Southward Han migration from a linguistic perspective

Ian Joo is an associate professor at the Otaru University of Commerce (Japan). Born in South Korea, he obtained his PhD at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His main research interests are linguistic iconicity (the resemblance between linguistic form and meaning) and areal typology (the geographical distribution of linguistic features). He is currently focusing on building Phonotacticon, a cross-linguistic phonotactic database.

Topic

Southern Chinese lects show a high degree of typological similarity to the lects of Mainland Southeast Asia, the non-Sinitic lects spoken in the Indochinese peninsula and southwest China (Szeto & Yurayong 2021). What seems less intuitive, however, is that northern Chinese also demonstrates high similarity to Mainland Southeast Asia, albeit at a lesser degree than southern Chinese. According to Joo and Hsu (2025), grammatical distances between Eurasian lects measured based on Grambank (Skirgård et al. 2023) and phonological distances based on Phonotacticon (Joo & Hsu 2024) show that northern Chinese lects (Mandarin and Jin) show stronger areal affinity to the lects of Mainland Southeast Asia than to their neighboring lects in Northeast Asia.

There are logically two possible explanations for this areal peculiarity of northern Chinese: 1. Northern Chinese has converged to Mainland Southeast Asian lects (but not to Northeast Asian non-Sinitic lects); or 2. Mainland Southeast Asian lects have converged into pan-Sinitic featurs. We argue for the latter hypothesis based on the historical context of the southward migration of the Han Chinese. Evidence for the southward Han migration and its influence on Mainland Southeast Asia comes from written history (Fitzgerald 1972), genetics (Wen et al. 2004), archaeology (Wu et al. 2019), and linguistics (Alves 2021). In this presentation, we focus on the linguistic evidence for the southward Han migration, from the perspectives of typology, by analyzing quantitative datasets such as Grambank and Phonotacticon, and historical linguistics, by comparing the earlier stages of Sinitic to the earlier stages of non-Sinitic families of Mainland Southeast Asia.

References

1. Alves, Mark J. (2021). “Linguistic influence of Chinese in Southeast Asia”. In: The Languages and Linguistics of Mainland Southeast Asia. Ed. by Paul Sidwell and Jenny Mathias. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, pp. 649–672. DOI: 10.1515/9783110558142-027.
2. Fitzgerald, C. P. (1972). The Southern Expansion of the Chinese People: Southern Fields and Southern Ocean. Canberra: Australian National University Press.
3. Joo, Ian and Yu-Yin Hsu (2024). “Phonotacticon: a cross-linguistic phonotactic database”. In: Linguistic Typology (ahead of print). DOI: 10.1515/lingty-2023-0094.— (under review). “Phonological and grammatical distances between Eurasian lects demonstrate domain-specific convergence patterns”. In: Linguistics.
4. Skirgård, Hedvig et al. (2023)“Grambank reveals the importance of genealogical constraints on linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss”. In: Science Advances 9.16, eadg6175. DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adg6175.
5. Szeto, Pui Yiu and Chingduang Yurayong (2021). “Sinitic as a typological sandwich: Revisiting the notions of Altaicization and Taicization”. In: Linguistic Typology 25.3, pp. 551–599.
6. Wen, Bo et al. (2004). “Genetic evidence supports demic diffusion of Han culture”. In: Nature 431.7006, pp. 302–305.
7. Wu, Xiaotong et al. (2019).“Resettlement strategies and Han imperial expansion into southwest China: a multimethod approach to colonialism and migration”. In: Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 11.12, pp. 6751–6781. DOI: 10.1007/s12520-019-00938-w.

DATE & VENUE

• 16:30-17:30 pm, 2025.03.18 (Tuesday)
• 5238, Building 5, Shanghai International Studies University, Songjiang Campus
• Zoom ID: 822 1931 4400 (Passcode: 237451)