Modern Chinese took the place of classical Chinese and has been the standard form of writing since the early 1920s. While several studies have been carried out on diachronic variation in modern written Chinese, these include few aggregate investigations. This study examines the diachronic variation in modern Chinese writings and translations from the 1900s to the 2000s. Frequencies of multiple linguistic features sensitive to historical change were drawn from a multi-genre comparable corpus, ‘DCMCWT’, containing five periods: 1900–1911, 1919–1930, 1931–1949, 1950–1966, and 1978–2012. Hierarchical agglomerative clustering was employed for periodisation, while multidimensional scaling supplemented the developmental path. The results suggest that Chinese writings and translations fall into three broad periods: 1900–1911, 1919–1966, and 1978–2012. Chinese translations follow a similar evolutionary path as the writings, and the gap between them, narrowed from 1900 to 2012. This developmental path corresponds to the socio-historical backgrounds in Chinese history and shares similarities and differences with the development of English. Diachronic variation in early modern Chinese mirrors that of English in that both languages developed to be more colloquial and interactive. However, early modern Chinese is different from English, as diglossia has played a crucial evolutionary role.
Biber, Douglas. (2003). Compressed noun-phrase structures in newspaper discourse: The competing demands of popularization vs. economy. In Jean Aitchison & Diana M. Lewis (Eds.), New media language (pp. 169–181). Routledge.
Biber, Douglas, & Finegan, Edward. (1989). Drift and evolution of English style: A history of three genres. Language, 65(3), 487–517.
Chen, Pingyuan. (2004). Modern Chinese: History and sociolinguistics. Cambridge University Press.
Chen, Pingyuan. (2010). Transformation of the narrative patterns of Chinese novels. Peking University Press.
Cronbach, Lee J. (1951). Coefficient alpha and the internal structure of tests. Psychometrika, 16(3), 297–334.
Cui, Xiliang. (2020). Division between formal and informal registers. Chinese Linguistics, 38(3), 100–110.
Diao, Yanbin. (2006). An Introduction to the history of modern Chinese. Peking University Press.
Feng, Shengli. (2015). Modern Chinese: Written Chinese. In Chan Sin-Wai (Ed.), The routledge encyclopedia of the Chinese language (pp. 645–663). Routledge.
Feng, Shengli. (2018). An introduction to stylistic grammar in Chinese. Beijing Language and Culture University Press.
Ferguson, Charles A. (1959). Diglossia. Word, 15(2), 325–340.
Fu, Jianzhou, Huang, Nianran, & Liu, Zaihua. (2015). Transformation of modern Chinese literary theories. Shanghai Classics Publishing House.
He, Jiuying. (2015). Change of language and literature in China’s modernization. Language and Culture Press.
Holman, Eric W. (1972). The relation between hierarchical and euclidean models for psychological distances. Psychometrika, 37(4), 417–423.
Hu, Xianyao. (2010). A corpus-based multidimensional analysis of Chinese translations. Foreign Language Teaching and Research, 42(6), 451–458.
Hu, Xianyao, Xiao, Richard, & Hardie, Andrew. (2019). How do English translations differ from non-translated English Writings? A multi-feature statistical model for linguistic variation analysis. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistics Theory, 15(2), 347–382.
Kaske, Elisabeth. (2008). The politics of language in Chinese education, 1895–1919. Brill.
Kruger, Haidee, & Smith, Adam. (2018). Colloquialization versus densification in Australian English: A multidimensional analysis of the Australian Diachronic Hansard Corpus (ADHC). Australian Journal of Linguistics, 38(3), 293–328.
Kruskal, J. B. (1964). Multidimensional scaling by optimizing goodness of fit to a nonmetric hypothesis. Psychometrika, 29(1), 1–27.
Kruskal, Joseph. (1977). The relationship between multidimensional scaling and clustering. Classification and Clustering, 17–44.
Qin, Hongwu, & Xia, Yun. (2017). A diachronic corpus-based study on the interaction between modern Chinese translations and writings. Shanghai Jiao Tong University Press.
Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt. (2013). Grammatical variation in British English dialects: A study in corpus-based dialectometry. Cambridge University Press.
Tsai, Yvonne. (2020). A corpus study of the diachronic development of Chinese patent terminologies. Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies, 7(1), 52–66.
Wang, Bingqin. (2018). Chinese translation theories in the 20th century. Nankai University Press.
Wang, Kefei, & Qin, Hongwu. (2012). Development of a diachronic corpus of English-Chinese translations and Chinese writings. Foreign Language Teaching and Research, 44(6), 822–834.
Wu, Dongying, & Xu, Qianwen. (2000). Dialect variation or register variation? An ANOVA analysis of entertainment news in mainland China and Hongkong. Studies of the Chinese Language, 11, 35–41.
Wu, Yunfang. (2001). Sentence length in news and novels: An empirical study. Journal of Language and Literature Studies, 51, 66–67.
Xia, Yun. (2014). Normalization in translation: Corpus-based diachronic research into twentieth-century English-Chinese fictional translation. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Xu, Shiyi. (2015). A history of vernacular Chinese. Peking University Press.
Zhang, Zhengsheng. (2017). Dimensions of variation in written Chinese. Routledge.