Feeding Language Acquisition

This article explores the concept of gastrolinguistics through the examination of Jesuit missionaries’ encounters with Chinese culture during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. The research focuses on three texts created by the missionaries for language acquisition: Dicionário Português-Chinês, Notitia Linguae Sinicae, and Instruction pour les visites de mandarins. These texts not only facilitated the missionaries’ Chinese linguistic learning but also deepened their understanding of Chinese cultural values and social norms, ultimately enhancing their missionary work. This finally leads to the elucidation of functions of gastrolinguistics in interculture encounters between Jesuit missionaries and Chinese from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. By decoding how language and food were intricately interwoven in the language learning materials, this article explains how missionaries’ gastrolinguistic experiences conveyed both food and language knowledge. These experiences included intercultural encounters, highlighting how food and language shaped missionaries’ thoughts, feelings, and actions according to the values and traditions of Chinese society.