Late Qing Multilingualism and National Linguistic Practice in the Qing Borderlands

This exploratory article reviews recent scholarship about late Qing multilingualism and discusses its influence on studies of national linguistic practice in modern Chinese history, particularly in the borderlands. The Qing Empire (1644–1911) was a multilingual empire with the Manchu, Mongolian, Chinese, Tibetan, and Uighur languages being used in its large territory. Qing multilingualism maintained distinctive group identities and the integrity of the empire. The real difficulty for Chinese national linguistic practice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was how to transform the social ideology and structure which supported Qing multilingualism. Linking empire and nation by the legacies of Qing multilingualism helps us reconsider the result and future of national linguistic practice and its aspiration to build the Chinese nation within its multilingual background. Qing borderlands largely inherited and maintained the empire's multilingual legacies. The infiltration of the Russian and Japanese languages further highlighted the complexity of the challenges faced by modern Chinese national linguistic practice in borderland areas. All of these make the Qing borderlands a good setting to examine the complicated and sometimes contradictory relationship between late Qing multilingualism and national linguistic practice.