Nushu: a secret 'language'?

There is an article in today's Guardian with the headline 'China's Secret 'Women Only' Language'.  As a linguist and a woman, this immediately caught my eye for obvious reasons.  How amazing to find a language that was only spoken by half of a community!  Immediately a multitude of questions popped into my head.  How did it develop?  How do the women pass it on without the men picking up on it?  How different is it to the other languages spoken by that community? 

However, on reading a little more closely, it becomes clear that all is not as it seems! 

The subject of the article is 'Nushu', which literally translates as 'women's writing', and this translation, it seems, takes us a little closer to the truth. Nushu is a script that was used exclusively by women to write things down in the Xiangnan Tuhua dialect of Southern China.  Whilst the social factors that led to the development of this script are, in themselves fascinating, I think the article itself raises some important issues about the everyday use of the language we use to talk about language.

So, despite the claims of the headline, Nushu  is not a language at all.  It is a writing system.  Writing systems are a kind of code used to represent a language, and are interesting in their own right.  However, there is no suggestion that the spoken form of the dialect was restricted to women only. 

When studying language, it's important to able to separate linguistic ability from literacy (generally and in a particular language).  There are millions of people in the world who speak a language or languages that they are not able to read or write.  They are still linguistically competent, and their intutitions as native speakers of their language(s) are still just as valuable to those of us studying language as those of the most learned scholar.

We start acquiring our native language(s) almost effortless from the moment we are born (perhaps even before!), while the process of learning to read and write typically happens much latter and takes careful study and practice to become competent in. Learning to speak and learning to read and write are qualitively different processes and abilities, and so with this in mind, perhaps the headline for this article should be edited slightly.  Moving the quotation marks might be enough. I suggest: 'China's Secret Women Only "Language"'

 

Comments

[Billy]

Word is that the movie isn't as good as it could be. Here's a link to the imdb page:

http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1541995/

and you can find Mark Kermode's review in the episode from the 4th of November here (it's at the end in the 'DVD extras', i.e. the bit that's only on the podcast):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/kermode

Billy