CFP for “Han’er yanyu” Special Section for Journal of Song-Yuan Studies Topic: We are looking for contributors to a special section devoted to the phenomenon of “Han’er yanyu” 漢兒言語 (also known as “Yuan baihua” 元白話 or “Yingyi” 硬譯) for the Journal of Song-Yuan Studies<https://www.songyuan.org/JSYS/index.html> (JSYS) to appear upon successful completion of peer review in issue 57 (2028). Timeline: If interested, please submit an abstract to both co-editors, Johannes S. Lotze<https://buberfellows.huji.ac.il/people/johannes-lotze> (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, johannes.lotze@mail.huji.ac.il) and Patricia Sieber<https://deall.osu.edu/people/sieber.6> (The Ohio State University, sieber.6@osu.edu) by October 15, 2026 (350–500 words). The co-editors will contact you between Oct 15 and Oct 31 with further questions and/or acceptance. The full draft version of the paper written in accordance with the JSYS style sheet<https://www.songyuan.org/Downloads/JSYSStyleSheet.pdf> will be due April 1, 2027 to the co-editors and will be submitted for peer review shortly thereafter. Please consult the CFP below to frame your inquiry. CFP: Although it is well known that the Mongol Yuan (1271–1368) was a multilingual empire, we contend that the literary, social, and political significance of that fact has yet to be fully understood in the scholarship on the cultural history of the period. As historians and linguists alike have noted, languages did not simply exist side by side, but interacted with one another in numerous and significant ways. One such linguistic variety is primarily known by its Yuan-dynasty name of “Han’er yanyu” 漢兒言語 (“Han’er language,” sometimes rendered as “Northern Chinese”), a term that appears in sources such as the 老乞大 (Chin. Lao Qida, Kor. Nogŏltae), a Yuan/Ming language primer for Koreans. The same linguistic variety (and/or related varieties) is referred to by the essentially modern term “Yuan baihua” 元白話 (“Yuan vernacular Chinese”), particularly by scholars who highlight the assumed division between so-called vernacular (baihua) and literary (wenyanwen 文言文) Chinese. Other scholars refer to texts exhibiting features associated with “Han’er yanyu” by the modern term “Yingyi” 硬譯 (“hard translation”), emphasizing the extent to which their linguistic peculiarities may have resulted from direct or close translation from Mongolian into Chinese, rather than treating them as evidence of a standalone vernacular that developed in North China through contact between speakers of Chinese and Mongolic and other non-Sinitic languages. Two foundational studies in the 1950s established “Han’er yanyu” as an object of scholarly inquiry: one a conceptual essay by the Japanese historical linguist Tatsuo Ota (1954/1988), the other a compilation of relevant inscriptions by the Chinese historian Cai Meibiao (1955/2017). Key works in linguistics that built on this foundation include Zu Shengli (2001) and Djamouri, Lamarre and Lefort (2025) among others, which acknowledge the significant influence of the Mongolic, Tungusic, Turkic, and Tibetic languages on the formation of Chinese varieties. For the proposed special section, we take a broadly cultural approach to the sociolinguistic phenomenon of “Han’er yanyu.” Although our primary focus is not linguistics per se, we welcome discussions of the linguistic characteristics of “Han’er yanyu” insofar as they bear on the themes that are of central interest to us, including statecraft, imperial self-representation, the language policies and language ideologies of political, religious, and other institutions, regional diffusion, literary practices, and their social and ethnic underpinnings. Rather than isolated technical comparisons of linguistic features, we are interested in broader historical questions. Building on ideas first advanced by Haenisch (1931), Yoshikawa (1953), De Rachewiltz (1969), and others, we are interested in examining how textualized forms of “Han’er yanyu” interacted with the conventions of Literary Sinitic prose, the emerging Chinese vernacular associated with newly textualized performance traditions, and with the development of different forms of writing in Middle Mongolian. We see this proposed body of work as part of a larger endeavor to explore how different actors shaped the transnational cultural history of Mandarin and other Northern Sinitic languages (Söderblom Saarela 2019). Questions that we are interested in include, but are not limited to, the following: Is “Han’er yanyu” a product of spoken language contact between Northern Chinese and spoken Middle Mongolian (e.g., a “contact language,” “creole,” or “pidgin”)? Or is it a written medium that emerged through the translation of written texts (the “Yingyi” hypothesis), or perhaps a combination of oral and written modalities within a multilingual environment? Does it exist as a discrete language with consistent grammatical and lexical features, or is it better understood as a continuum of linguistic features distributed across multiple languages and registers? In other words, do “Han’er yanyu,” “Yuan baihua,” and “Yingyi” essentially refer to the same phenomenon, to related and overlapping phenomena, or to relatively distinct linguistic varieties? Historically, do its roots reach back to the settlement of Northern China (“borderland”) by steppe peoples during the Six Dynasties period (220–589 CE), or did its emergence in the oral and/or written domains mainly result from Yuan rule? Who used “Han’er yanyu”? Was “Han’er yanyu” anyone’s native language (or one of their native languages), or was it specifically acquired to facilitate oral and/or written communication between different groups of people? What was the status of “Han’er yanyu” among different language communities? Was it a prestige language imbued with special powers? Was it considered a vulgar and demotic tongue? Or was it primarily a bureaucratic and educational medium designed to communicate specific content to certain audiences? What, if any, aesthetic potency and rhetorical power was it believed to possess? What was the relationship of “Han’er yanyu” to other contemporaneous written traditions and textual genres, particularly written Middle Mongolian (e.g., Secret History of the Mongols, Menggu mishi 蒙古秘史, thirteenth century), Yuan-printed zaju and other entertainment-related literature (e.g, Thirty Yuan-Printed Plays, Yuankan zaju sanshi zhong 元刊雜劇三十種, mid-fourteenth century), Chinese classics written in Literary Sinitic (Plain Explanation of the Classic of Filial Love, Xiaojing zhijie 孝經直解, 1308), administrative prose (Yuan Dynasty Administrative Statutes, Yuan dianzhang 元典章, 1320-22), and imperial edicts (A Collection of Vernacular Inscriptions from the Yuan Dynasty, Yuandai baihua beiji lu 元代白話碑集錄, 1955, rev. 2017)? What does the interaction of “Han’er yanyu” with other written traditions reveal about the linguistic and cultural dynamics of the Yuan period? And, last but not least, how did the use of “Han’er yanyu” relate to processes of empire-building? What afterlives did “Han’er yanyu” experience following the establishment of the Ming dynasty (1368), both in the Sinitic borderlands and in the Chinese heartland? These questions are important because “Han’er yanyu” offers a unique window onto the everyday realities of the Yuan as a multilingual empire and the complex interactions among language, translation, literary production, and political authority. Addressing them will deepen our understanding of the linguistic, cultural, and political transformations that accompanied the rise of the Yuan and shaped its transition to the Ming. By bringing together linguistic, literary, cultural, and historical perspectives, this special section seeks to advance the study of language contact, language change, and multilingual governance in imperial China, while contributing to broader discussions of how languages, texts, and imperial institutions mutually shaped one another in premodern Eurasia.