Bernhard Karlgren - Education and First Journey To China

Education and First Journey To China

A native of Jönköping, Karlgren showed ability in linguistics from a young age, and was interested in Sweden's dialects and traditional folk stories. He published his first scholarly article at the age of 16 on the dialect of the Swedish province of Dalarna. He studied Russian at Uppsala University under Johan August Lundell, a Slavicist interested in comparative linguistics. After graduating in 1909, Karlgren went to St. Petersburg to continue studying. While in St. Petersburg, Karlgren won a grant to study Chinese dialects, even though he had no background in Chinese.

Karlgren lived in China from 1910 to 1912. He achieved basic fluency and literacy after only a few months of study, and prepared a questionnaire of 3,100 Chinese characters to gather information on Chinese dialects. After his grant money ran out, Karlgren supported himself by teaching French and, famously, English, which he had never been taught but had picked up from English-speaking passengers on the ship from Europe to China. He eventually gathered data on 19 different dialects of Mandarin Chinese, as well as Shanghainese, the Fuzhou dialect of Min Dong, and Cantonese, plus the Vietnamese and Japanese pronunciations of the characters in his questionnaire.