| The Chinese language (汉语/漢語, 华语/華語, or 中文;
Pinyin: Hànyǔ, Huáyǔ, or Zhōngwén) is a tonal language and a member of the Sino-Tibetan family of
languages. Although Chinese is often regarded for cultural reasons as a single language, its regional variation is comparable to those of Romance languages. However, all of the users of spoken varieties of Chinese have always used a common
formal written language, which since the beginning of the twentieth
century has been Vernacular Chinese (based on Mandarin), written using a nearly identical set of Chinese characters.
About one-fifth of the world speaks some form of Chinese as their native language, making it the language with the most native
speakers. The Chinese language, spoken in the form of Standard
Mandarin, is the official language of the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China on Taiwan, as well as one of four official
languages of Singapore, and one of six official languages of the United Nations. Spoken in the form of Standard Cantonese, Chinese is one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macao (together with Portuguese).
The terms and concepts used by Chinese to think about language are different from those used in the West, partly because of
the unifying effects of the Chinese characters used in writing,
and partly because of differences in the political and social development of China in comparison with Europe. Whereas after the fall of the Roman Empire,
Europe fragmented into small nation-states, the identities of which were often defined by language, China was able to preserve
cultural and political unity through the same period, and maintained a common written language throughout its entire history,
despite the fact that its actual diversity in spoken language has always been comparable to Europe. As a result, Chinese make a
sharp distinction between Written language (wen/文) and Spoken language (yu/語). The
concept of a distinct and unified combination of both written and spoken forms of language is much less strong in Chinese than in
the West. One uniform written language continues to be used (with a few exceptions) instead of written versions of the spoken
languages.
Spoken Chinese
The maps on the right depict the subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within Chinese. The seven main groups are
Mandarin; Wu (includes Shanghainese); Xiang; Gan; Hakka; Cantonese (or Yue); and Min (which linguists further divide into of 5 to 7 subdivisions on
its own, which are all mutually unintelligible). Linguists who distinguish ten instead of seven major groups would then separate
Jin from Mandarin, Pinghua from Cantonese, and Hui from Wu. There
are also many smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect, spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua 乡话 (not to be confused with Xiang 湘), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou
Tuhua, spoken in northern Guangdong. See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of
individual dialects within these large, broad groupings.
There is also Standard Mandarin, the official standard used by
the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China (Taiwan), and
Singapore. Standard Mandarin is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing, and the governments
intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. It is therefore used in
government, in the media, and in instruction in schools, even where it is not the language of the people.
There is a lot of controversy around the terminology used to describe the subdivisions of Chinese, with some preferring to
call Chinese a language and its subdivisions dialects, and others preferring to call Chinese a language
family and its subdivisions languages. There is more on this debate below. On
the other hand, even though Dungan is very closely related to
Mandarin, not many people consider it "Chinese", because it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by people outside of China who are not considered Chinese in any sense.
It is common for speakers of Chinese to be able to speak several variations of the language. Typically in southern China, a
person will be able to speak the official Standard Mandarin, the
local dialect, and occasionally either speak or understand another regional dialect, such as Cantonese. Such polyglots will frequently code switch between Standard Mandarin and the local dialect, depending on
situation. Sometimes, the various dialects are mixed from other dialects, depending on geographical influence. A person living in
Taiwan, for example, will commonly mix pronunciations, phrases, and words from Standard Mandarin and Taiwanese, and this mixture is considered socially appropriate under many circumstances.
Is Chinese a language or a family of languages?
Spoken Chinese comprises many regional and often mutually unintelligible variants. In the West, many people are familiar with
the fact that the Romance languages all derive from Latin and so have many underlying features in common while being mutually unintelligible. The
linguistic evolution of Chinese is similar, while the socio-political context is quite different.
In Europe, political fragmentation created independent states which are roughly the size of Chinese provinces. This created a
political desire to create separate cultural and literary standards between nation-states and to standardize the language within
a nation-state. In China, a single cultural and literary standard (Classical Chinese and later, Vernacular
Chinese) continued to exist while at the same time spoken language between different cities and counties continued to
diverge, much in the same manner European languages diverged from each other, as the result of the sheer scale of the country,
and the obstruction of communication by mountains and geography.
As a case in point, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than flat North China. There's even a saying in
Chinese, 南船北馬 (pinyin: nán chuán běi mǎ), meaning
"Boats in the South and horses in the North." The flat plains of the northern China allows one to cross with relative ease using
a horse, but the dense vegetation and numerous mountains and rivers of the south prevented this. In southern China, the most
efficient means of transportation was a boat. For instance, Wuzhou is a city that lies about 120 miles upstream from Guangzhou, the capital of the Guangdong province in the south. On
the other hand, Taishan is only 60 miles southwest of Guangzhou, but several rivers
must be crossed in order to get there. Because of this, the dialect spoken in Taishan, relative to the dialect spoken in Wuzhou,
has actually diverged more from the Standard Cantonese spoken
in Guangzhou (Ramsey, 1987).
This diversity in spoken forms and commonality in written form has created a linguistic context that is very different from
that of Europe. For example, in Europe, the language of a nation-state was usually standardized to be similar to that of the
capital, making it easy, for example, to classify a language as French or Spanish. This had the effect of sharpening linguistic
differences. A farmer on one side of the border would start to model his speech after Paris while a farmer on the other side
would model his speech after Madrid. Moreover, the written language would be modelled after the language in the capital, and the
use of local speech or mixtures of local speech and the national standard would be considered substandard and erroneous. In
China, this standardization did not happen.
More relevant to China's situation is that of India. Though India has historically not
been as unified as China, parts of it speaking multiple languages have long been united in various states, and many of the
languages have
not until the last few decades been standardized through political centralization. Sanskrit long played a role as a common written language. In India, however, the status of the different
descendant languages of Sanskrit as separate languages is not in question; 13 of them are official languages, and the borders of
Indian states were even re-drawn several decades ago to conform to those of the languages.
Few linguists would seriously hold that Cantonese and Mandarin are the same language in the way they use the term, but for the
popular classification of a speech variety as a language or dialect, linguistic considerations are often not as important as
cultural or nationalistic ones. In self-description, Chinese people generally consider Chinese to be one single language, partly
because of the common written language. In order to describe dialects, Chinese people typically use the speech of
location, for example Beijing dialect
(北京話/北京话) for the speech of Beijing or Shanghai dialect (上海話/上海话) for the speech of Shanghai. Often
there is not even any awareness among laypeople that these various "dialects" are then categorized into "languages" based on
mutual intelligibility, though in areas of greater linguistic diversity (such as the southeast) people do think of dialects as
being grouped into categories like Wu, Hakka. So although it is true that many parts of north China are
quite homogeneous in language, while in parts of south China, major cities can have dialects that are only marginally
intelligible even to close neighbours, there is a tendency to regard all of these as "Chinese dialects" — equal
subvariations under a single Chinese language. As with the concept of Chinese language itself, the divisions between different
"dialects" are mostly geographical rather than based on linguistic distance. For example, Sichuan dialect is considered as
being distinct from Beijing dialect in the same way that Cantonese is, despite the fact that linguistically Sichuan dialect and Beijing dialect
are both considered Mandarin dialects by linguists while Cantonese is not.
Due to this self-perception of a single Chinese language by the majority of its speakers, some linguists respect this
terminology, and use the word "language" for Chinese and "dialect" for Cantonese, but most follow the intelligibility requirement
and consider Chinese to be a group of related languages, since these languages are not at all mutually intelligible, and show
variation comparable to the Romance languages. As with many areas that have been linguistically diverse for a long time, whether
the speech of a particular area of China should be considered a language in its own right or a dialect of another is not always
clear, and many of the languages do not have sharp boundaries between them. The Ethnologue lists fourteen (http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=1270), but the number varies between seven
and seventeen depending on how strict the intelligibility criterion is.
The distinction between a single language and a language family has major political overtones, and the amount of emotion put
into this issue arises from political implications. To some, describing Chinese as different languages implies that China should
actually be considered several different nations, and challenges the notion that there is a single Han Chinese "race". For this reason, some Chinese are uncomfortable
with the idea that Chinese is not a single language, as this perception might legitimize secessionist movements. Supporters of
Taiwanese independence do tend to be strong promoters
of Min- and Hakka-language education. Furthermore, for some, the implication that describing Chinese as multiple languages is
more correct carries with it the implication that the notion of a single Chinese language and by implication a single Chinese
state or nationality is backward, oppressive, artificial, and out of touch with reality.
However, the linkages between ethnicity, politics, and language can be complex. For example, many Wu, Min, Hakka, and
Cantonese speakers would consider their own tongues to be separate spoken languages, and the Han Chinese race to be a single entity, do not consider these two positions to be contradictory; instead they
consider the Han Chinese to be an entity that is, and has always been, characterized by great internal diversity. Moreover, the
government of the People's Republic of China
officially states that China is a multinational nation, and that the very term "Chinese" refers to a broader concept called
Zhonghua minzu that incorporates groups that do not natively
speak Chinese at all, such as Tibetans, Uighurs, and Mongols. (Those that do speak Chinese and are considered
"ethnic Chinese" from an outsider point of view are called Han Chinese
— this is seen as an ethnic and cultural concept, not a political one.) Similarly on Taiwan, one can find supporters of
Chinese unification who are also interested in promoting
local language, and supporters of Taiwan independence who have little interest in the topic. And in an analogy to the mainland
Chinese idea of Zhonghua minzu, the Taiwanese identity also incorporates Taiwanese aborigines, who are not at all considered Han Chinese because they speak Austronesian languages, predate Han Chinese migration to Taiwan, and are culturally linked to other Austronesian-speaking peoples such as
the Polynesians.
Written Chinese
The relationship between the Chinese spoken and written languages is complex. This complexity is compounded by the fact that
the numerous variations of spoken Chinese have gone through centuries of evolution since at least the late-Han Dynasty. However, written Chinese has changed much less than the spoken
language.
Until the 20th century, most formal Chinese writing was done in wenyan (文言), translated as Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese, which was very different from any
of the spoken varieties of Chinese in much the same way that Classical
Latin is different from modern Romance languages. Since the
May Fourth Movement of 1919, the formal standard for written Chinese was changed to baihua (白話/白话), or
Vernacular Chinese, which, while not completely identical to
the grammar and vocabulary of modern spoken Mandarin, was based mostly on modern spoken Mandarin. The term Standard Written
Chinese now refers to Vernacular Chinese.
Chinese characters are understood as morphemes that are independent of phonetic
change. Thus, although the number one is "yi" in Mandarin, "yat" in Cantonese and "tsit" in Hokkien, they derive from a
common ancient Chinese word and still share an identical character: 一. Nevertheless, the orthographies of Chinese dialects
are not identical. The vocabularies used in the different dialects have also diverged. In addition, while literary vocabulary is
often shared among all dialects (at least in orthography; the readings are different), colloquial vocabularies are often
different. Colloquially written Chinese usually involves the use of "dialectal characters" which may not be understood in other
dialects or characters that are considered archaic in baihua.
Cantonese is unique among non-Mandarin regional languages in
having a widely used written colloquial standard. In contrast, the other regional languages do not have such widely used
alternative written standards. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging. Even still,
Cantonese speakers will use standard written Chinese in most formal written communications.
Chinese characters
The Chinese written language employs Chinese characters
(漢字/汉字 pinyin hànzì), which is a systems based on logograms, where each symbol represents a morpheme (a meaningful unit of language). Chinese characters appear to have originated in the Shang dynasty. Initially, characters were pictures of their meanings, but as time
passed, shapes became stylized and more complicated measures were adopted to write down words expressing more abstract concepts.
Today, the majority of characters today contain one element (the phonetic) that gives (or at least once gave) a fairly
good indication of the pronunciation, and another component (the radical) that gives an indication of meaning. Pictorial
resemblances to real-life objects has mostly been lost through stylization.
Many styles of Chinese calligraphic writing developed over
the centuries, such as zhuanshu (篆書, seal-script), caoshu (草書, grass script), lishu (隸書, official script) and kaishu (楷書, standard script).
In Japan and Korea, Han characters were
adopted and integrated into their languages and became Kanji and Hanja, respectively. Japan still uses Kanji as an integral part of its writing system; however, Korea's use of
Hanja has diminished (it is not used at all in North Korea).
There are currently two standards for printed Chinese
characters. One is the Traditional
system, used in Taiwan. Mainland China and Singapore use the Simplified system (developed by the PRC government
in the 1950s), which uses simplified forms for many of the more complicated characters. For Hong Kong and Macau, they use mainly the Traditional system, but for some
characters, they have adopted the simplified form. Most simplified versions were derived from established, though obscure,
historically-established simplifications. In Taiwan, many simplifications are used when characters are handwritten, but in
printing traditional characters are the norm. In addition, most Chinese use some personal simplifications.
History
Most linguists classify all of the variations of Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, called Proto-Sino-Tibetan, similar to
Proto Indo-European, from which the Sinitic and
Tibeto-Burman languages descended. The relations between Chinese and the other Sino-Tibetan languages is still unclear and an
area of active research, as is the attempt to reconstruct proto-Sino-Tibetan. The main difficulty in this effort is that, while
there is very good documentation that allows us to reconstruct the ancient sounds of Chinese, there is no written documentation
concerning the division between proto-Sino-Tibetan and Chinese. In addition, many of the languages that would allow us to
reconstruct proto-Sino-Tibetan are very poorly documented or understood.
Categorization of the development of Chinese is a subject of scholarly debate. One of the first systems was devised by the
Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren; what follows is a modern
revision of his system.
Old Chinese (上古漢語), sometimes known as
'Archaic Chinese', was the language common during the early and middle Zhou Dynasty (11th to 7th centuries B.C.), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze
artifacts, the poetry of the Shijing, the history of the Shujing, and portions of the Yijing (I Ching). Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qing dynasty philologists. The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese
characters also provide hints to their Old Chinese pronunciations. Old Chinese was not wholly uninflected. It possessed a rich
sound system in which aspiration or rough breathing differentiated the consonants.
Middle Chinese (中古漢語) was the language
used during the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties (7th through 10th centuries
A.D.). It can be divided into an early period, to which the 切韻 'Qieyun'
rhyme table (A.D. 601) relates, and a late period in the 10th, which the
廣韻 'Guangyun' rhyme
table reflects. Bernhard Karlgren called this phase 'Ancient
Chinese'. Linguists are confident in having a good reconstruction of how Middle Chinese sounded. The evidence for the
pronunciation of Middle Chinese comes from several sources: modern dialect variations, rhyming dictionaries, and foreign
transliterations. Just as Proto-Indo-European can be reconstructed from modern Indo-European languages, so can Middle Chinese be
reconstructed from modern dialects. In addition, ancient Chinese philologists devoted a great amount of effort in summarizing the
Chinese phonetic system through "rhyming tables", and these tables serve as a basis for the work of modern linguists. Finally,
Chinese phonetic translations of foreign words also provide plenty of clues about the nature of Middle Chinese phonetics.
However, all reconstruction is tentative; scholars have shown, for example, that trying to reconstruct modern Cantonese from the
rhymes of modern Cantopop would give a very inaccurate picture of the language.
The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. The language tree
shown here shows how the present main divisions of the Chinese language developed out of an early common language. Comparison
with the map above will give some idea of the complexities that have been left out of the tree. For instance, the Min language
that is centered in Fujian Province contains five subdivisions, and the so-called northern language Bei yu (which is called
Mandarin in the West), also contains named subdivisions, such as Yunnan hua and Sichuan hua.
Most Chinese living in northern China, in Sichuan, and, actually, in a broad arc from the northeast (Manchuria) to the southwest (Yunnan), use various
Mandarin dialects as their home language. (See the three regions colored
yellow and brown in the map above.) The prevalence of Mandarin throughout northern China is largely the result of geography,
namely the plains of north China. By contrast, the mountains and rivers of southern China have promoted linguistic diversity. The
presence of Mandarin in Sichuan is largely due to a plague in the 12th
century. This plague, which may have been related to the Black Death,
depopulated the area, leading to later settlement from north China.
Until the mid-20th century, most Chinese living in southern China did
not speak any Mandarin. However, despite the mix of officials and commoners speaking various Chinese dialects, Nanjing Mandarin
became dominant at least during the officially Manchu-speaking Qing Empire. Since the 17th century, the Empire had set up Orthoepy Academies (正音書院 Zhengyin Shuyuan) in an attempt to make pronunciation
conform to the Beijing standard (Beijing was the capital of Qing), but these attempts had little success. The Nanjing Mandarin
standard was finally replaced in the imperial court with Beijing Mandarin during the last 50 years of the Qing Dynasty in the
late 19th century. For the general population, although variations of Mandarin were already widely spoken in China then, a single
standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to speak their regionalects for
every aspect of life. The new Beijing Mandarin court standard was thus fairly limited.
This situation changed with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC) of an elementary school education system committed to
teaching Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken fluently by most people in Mainland China and in Taiwan. In Hong Kong, the language of education and formal speech remains Cantonese, but Mandarin is becoming increasingly influential.
Influence on other languages
Chinese is a member of the Sino-Tibetan family, and
so is related to Tibetan and Burmese, but genetically unrelated to other neighbouring languages, such as Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese. However, these languages (and their associated cultures) were strongly influenced by Chinese in
the course of history. Korean and Japanese both have writing systems employing Chinese characters, which are called Hanja and Kanji, respectively. In South Korea, the
Hangul alphabet is generally used, but Hanja is
used as a sort of boldface (In North Korea, Hanja has been discontinued.) Japan has thought of abandoning the use of
Chinese characters since the 20th century, but Chinese characters are
deeply rooted in Japanese culture and have not been abolished. Vietnamese also generally stopped the use of Chinese characters but Chinese loanwords can still easily
be seen in the Vietnamese modern phonetic alphabet.
Phonology
Almost all varieties of spoken Chinese use tones, where a word is
distinguished not only by its consonants and vowels, but also by the intonation with which the word is pronounced. A few dialects of north China may have as few
as three tones, while some dialects in south China have up to 6 or 10 tones, depending on how one counts. One exception is the
Shanghai dialect, in which the tonal system has evolved into a
two-toned pitch accent system.
See articles on individual spoken varieties for detailed information. Information on how to pronounce Romanized Chinese is in
the article Pinyin, which is the dominant method of writing Standard Mandarin in the Roman alphabet. Information on how to pronounce
other romanization systems or other dialects are given in their respective articles.
Grammar
In general, all spoken varieties Chinese are isolating
languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather
than morphology (changes in the form of the
word, such as conjugation).
See Chinese grammar for the grammar of Standard Mandarin (the standardized Chinese spoken language), and the
articles on other varieties of Chinese for their respective grammars.
Related topics
References
External links
- The Chinese
Outpost: (http://www.chinese-outpost.com)Language learning site centered
around an “Introduction to Mandarin Chinese” tutorial that aims to demystify the Chinese Language—in everyday
language, not academese—with units focused on Pronunciation, Characters, and Grammar.
- Zhongwen.com: (http://www.zhongwen.com)Chinese to English dictionary and other resources presented in
English; searchable by English meanings; Chinese text displayed as graphics (i.e. does not require any Chinese font).
- MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary (http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=chardict)
- Sheik's
Cantonese Forum (http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/phorum/) Forums for Cantonese
Learner
- Chinese Pinyin English Dictionary (http://www.asinah.org/travel-guides/chinese.html)
- Oneaday.org (http://www.oneaday.org) One Chinese idiom a day (simplified and traditional characters) with
pinyin transliteration and English translation.
- Shanghainese (a Wu Chinese
dialect) (http://www.zanhe.com/): a project to introduce and promote the
Shanghai dialect. In the works.
- Wu-Chinese.org (http://www.wu-chinese.org/) (江南雅音话吴语):
Introduction, statistical data, vocal records, dialectmaps and literature datum of Wu Chinese
- Chinese
Linguistics (http://www.unet.univie.ac.at/~a9305416/): Sites on Chinese
linguistics (in English).
- Chinese Characters Dictionary (http://www.chineselanguage.org/CCDICT/index.html): supports Japanese, Korean, Cantonese,
Hakka etc.
- Chinese Language and Culture
Forums: (http://www.chinese-forums.com/) An online community.
- Listing of Chinese dialects in Ethnologue (http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=1270:)
- Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks (http://deall.ohio-state.edu/chan.9/c-links.htm): A large collection of Web resources by a
professor of linguistics at Ohio State University
- On-line Chinese
Tools (http://www.mandarintools.com/): Tools for learning and using
Chinese.
- Chinese Learning
Center (http://chinese-school.netfirms.com): Site on learning Chinese and
Chinese language general information.
- Shanghaiexpat.com (http://www.shanghaiexpat.com/PNphpBB2-viewforum-f-17.phtml): Chinese Learning Forum]
- Chinese - English Dictionary (http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definition/Chinese-english/): from Webster's Online
Dictionary (http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org) - the Rosetta
Edition.
- Chinese dictionary (http://www.online-dictionary.biz/english/chinese) Free Chinese-English-Chinese
dictionary.
- Rikai.com (http://www.rikai.com/perl/HomePage.pl?Language=Zh) A web-mediator that adds mouseover pinyin
readings and English meanings to Chinese web-pages.
- Chinese Symbols (http://chinese-school.netfirms.com/Chinese-symbols-customized.html) Introduction to Chinese
characters
- Mandarin Chinese Language
Programs in Shanghai (http://www.mandarin-center.com) Mandarin Center offers
great inexpensive Mandarin courses
- www.OCRAT.com (http://www.ocrat.com/) Chinese-related web pages with a focus on Chinese language learning
for English speakers including animations that demonstrate stroke order
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