The History of the Nushu Language

A unique and fascinating ancient writing system used exclusively by local women in the mountainous areas of Hunan Province in central China, Nushu (known as woman’s language) is a language that can give us a fascinating insight into the lives of ancient Chinese women.

For the most part in Chinese history, women and their lives were pushed to the background. Chinese society, both in ancient times and even today, is a very patrilineal society. Women were expected to follow the men in their lives – their fathers before they were married, then their husbands and afterwards their sons. Women were not expected to learn to read and write, this was left for the men of the house to learn.

Nushu employs a unique script based on the shapes of the Chinese characters but comprising neither ideographs nor phonetic letters. It differs from that of Nanshu (male writing) and the origins of this type of writing is still unknown. According to some scholars, they suggest that it is the “vestige of an ancient language dating back to the early Qin dynasty, while others see it as a special written code that local women created during the Min or Qing dynasty from Chinese characters and traditional decorative designs in order to record the local dialects”.  

The Nushu written language is a record of oral works that have been passed down from generation to generation among the local people of Jiang Yong region in Hunan Province, and thus they preserve their original nature as oral literature. The language is based “on Xiangnan tuhua, the language of everyday use in ten counties of southeast Hunan, including Jiangyong County. Nushu culture is specific to the Shangjiangxu region in northern Jiangyong County. Xiangnan tuhua belongs to the Han Chinese language group, although it betrays the influence of neighbouring non-Han minority languages”.

The language, both written and oral, is based on the existing spoken language of the region, but it can be spoken in older pronunciations based on classical Chinese (wenyan) that would have to be taught to each generation of women in the region.

According to the few scholars that have undertook the daunting task of deciphering the language, the Nushu script is not divided into lines – only by vocalising the characters can the language become ‘readable’ and the women who speak Nushu do not distinguish between reading and writing it.

The scholar Xie Zhimin states that Nushu is a language that is remnant of the oracle bone script, which disappeared sometime between the 11th and 5th centuries BCE. There is no evidence of its survival anywhere in Chinas after this time and Xie Zhimin’s theories have merit.

According to Gong Zhebing and Zhou Shuoqi, Nushu was derived from script used by the Yao people, a script “retained only by women during the process of signification”. Another scholar, Chiang, states that it is his belief that the shapes and strokes of the Nushu language were “borrowed largely from regular Chinese script (hanzi). Of the 719 distinct graphs he identifies, 439 (61%) appear to be derivative from hanzi graphs”.

From looking at the evidence and the theories of its origination, it seems clear that we do not know precisely when and where Nushu emerged from.

It has been argued as to who used Nushu. The theory that uneducated women in ancient China could have devised a script as complicated as Nushu has not been met with a great deal of support by academics.

During imperial times, only a handful of women were literate in the Jiangyong County. One myth about the origin of the Nushu script states that it was devised by some women who had been educated. She or they (it is still unclear) took a number of Chinese characters to create a secret written code for a select circle of reader. As Nushu was passed on by mother to daughter, generation by generation, the script was “the remoteness of the com-munity using this script,t he complete lack of standardization, and the strong tendency to use homophones to record the changing patterns of actual speech would have accentuated the gradual divergence of niishu from Chinese script”. It has been suggested that the stitch forms in needlework might have contributed to the inspiration behind this.

Throughout history, women were praised for their literacy in Nushu, by both men and women. The skill of reading, writing and speaking Nushu was said to strengthen the bonds between women who called it the sisterhood. Men were highly proud of their women who were literate in it. Scholars studying the language in recent decades in Jiangyong County found a man who had been taught the language by his wife.

Despite the fact that scholars still cannot answer the question of when the script was devised, it is crystal clear that Nushu was passed on and modified by generations of women to note their particular traditions.

Bibliography:

McLaren, Anne (1996) Women’s Voices and Textuality: Chastity and Abduction in Chinese Nushu Writing, Modern China, Sage Publications, Ltd.

Shouhua, Liu & Xiaoshen, Hu (1994) Folk Narrative Literature in Chinese Nushu: An Amazing Discovery, Asian Folklore Studies, Nanzan institute for Religion and Culture.