In China, although the theoretical explanation of the relationship between language and culture is not as brilliant as that in the west, the tradition of studying language by combining culture has a long history. For example, the investigation and records of * * * dialect in Yang Xiong dialect in the Western Han Dynasty reflect the cultural differences between different regions, such as four volumes of clothing, five volumes of sericulture and ten volumes of poultry. Through the names of silkworm bookshelves in different dialects recorded in the fifth volume, we can get a general understanding of the distribution of sericulture in the north and south, which provides strong linguistic evidence for studying the cultural geography of the Han Dynasty. Ancient exegetics originated from Er Ya in the Western Han Dynasty and Shuo Wen Jie Zi by Xu Shen in the Eastern Han Dynasty. In the process of collecting and analyzing words, a lot of cultural information is preserved. For example, the kinship and its appellation recorded in Er Ya Qin Shi are important materials for understanding the ancient marriage system and patriarchal clan system. Another example is Xu Chong's introduction to Xu Shen's "Six Arts Group Books". "Six arts group books teach its meaning, but there are endless ghosts and gods, mountains and rivers, animals and plants, birds and animals, strange chores, royal etiquette and secular personnel."

However, it was the first western scholars who consciously combined China's language with national culture, such as French M. Lan Yan, Ma Bole and American B. Laufer. At the beginning of this century, they discussed the evolution of the oriental naming system and the interaction between China and ancient civilizations in Central Asia and West Asia, leaving behind many related works. In 1930s, some minority linguists in China also began to conduct field research on the relationship between language and culture, and Luo Xianglin, Liu Xifan and Xu successively published important works. In particular, Xu's Textual Research on Thai-Zhuang Language and Cantonese (Zhonghua Book Company, 1936) and People's History of the Crossing River Basin (Zhonghua Book Company, 1939) involve a lot of linguistic contents, but unfortunately, due to the author's ignorance of linguistics, the recorded language materials are not very accurate. Pan Maoding's anthology The Origin and Culture of China (Zhi Zhi Bookstore), published by 1947, is a monograph on ci culture. He studied "the origin of China culture" and "the confluence of Chinese and foreign cultures" by textual research on etymology.

Since then, China's most outstanding research achievement on culture and language is Luo Changpei's Language and Culture (1950, Peking University Publishing House). Although this book is short in chapters and depth, it is still worthy of being a "pioneering work" of cultural linguistics. The author thinks that "this road is the new direction of China"; And hope that "it can build a bridge between linguistics and anthropology." In fact, the author did use this book to "pave the way for a new way of linguistics in China" (Luo Changpei's Language and Culture). Unfortunately, in the next 30 years, there are few people on the road to cultural linguistics.