Search

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…