Chinese handwriting is currently at an intriguing stage of transition, triggered in part by a sharp decline in everyday use, in China as well as globally. The documentation and analysis of this transition is opening up a fascinating new field of research, ever hungry for authentic data and better methods.

The special, even sacred position of scripts in cultural identifications has impacted the way they are being studied around the world. Despite the rise of modern linguistics as a research discipline since the early 20th century, principles from traditional fields such as philology and calligraphy have been tenacious, creating considerable pitfalls for descriptive and empirical research into writing systems — including the study of Chinese scripts.

I present a sinographic perspective on the study of Chinese handwriting, defining “sinographics” as the linguistically informed study of written manifestations of Sinitic languages, such as Chinese characters; or alphabetical orthographies; or linguistic systems of transcription. The scope of the sinographic field explicit­ly includes adaptations of Chinese scripts for languages outside of the Sinitic group, e.g. for Korean, Japanese or Vietnamese.

In terms of data, I will present some of my materials, and reflect on problems of live data collection and classification. In terms of method, I intend to demonstrate how processing and analyzing these data depends on careful observation and clear-cut research questions. In our discussion, I hope to do a quick check on the status of Chinese handwriting in academic curricula.

Jeroen Wiedenhof was trained as a linguist and sinologist in Leiden and Beijing. He works as a teacher and researcher at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL). Apart from his work in Chinese and general linguistics, he has published on the origin and evolution of language in humankind..