Vernacular——The Folk Discourse

The vernacular movement led by Hu Shih starts with the literature language reform and stresses the importance of vernacular to literature, which makes the vernacular chinese officially enter the academic field. The concept of vernacular, not only referred as a kind of language, but also as a kind of folk discourse, means that the folk and their daily life can be powerful resource of literature. Meanwhile, the elite and the folk finally find a possible and reasonable way to communicate with each other equally. In this sense, the vernacular movement establishes the basis of folk literature system. However, the expression of "folk" is more often interpreted into ideological meaning, which shadows the original academic significance of folk literature. The paper chooses "vernacular" as the core concept of folk literature to make a detailed analysis of the history and the issues of dispute of the folk literature.