3: The Multilingual Origins of Theatrical Language: Yuan Zaju Texts and Yuan Period Language Practices

Historical linguists have developed a rich body of scholarship around what is alternately called “Han’er yanyu” (“the spoken language of North China,”) and “Yuandai baihua” (“the official vernacular of the Yuan dynasty”). Interestingly, one of the richest corpora of relevant texts are stele, many of which represent Chinese-language promulgations of Yuan imperial edicts, often filtered through translations from Mongolian. Recent work has foregrounded this form of writing as a “contact language” between “Altaic” and various Chinese language strata. What so far has received less attention is how this “official vernacular language” interacted with the new literary idiom of the performing arts (often called “baihua,” and alternatively translated as “vernacular,” “plain writing,” or “mixed register writing”). It is the contention of this paper that these ostensibly separate forms of writing interacted with one another as attested to by the extant zaju corpus from the Yuan and Ming periods. Specifically, this paper will analyze three aspects to investigate how the “official vernacular” shaped Yuan dynasty zaju texts: (1) the use of unmarked Mongolian-inflected syntactical structures; (2) the use of pronouns for high and low status characters to encode social hierarchy in relation to translation practices from Mongolian; (3) the use of Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic terms as an ethnically marked and unmarked means of characterization. Finally, the paper touches upon whether such language forms remained isolated Yuan period practices or whether they permanently sedimented into the theatrical idiom of later dynasties.