent. Its direct roots probably lie in the way China, since the reform and opening-up, has integrated into global capitalism in an uneven and spatially hierarchical way, which in turn deepened regional disparities. The Pearl River Delta and Yangtze River Delta regions achieved rapid growth through FDI and export-oriented manufacturing, while the central and western regions mainly supplied cheap labor for these industries. This uneven integration produced a whole series of imaginaries about “backward” and “advanced”, “urban” and “rural”, spanning from economics to culture. Mandarin hegemony does exist everywhere, but the cultural imaginations attached to dialects and languages differ. For instance, Wu languages are endangered in some places (precisely those hubs of export-oriented manufacturing that have drawn large numbers of migrant workers from the interior), but Wu itself has not been stigmatized the same way Henanhua has. Henanhua speaking regions have played a different role in the economic structure: at least in the first decades of post-reform growth, its primary role was to supply cheap labour for coastal regions.

我开始重新审视我的方言。我意识到虽然我可以说中原官话，但其实绝大多数时候不过是用中原官话的语调去说普通话罢了。很多不属于“书面语”的生活语汇我可以听得懂，但是自己不会去用。在我们那里老一辈人口中，月亮是“月明地儿”，太阳是“天天地儿”，早晨是“清起来”，晚上是“黑家”，昨天是“yan（夜？）门儿”。这样的语汇背后是一套“非标准”的、感知性的知识系统，它们的消失不光是前面说的经济进程，也是面对现代性的同质化、标准化进程中，地方性知识系统（vernacular epistemology），一种与自然世界、日常生活紧密交织的语义世界的消失。现代社会要求需要有统一的“标准语”，教育的语言，考试的语言，也是学术的语言。但是被叫做“土话”的话，用不同方式感知世界、表达情绪的语汇真的失去了相关性吗？

When I began to re-examine my dialect, I realized that although I can speak Zhongyuan Mandarin, most of the time I’m really just speaking Putonghua or standardized Mandarin with the intonation of Zhongyuan Mandarin. Many everyday words that don’t belong to the standardized language – I can understand them, but don’t actively use them myself. Among the older generation in my hometown, the moon is 月明地儿 (“the bright thing in the sky at night”?), the sun is 天天地儿 (“the thing that makes day”?), morning is 清起来 (“when it gets clear”?), evening is 黑家 (“when it turns dark”), and yesterday is yan (夜？)门儿 (“a night before”?). Behind such vocabulary lies a whole non-standard, sensory knowledge system. Its disappearance is not only the result of the economic processes I mentioned earlier, but also of modernization’s drive toward homogenization and standardization: the erosion of vernacular epistemologies, the disappearance of the semantic worlds closely intertwined with nature and everyday life. Modern society demands a unified “standard language” — the language of education, of examinations, and of scholarship. The language I use to write this blog post. But how about the so-called 土话 (“rural, native, or rustic tongues”), the words that express feelings and perceptions in alternative ways?

自媒体的兴起好像带来了某种方言复兴，去中心化的创作和“草根”内容生产中，方言的可见性好像比在传统媒体中要高。四川话的文艺创作更是大受欢迎，在流行文化中极有存在感（为什么如此是另外一个话题了）。我最近很喜欢看B站一个频道是用河南话讲河南话知识，我在里面学到不少小知识，比如一些不知道怎么写的常用词该怎么写，或是某种“土话”表达能在古典文学中找到很多示例等等，就还挺有意思的。但，我发现和中原文化相关的内容很容易陷入“正统主义”的窠臼，带有一种强烈的文化保守主义的色彩。这种叙事就是说：中原官话是中华文化正统，从来都是“雅言”、“官话”、“读书音”之类。

With the rise of social media, there seems to be a kind of revival of dialects. In decentralized, grassroots content production, dialects seem more visible than in traditional media. The artistic use of Sichuanese, in particular, has become extremely popular and has a strong presence in popular culture (why that is, is another topic). Recently, I’ve really enjoyed watching a Bilibili channel that talks about Henanhua in Henanhua. I’ve learned quite a few interesting things from it — for example, how to write certain everyday words whose written form I never knew, or how some so-called “tuhua” expressions can actually be found abundantly in classical literature.

However, I’ve also noticed that content about Zhongyuan (the Central Plain, often considered the “cradle” of Chinese civilization) culture easily falls into the trap of orthodoxism, marked by a strong sense of cultural conservatism. The narrative often goes like this: Zhongyuan Mandarin is the true orthodox form of Chinese culture — it has always been the “elegant speech”(雅言, or the language used in classical literature), the “official tongue” (官话, used in the imperial bureaucratic system), the “reading pronunciation” (读书音, the phonological standard used to read out classical literature).

这种方言复兴主义我是很反感的。它把重新发掘河南话这件事情从反对语言的（基于经济格差的）高低贵贱转移到构建一种另外的，基于“文化正统”的高低贵贱。有时候它声称反对某种南方语音中心的ethnonationalism（声称北方语音是“胡化的汉语”），但同时又复制其逻辑。夸张点说，两种对纯粹主义的声张都带着法西斯主义对“文化复兴”的解读，追求所谓的“正统”“纯粹”和“统一”。这不应该是我们重新审视中原官话的出发点或目的，我们的目的是抵制污名化，反对语言作为社会歧视的工具，还原语言的多样性。任何一种语言、方言都是可以写诗的，不是因为它得到了过去某个时期的达官贵人的认可，而是因为它是我们生活、感知世界、表达爱恨的一部分。对我来说，文化不是一种“遗产”，不是过去留存下来固定的东西，而是我们如何生活。有人在讲，有人在用它写诗，它就是活着的文化。

I find this kind of dialect revivalism off-putting. It shifts the project of rethinking Henanhua away from resisting linguistic hierarchies rooted in socioeconomic inequality, toward constructing another hierarchy based on cultural orthodoxy. Sometimes, it claims to oppose certain forms of “southern” linguistic ethnonationalism that dismiss northern accents as “barbarized Chinese” (胡化汉语, suggesting that northern accents have been influenced by nomadic or non-Chinese cultures) yet it ends up reproducing the same logic. Even though these linguistic activisms in a way aim to challenge the Putonghua hegemony, their claim to “orthodoxical status” risks reproducing a fascist idea of “cultural revival” – the pursuit of purity and the desire to eliminate foreignness or impurity.

That should not be our starting point or end point in rethinking Zhongyuan Mandarin. Our goal should be to resist stigmatization, to oppose the use of language as a tool of social discrimination, and to respect the diversity that has always shaped our linguistic world. Any language or dialect can be poetic: not because it was once approved by elites or emperors in history, but because it forms part of how we live, how we connect to our families, how we express our feelings. For me, culture is not a “heritage,” not something fixed and preserved from the past. It is the way we live. As long as someone speaks it, as long as someone writes poetry in it, it is our living culture.