Linguistic Contributions of Protestant Missionaries in South China: An Overview of Cantonese Religious and Pedagogical Publications (1828–1939)

Robert Morrison 馬禮遜, the first Protestant missionary to China, came to Guangdong as an employee of the East India Company and with the support of the London Missionary Society in 1807. Amongst his path-breaking translation work, he published the first Chinese Bible (Shen Tian Shengshu 神天聖書) in 1823. As many foreigners in Guangdong could not speak Cantonese, Morrison compiled a three-volume Cantonese learning aid, A Vocabulary of the Canton Dialect (1828), using specifically Cantonese Chinese characters and his Cantonese romanization system. In consequence, missionaries translated Christian literature and the Bible into Cantonese, for they realized that proficiency in Cantonese was essential for proselytization among ordinary people. Over the past twenty years, we have collected and identified around 260 Cantonese works written and translated by Western Protestant missionaries, and these Cantonese writings can be categorized as follows: 1. dictionaries; 2. textbooks; 3. Christian literature; 4. Bibles; and 5. miscellanea. In the study of the Western Protestant missions, their linguistic contribution is relatively under-represented. Through analyzing the phonological, lexical, and grammatical features of early Cantonese expressions in these selected missionary works, we strive to highlight the missionaries’ contributions to the diachronic study of the Cantonese language in modern southern China.