The circulation of English in China, 1840--1940: Historical texts, personal activities, and a new linguistic landscape

My dissertation project focuses on language contact and its social history in nineteenth and early twentieth-century China. By examining how Western languages and ideas influenced the native social life in the treaty port of Shanghai, I wish to demonstrate how language transformation became one of the historical stimuli that shaped a new linguistic landscape of the city. My dissertation investigates how English was circulated among different groups of local people in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Shanghai, and what cultural consequences a foreign language brought to a treaty port society. I have divided chapters according to the two circulation methods, i.e., orality and literacy. In the first part, I focus on ordinary people's oral and visual English throughout their daily practices, and examine how English in an oral-visual format became embedded in the social activities of local Chinese. In the second part, I cover how dictionaries and reference books as materials for the study of English proliferated. By addressing the subjects of authorship, readership, and the market for English study together, I also try to explore how the business of text making and publishing became more and more professional, which led to a wide range of professionazation of English study toward the mid-twentieth century. My research indicates that English was a cultural phenomenon rather than an academic subject when it entered Shanghai in the mid-nineteenth century. During the second half of the nineteenth century, materials for the study of standard English emerged, which made the learning of English evolve into a professional stage. In as much as English was incorporated into the city's new cultural landscape toward the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, its linguistic identity was transformed by being transcribed into Chinese and thus, English turned into part of local people's vernacular repertoire. The one-hundred-year history of English in the treaty port of Shanghai, therefore, manifests the shaping of a new linguistic landscape from which contemporary Shanghai culture grew.