從中國廣西東興京族語言環境的角度窺察京語的傳承方式：喃字

Analyses of the Transmission of the Jing Language through Nôm Characters from the Perspective of Language Situation of the Jing People in Dongxing, Guangxi, China

京族分布於廣西東興市江平鎮，是中國的少數民族之一，其民族語言「京語」是越南語的一種方言。承受著來自漢語普通話、漢語白話方言以及通用越南語的巨大壓力，京語正處於消亡的邊緣。保護及傳承該民族語言的需求變得極為迫切，一群老一輩的京族知識份子選擇了以喃字作為傳承京語的手段。本文以2015年兩次在京族三島進行的社會語言學田野調查的考察成果為基礎，初步探索京族人之所以選擇傳承喃字作為傳承語言方式的原因，及喃字傳承方式。相比之下，漢字系統的「喃字」無法如現代越南語(或稱「國語字」)一般，能呈現京語的語音面貌，在記錄和傳承京語語言方面上並無優勢。本文認為，選擇「喃字」作為京語傳承載體是出於民族生命的考慮，強調「喃字」是和漢字一脈、京族和漢族是部分與整體的關係。

 

Jing people inhabit Jiangping town of Dongxing city district in Guangxi and constitute a national minority in China. Their language – the so-called Jing language -- is a dialect of the Vietnamese. Now the Jing language faces extinction because of the pressure from standard Mandarin, spoken dialects of Chinese, and standard Vietnamese. In order to protect and promulgate the Jing language, a group of local old intellectuals have decided to use Nôm characters as a tool of transmission of the Jing language. The present article, based on materials collected during two fieldwork trips to the “three islands area of the Jing nationality” in 2015, for the first time discusses the reasons why the Nôm characters have been chosen as the tool of language transmission as well as the ways of transmission of the Nôm characters themselves. In comparative perspective, the Nôm characters belonging to the Chinese characters system, unlike Romanization of modern Vietnamese (the so-called quốc ngữ) cannot represent the exact pronunciation of the Jing language, and therefore cannot offer advantage in the task of transmission of this language. The author argues that the choice of the Nôm characters as the tool of the Jing language transmission is caused by considerations of the survival of this ethnicity; it emphasizes original connections between Nôm and Chinese characters, as well as the status of the Jing as a part of the big Han nation.