Commerce, Christianity and China’s Jerusalem: Linguistic Preservation in the Wenzhounese Diaspora
“Where there are Wenzhou businesspeople, there are Wenzhou Christians,
and where there are Wenzhou Christians, there are Wenzhou churches”
— — Wenzhounese Local Saying (Cao, 2008)
Wenzhou is affectionately referred to as China’s Jerusalem. Its indigenous language belongs to the linguistic family of Wu dialect and is one the hardest languages to learn in the world. Nowadays, Wenzhou is known for economic innovations, and wealth accumulations. However, for thousands of years, it was isolated from the rest of China because of its mountainous terrain. Its geography has managed to preserve the way Chinese people spoke a thousand years ago. The Wenzhounese language/dialect is called the living fossil of China.
My study examines the intersection of religion, business and the Wenzhounese language. As Sapir says, “language does not exist apart from culture.” (Sapir, as cited in Copland et al, 2015), I argue that Christianity and the Wenzhounese language’s linguistic preservation are intertwined. In this paper, I study the linguistic, cultural and spiritual identities of the indigenous Wenzhounese community. I strive to show the contemporary efforts in the preservation of the Wenzhounese language/dialect and the current status of the Wenzhounese communities on a global scale, in the form of business and religious ventures. Christianity helps Wenzhounese strengthen and preserve their linguistic identities. What is special and beautiful about Wenzhouese culture is that it is a diaspora that is scattered across the world. I hope to give further suggestions in scalable ways to preserve and strengthen the Wenzhou cultures and linguistic repertoires.
Wenzhouese is spread beyond China through evangelization and its huge diaspora across the globe. When William Edward Soothill, a Methodist missionary and a sinologist at the University of Oxford, went to evangelize in Wenzhou, he studied Wenzhounese assiduously, seizing every perceivable opportunity to practice the language (Shen, 2013). Soothill “desperately learned Wenzhou language from the people around him,” even “cooks and opium smokers were his language teachers” (Shen, 2013). Because of the language barrier between Soothill and one of his “teachers”, sometimes his teachers have to be creative in communicating with Soothill. For instance, one teacher wanted to teach Soothill “the word ‘death’ ” so “he lied on the floor and pretended to be dead without moving; if he taught the word ‘rotation’, he would roll around by himself” (Shen, 2013).
Evangelism aids the preservation of the Wenzhounese dialect. Because the Wenzhounese language has different intonations, the missionaries found ways to use latin alphabets to add phonetic notations (Shen, 2013). The Bible became an intercessor in the preservation of the Wenzhouese dialect and for further revitalization. Evangelization incentivizes the priests and missionaries to “[use] the Latin alphabet to phoneticize official Chinese, but also phoneticized local dialects (Shen, 2013). The original purpose of annotating dialects is to enable ordinary people with little education to read the Bible” (Shen, 2013). Using the Latin alphabet to understand and annotate Wenzhou dialect is a widespread collaborative phenomena resulting from generations of Western missionaries work (Shen, 2013). Thanks to the phonetic notation method, “Wenzhou dialect is not so difficult to read and speak.” (Shen, 2013). Soothill “compiled a book of daily expressions. Most of the missionaries who later went to Wenzhou used this method to learn Wenzhou dialect” (Shen, 2013). As a result, we are gifted with a wealth of Wenzhouese dialect’s pronunciation and usage guidelines, created by community outsiders.
Instead of preaching with the Bible in Classical Chinese, missionaries like Soothhill translated the Bible into the everyday spoken Wenzhouese. Soothhill chose word choices that are commonly used in Wenzhou people’s daily life in his translations (Li, 2015). Instead of using Father to refer to God the Father in the Christian faith, Soothhill uses the colloquial Wenzhounese version of father, ah-pa, to refer to God the Father (Li, 2015). That is why the Wenzhounese Bible preserved at the University of Cambridge is a down-to-earth documentation of Wenzhounese spoken by people at the time, instead of a rarefied and high brow translation of the Bible into Classical Chinese (Li, 2015). To aid local Wenzhouese’s understandings of Christianity, Soothhill boldly integrates word choices commonly found in Buddhist traditions (Li, 2015). For instance, the term reward in Matthew 5:12 is translated into karma (Li, 2015). Because many Wenzhou people are familiar with Buddhism before Soothhill’s arrival, poetic translation such as this helps Wnezhouese grasp the Christian faith swiftly (Li, 2015).
Wenzhouneses’ passion for commerce and enthusiasm to go abroad prompted the spread of the Wenzhounese language around the world. In Paris, many small convenient shops are run by the Wenzhounese people (Economists). In Italy, cashmere factories are run by Wenzhounese communities (Economists). Christianity is a socializing mechanism that prompts more business collaborations as well as the dissemination of linguistic repertoire, and the preservation of the Wenzhounese dialect. Common business goals and religion are denominators that bond the Wenzhounese together. At the same time, the Wenzhou language is preserved, metamorphosed and scattered around the world. As one successful Wenzhouese entrepreneur says, “I hired people through relationships…Sometimes I had to ask the Christian church to help with recruitment” (Zhang and Zhang, 2016). Cao finds out that “instead of being integrated into Western or even other overseas Chinese Christian communities, the ‘Wenzhou model’ of churches in Europe operates on a basis of autonomy and maintains close transnational ties to the church communities back in Wenzhou, resembling the business dealings of Wenzhou immigrant enclaves in Europe. These immigrant Wenzhou churches regularly invite Wenzhou preachers to preach in Europe in Wenzhou dialect, and pay their travel expenses” (Cao, 2008, Pg. 68).
While heritage classrooms are valuable sites to learn languages, in practice, not every indigenous languages’ communities have the luxury to enact such mechanisms and spaces to practice the speaking of the language. It is time for outsiders and insiders to be creative and to use technology and social media to make indigenous languages live through different forms. In the same way we see Pidigindized languages as a form of indigenous language (Goodfellow, 2003, as cited in Moore, 2012), we could see images, videos, business ventures, cultures, and religious worship as new forms of languages. As my capstone research in emoticons found, emoticons are a powerful medium to initiate changes in communities. I believe it is important to shift society’s cultural understanding of the Wenzhounese language from rarefield living fossil, to a useful and profitable language spoken by real Chinese migrants around the world. Community outsiders are called to become courageous in learning and exploring Wenzhounese language and practice speaking the language, despite not always being supported and understood by community insiders.
As Anne Goodfellow puts it, “the time has come to stop talking about language and start talking about language change” (2003, Pg. 55). All languages change in beautiful and unpredictable ways. It is in our best interest to forgo our desire to grasp language, frame it, and ask it to never change.
To reclaim our power in the grand journey of language preservation, I argue that we want to think with courage and creativity. “Cultures adapt to environments and change over time” (Goodfellow, 2003, Pg. 53), it is now our job to change more minds. Not only we are called to preserve indigenous languages linguistically, we are called to preserve indigenous languages culturally. I hopefully believe that religion, culinary experiences and business ventures are all our chances to speak and use the Wenzhou language.
Works Cited
Cao, N (2010). Constructing China’s Jerusalem : Christians, Power, and Place in Contemporary Wenzhou. Stanford University Press.
Cao, N (2008). Boss Christians: The Business of Religion in the “Wenzhou Model” of Christian Revival. The China Journal. 59(1).
Copland, F, Creese, A (2015). Linguistic Ethnography: Collecting, Analysing and Presenting Data. SAGE Research Methods.
Moore, R (2012). “Taking up speech” in an Endangered Language: Bilingual Discourse in a Heritage Language Classroom. University of Pennsylvania.
Lin, S (2011). Socio-spatial segregation in China and migrants’ everyday life experiences: the case of Wenzhou. Urban Geography.
Simons, R (1999) Chinese Dialect Classification : A comparative approach to Harngjou, Old Jintarn, and Common Northern Wu. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory.
Shen, J. (2013). Xúnzhǎo sūhuìlián [Looking for William Edward Soothill]. New Star Press.
Goodfellow, A (2003). The Development of “New” Languages in Native American Communities. American Indian Culture and Research Journal. 27(2).
Tianyi, L (2023). The impact of Emoticons in community-facing religious institutions. Graduate School of Education. The University of pennsylvania.
Xinde, Li (2015). Sūhuìlián wēnzhōu huà shèngjīng yìběn yánjiū [Su Huilian’s Wenzhou Dialect Bible Translation Study]. World Religions Studies.
Zhang, Y, Zhang M (2016). Can Overseas Migrants Develop Sustained Entrepreneurship? Multiple Case Studies of Wenzhou Migrants in Italy. The Journal of Chinese Sociology.
Emigrants from a small corner of China are making an outsize mark abroad (2022). The Economists. https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2022/12/20/emigrants-from-a-small-corner-of-china-are-making-an-outsize-mark-abroad
