Every writer has his hometown, and where there is a hometown, there is a dialect. Dialect is the sunshine and rain on the road of writers' growth, the rich soil where the roots of the writer's spirit and life take root into the depths, and the foundation and bricks for writers to build the edifice of literary language.
The nourishment and infiltration of dialects are immersed in the blood, often accompanied by the literary time of the writer's life, silently promoting the writer to form a unique linguistic aesthetic and creative personality. The in-depth involvement of dialects and folklore in literature has contributed to the birth of literary geography and broadened the field of literary studies.
The picture is taken from the comic book of the same name published by Comic Book Publishing House, adapted from Jia Pingwa's novel "I Am a Peasant". Profile picture
In a linguistic sense, dialects are "local languages", that is, "native languages", which are the traditional lingua franca of local areas. Many dialects retain many ancient sounds, ancient words, and ancient rhymes, and have unique historical and cultural characteristics and cultural contexts. China has a vast territory and many ethnic groups, "a hundred miles of different winds, thousands of miles of different customs". One of the contents of this "vulgar" is dialect. The ubiquity of dialects has created linguistic divisions that are bounded by natural or administrative regions. The ancients understood this question. The reason why Yangxiong of the Western Han Dynasty wrote the treatise "Dialects" was to eliminate language barriers and break down barriers. Due to the mixed dialects in the scattered operas of the Yuan Dynasty, the modern scholar Zhang Xiang took great pains to compile a "Dictionary of Poetry, Songs, and Songs", the focus and difficulty of which lies in the annotation of the other party's words, in order to facilitate readers to read the obstacle escort. This shows that both ancient and modern writers have paid attention to the limitations of dialects in their creation.
There is no distinction between high and low languages in any language, only the difference between the number of users and the less, and they are all part of human civilization. As the language of this land, the dialect is very "earthy", but it does not mean "vulgar" and "shallow". In a specific context, many dialects are full of mysteries, and many times it is difficult to accurately interpret them in the common language, which is due to the vivid images and rich connotations of the dialects. Sometimes it is more charismatic than the lingua franca, more expressive and transparent.
With its distinct regionality and high recognition, dialects occupy the linguistic highland of one side. In the evolution of social history, in the face of the continuous input of various foreign words, buzzwords and new vocabulary, dialect is still a clear stream of "doing its own thing", maintaining its own internal characteristics and vigorous vitality for a long time and tenacity. In daily life, we can rely on dialects and accents to identify ancestors and determine the hometown and region of a particular person. It is precisely because the "vernacular pronunciation is difficult to change" that it is generally difficult to completely transform and update the dialect, which can only make it richer, and then form a multi-tone mixed language pattern.
From the perspective of literary history, ancient Chinese literary classics are shielded from dialects, and the authors are written in pure Yayan, thus ensuring the recitation and circulation of traditional classics in various ethnic groups and dynasties. Dialect into literature, is the product of narrative literature, ice-breaking began from the Tang people's notebook novels, the Song Dynasty continued to follow up, to the Ming Dynasty Feng Menglong, Ling Mengchu's "three words and two beats" completely broke the door of confinement, so that dialect into the story text, by the general recognition of the society. "Journey to the West", "Water Margin" and "Dream of Red Mansions" are mixed with a large number of dialect slang, which should be used as a model of dialect use. The dialect of the unrefined hall is like an artistic elf, with the fragrance of the earth and the smell of the mountains, shuttling between the lines of the novel world, empowering the creation of ancient vernacular literature.
The use of dialects in the novel is the inevitable result of the joint efforts of many parties. In terms of origin, the novel covers "the gossip of the streets, and the creation of hearsay". The use of dialect returns the novel to the novel itself, which is the color restoration of folk discourse in the written language, which is not only due to the special needs of introducing the background of the characters and the expression of sentences, but also because of the flexibility of the writer's use of language.
At the beginning of the development of modern Chinese literature, it was an era of vigorous rise of vernacular literature, and a group of heavyweight writers were actively avoiding dialects and trying to use a popular language that they understood and understood. This popular language is understandable to the whole people, thus ensuring the effectiveness of the dissemination of the work. On the other hand, if the work uses too many dialects, it is easy to form dyslexia, blocking the transmission channel, which is not conducive to the transmission of the text. In some regional dialects, outsiders sound like foreign languages, and it is difficult to enter the level of literary reading. Imagine, if Mao Dun's "Midnight" and "Eclipse" were written in Shanghainese, and Lu Xun's "Diary of a Madman" and "Medicine" were written in Shaoxing dialect, what would it be? I'm afraid that few readers outside of Jiangnan can read it.
There is a Shanghai writer named Zhang Nanzhuang, who wrote a chapter back novel "He Dian" in the Shanghai dialect, which was circulated in the Songhu area in manuscripts, Liu Bannong once wrote a preface for it, and Lu Xun wrote an inscription for it twice, but this work still did not enter the public eye. In addition to the quality of the novel, an important problem lies in the dialect, where individual words are really obscure. The localization and niche of narrative language will inevitably lead to the localization and niche of the reading group, which will make many readers outside this dialect area daunting and stifling their interest in reading.
Language, as a tool, is always at the service of speaking. What tools to use for what work, the main tool for the kitchen desk is a kitchen knife, but sometimes scissors are better to use. The occasional use of dialect as an expression of special intentions in novels can turn the ordinary into magical, like the finishing touch. Therefore, whether it is Lu Xun or Lao She, when they face dialects, if they are not necessary, they must not use them; Use it skillfully, use it for the blade, and hit the nail on the head. Lu Xun wrote in "The Storm" when describing the dinner scene of a farmer in the water town in the south of the Yangtze River: "There was a buzzing noise, and the mosquitoes all hit the shirtless body and broke into the market under the black tree tree. The "market-making" here is the Shaoxing dialect, which means to catch the market, and you can imagine the scene of a swarm of mosquitoes flying around, chaotic and spectacular. The word "market making" makes the originally plain local meaning stronger.
Jia Pingwa is in the Shangluo dialect and Chen Zhongzhong is in the Guanzhong dialect, and their works are full of strong Sangzi feelings because of the use of dialects. The picture is excerpted from the comic strip of the same name published by the People's Fine Arts Publishing House, adapted from Chen Zhongzhong's novel "White Deer Plain". Profile picture
In contemporary literary creation, the use of dialects has become a basic consensus. The beauty of dialect is a common literary tradition that everyone follows, especially for enriching the semantics of narrative sentences, strengthening the intimacy of the work, and bringing the relationship between the writer and the reader closer. However, dialect is really a double-edged sword, and if there are too many obscure words and obscure words, then it should be a very cautious thing to use in the novel. Writers should have enough reverence for dialects, and should have both "quality" considerations and "degree" for the dialect words used. Jia Pingwa is in Shangluo dialect, Chen Zhongzhong is in Guanzhong dialect, Lin Jinlan is in Beijing dialect, Feng Jicai is in Tianjin dialect, these representative writers, in a sense, dialect is their cognition, emotion and life experience, childhood life imprint, carved for them indelible mulberry feelings, so that individual memory and historical inheritance are deeply integrated.
Jia Pingwa is in the Shangluo dialect and Chen Zhongzhong is in the Guanzhong dialect, and their works are full of strong Sangzi feelings because of the use of dialects. The picture is excerpted from the comic strip of the same name published by the People's Fine Arts Publishing House, adapted from Chen Zhongzhong's novel "White Deer Plain". Profile picture
The vigorous development of modern languages has not crowded out the living space of dialects, and the local dialects still maintain their original style. Writers still have a soft spot for dialects. It is precisely because of the rational use of dialects that the works are naturally embedded in the local cultural color, which not only contains nostalgia, but also conceals the sense of roots. The relationship between a writer and a dialect is the relationship between the land and the seed, and his work becomes a "GI product".
(Source: Guangming Daily, May 1, 2024, page 7; Author: Li Chunping, professor and novelist of the School of Liberal Arts, Ankang University; Image source: Original article with pictures. ）