Guangdong Ethnic Groups and Regional Culture Research

Author: Huang Shuping, Editor-in-Chief
Publisher:
Publish Date: 1999-06-01
Features: This research topic explores the culture of different Han ethnic groups and communities in Guangdong, with a particular focus on the former. Through these studies, it becomes clear that the interaction and integration between different ethnic groups in Guangdong and their respective cultures, or between different regional groups within the same ethnic group and their distinct cultures, have constituted the important characteristics of Guangdong's ethnic groups and regional cultures from ancient times to the present. This book studies the language of Guangdong, not limited to purely linguistic discussions, but emphasizes studying the characteristics of Guangdong's language from an anthropological perspective. Language is social; language is an important cultural feature of ethnic groups, and anthropology pays more attention to the role of human factors in revealing linguistic phenomena. Before the Northern Han people migrated here, the earliest residents of present-day Guangdong spoke the Baiyue language. Although its linguistic state is forever unknowable, it is both the ancient form of the Dong-Tai languages today and must share certain similarities with the modern Dong-Tai languages. The migration of settlers from the north to the south at different times, with their different origins and distributions, has determined the pattern of Guangdong's language.