Archive of The Interpretative Maps of Chinese Dialects

This archive is comprised mainly of two volumes of linguistic atlases entitled The Interpretative Maps of Chinese Dialects. In addition to the entire collection of maps, maps and commentaries for each individual inventory have been created. Commentaries as well as related articles, including Preface, Introduction, Notes etc., are written both in Chinese and English.

This is directly the result of a joint research project carried out from 2004 to 2006 funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, but its foundations were built on joint research on Chinese dialects that Chinese language researchers in Japan had been conducting since 1989. This project, called PHD (Project on Chinese Dialects), aimed to apply the ideas of linguistic geography that arose in Western Europe in the early 20th century to the study of Chinese dialects. The ultimate purpose of this study is to clarify the mechanism of linguistic change, lexical change in particular, by observing the forms as well as their referents through each mapping process. Under such concept, the term ‘interpretative’ implies that the classifications of lexical forms and referents along with the use of symbols on the maps show the researchers’ interpretations of lexical changes.