The “Ancestry” Challenge in Chinese Linguistics
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Foreword by William S-Y. Wang 王士元

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As Professor Kong Jiangping mentions in his Preface, the present volume may be regarded as a successor to an earlier JCL monograph #8, entitled The Ancestry of the Chinese Language, based on a two-day symposium held at the City University of Hong Kong in July 1994.
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The present volume is JCL monograph #29, with a slightly different title, The Ancestry of the Languages and Peoples of China. With a separation of over two decades between the two monographs, there is quite a turn-over in the authors. While Paul Li graces these monographs again to discuss language families in Southeast Asia, monograph #29 is strengthened by many fresh faces, young linguists with various connections to Peking University. This is of course a good sign—that a new generation of scholars in China have come of age to take up the challenge of understanding where they and their languages come from. In addition, contributions from several more seasoned scholars—George van Driem, Randy LaPolla, and Jackson Sun—make the monograph all the more valuable. Since the monograph has “peoples” in its title, it is especially appropriate that van Driem should discuss “The ancestry of the Chinese people based on language and genes”.
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It is well-known that East and Southeast Asia is a ‘linguistic area’, in the sense of Emeneau, M. (1956) , where for millennia migrating peoples fuse and split, again and again, as rhythmically stated in the opening chapter of the Sānguó yănyì三国演义: Tiānxià dàshì, fēn jiŭ bì hé, hé jiŭ bì fēn 天下大勢, 分久必合, 合久必分. In studying language relationships in China, the two dominant legacies are from Indo-European linguistics, centered on the family tree as the primary model, and from Chinese philology, where a Sino-centric perspective has blurred the vital importance of the numerous minority languages over the millennia. To move forward now, we must no longer be constrained by these two legacies, even though they have both combined to give us an indispensable foundation to build upon for many decades. We must give adequate attention, long overdue, to language mixing over the millennia; and we must keep fully in mind numerous languages have mixed intensively with each other along many dimensions during this time, Sinitic being just one of them. Chinese Linguistics is gradually building up a substantive literature on this important challenge of “ancestry”. The two papers on Sino-Tibetan, and this monograph brought together by Professor Kong are the latest important contributions. However, the challenge of understanding clearly where we and our languages come from is an immense one. A remarkable scientific breakthrough like the discovery of Ancient DNA may be too much to hope for in linguistics. Nonetheless, we will need to build carefully upon past scholarship in our own field as well as coordinate closely with geneticists and archeologists if we are to ever succeed in this quest.

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