试论早期南洋华文教材的基本面貌与当代价值

Review of Early Nanyang Huayu Textbooks:Their Basic Features and Contemporary Values

早期南洋华文教材是中华语言文化海外传播的先驱力量,也是祖语文化传承的重要载体和宝贵资源。早期南洋华文教材数量庞大,形态多样,面貌独特,影响深广。以《新出千字文》和《孔教撮要白话》两部课本为例,展示和分析早期南洋华文教材的基本面貌和当代价值。这些教材可为编写当代华文教材提供理念参照,为重构华语变化史、华语生活史和华文教材演变史提供证据,并成为海外华语资源库的重要组成部分。应加紧对这些教材进行系统的抢救和整理,建成东南亚早期华文教材资源库,以更好地开展相关专题研究。

Early Nanyang Huayu textbooks are the pioneers in spreading Chinese and Chinese culture overseas and also his-torical resources for the inheritance of Huayu.The textbooks were large in number,diverse in form,and unique in design.They used to have a signifi cant infl uence on Huayu education among the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia.This article reviews two textbooks,The New Edition of One Thousand Characters and The Vernacular Gist of Confucianism,as examples to demon-strate the basic features and contemporary values of the early Nanyang Huayu textbooks.The article holds that these textbooks can serve as conceptual references for developing Huayu heritage textbooks,provide materials for reconstructing the historical development of Huayu and the evolution of Huayu textbooks,and thus be an important part of a corpus of Huayu resources.Therefore,in order to preserve the rich and unique features of these historical texts for future use and research,this article ar-gues that these textbooks should be systematically rescued and incorporated into a corpus of early Huayu textbooks used in Southeast Asia.