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John DeFrancis (Bridgeport, Connecticut, August 31, 1911 – Honolulu, Hawai’i, January 2, 2009) was a renowned teacher and linguist of Chinese. He was also a socially committed and politically active individual who was unusually adventurous and gregarious. DeFrancis’s father was a laborer and his mother was illiterate, the memory of which later spurred him to sympathize with Chinese workers and peasants who could not read and write. DeFrancis’s career as a teacher and scholar of Chinese may be divided into four stages: student, teacher, researcher, and lexicogra…

“Digraphia” signifies a situation in which a single language is written with two scripts. Perhaps the best-known instance of digraphia in the world today is that of Hindī-Urdū, which is essentially one language, but is called Hindī when written in the Devanāgarī script and Urdū when written in the Perso-Arabic script. In Chinese, digraphia is referred to as shuāngwénzhì 雙文制. “Digraphia” is to be distinguished from “diglossia” ( shuāngyǔ zhì 雙語制), which is the concurrent use of two different languages within a single population. A good example of diglossia would b…

(Sinkiang, Xinjiang), IRANIAN ELEMENTS IN. A version of this article is available in print Volume V, Fascicle 5, pp. 460-484 CHINESE TURKESTAN i. Geographical Overview The eastern portion of the Central Asian land mass (see central asia i. geography), between 70° and 100° E and 25° and 45° N, encompasses Chinese Turkestan, now Sinkiang (Xin-jiang) Uighur Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China, with the Tarim basin and the high plateaus and mountains surrounding it (capital Urumchi [Wu-lu-mu-chi]); Tibet (ca…