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Chinese (汉语/漢語, (or Language Family ) that forms part of the Sino-Tibetan Family of languages. About one-fifth of the people in the world speak some form of Chinese as their native language. In general, all varieties of Chinese are Tonal and Analytic . However, Chinese is also distinguished for a high level of internal diversity. Regional variation between different variants/dialects is comparable in many respects to the Romance Language Family ; many variants of spoken Chinese are different enough to be mutually incomprehensible. There are between six and twelve main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most populous by far is Mandarin (c. 800 million), followed by Wu (c. 90 million), and Cantonese (c. 80 million). The Identification Of The Varieties Of Chinese as "languages" or "dialects" is a controversial issue. If Chinese is classified as a single language rather than a group of languages, it has the largest number of speakers in the world; if not, Mandarin still holds that title, with Wu and Cantonese following at tenth and sixteenth places respectively. The standardized form of spoken Chinese is based on the Beijing Dialect , a member of the Mandarin group; it is described in the article " Standard Mandarin ." Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic Of China and the Republic Of China or Taiwan , as well as one of four official languages of Singapore (together with English , Malay , and Tamil ). Chinese—''de facto'', Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations (alongside English, Arabic , French , Russian , and Spanish ). Spoken in the form of Standard Cantonese , Chinese is one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese ). Vernacular Chinese , which is most closely based on the Mandarin group, is the standardized written language used by speakers of all Chinese spoken variants. Some other variants, including Cantonese and Minnan, have also developed written forms that correspond more closely to the spoken form of those variants, though these are used predominantly in informal contexts. SPOKEN CHINESE See Also: spoken Chinese The map on the right depicts the subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within Chinese. The traditionally recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are:
Chinese linguists have recently distinguished 3 more groups from the traditional seven: 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 . The Dungan Language , spoken in Central Asia, is very closely related to Mandarin. However, it is not generally considered "Chinese," because it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by People outside China who are not considered Chinese in any sense. See List Of Chinese Dialects for a comprehensive listing of individual dialects within these large, broad groupings. ]] In general, the above languages / dialect groups do not have sharp boundaries. As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear how the speeches of various parts of China should be classified. The Ethnologue lists a total of 14 , but the number varies between seven and seventeen depending on the classification scheme being followed. In any case, some dialects belonging to the same group may nevertheless be mutually unintelligible, while other dialects split up among several groups may in fact share many similarities due to geographical proximity. In general, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may be marginally intelligible to close neighbours. For instance, Wuzhou is about 120 miles upstream from Guangzhou , but its dialect is more like Standard Cantonese spoken in Guangzhou, than is that of Taishan , 60 miles southwest of Guangzhou and separated by several rivers from it (Ramsey, 1987 ). Standard Mandarin and diglossia See Also: Standard Mandarin Standard Mandarin is the official Standard Language used by the People's Republic Of China , the Republic Of China , and Singapore . Its pronunciation is based on the Beijing Dialect , which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing ; its vocabulary is drawn from the Mandarin group and (to a lesser extent) other groups; and its grammar is based on Vernacular Chinese , the standard written language that first became prevalent during the early 20th century. The governments of the People's Republic Of China , the Republic Of China (Taiwan), and Singapore 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. The situation in China is a complex and interesting case of , such as Cantonese . Such polyglots frequently Code Switch between Standard Mandarin and the local dialect(s), depending on the situation. A person living in Taiwan , for example, may commonly mix pronunciations, phrases, and words from Standard Mandarin and Taiwanese , and this mixture is considered socially appropriate under many circumstances. Similarly, in Hong Kong, it is not unusual for people to speak Cantonese and English, and sometimes Mandarin Language or language family? See Also: Identification of the varieties of Chinese The diversity of Chinese variants is comparable to the Romance Languages , and greater than the North Germanic Languages . However, owing to China's sociopolitical and cultural situation, whether these variants should be known as "languages" or "dialects" is a subject of ongoing debate. Some people call Chinese a Language and its subdivisions Dialect s, while others call Chinese a Language Family and its subdivisions languages. From a purely Descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar Idiolect s, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches scientifically. However, the language/dialect distinction has far-reaching implications in socio-political issues, such as the national identity of China, regional identities within China, and the very nature of the (Han) Chinese "nation" or "race." As a result, it has become a subject of contention. On one hand, there is the tendency to regard dialects as equal variations of a single Chinese language. This is partly because all speakers of different varieties of Chinese use One Formal Standard Written Language , although this written language in modern times is itself based on one variety of spoken Chinese. On the other hand, some regions with strong senses of regional cohesiveness have become more aware of regional groupings of dialects. The idea of single language has major overtones in politics and self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. The idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that China consists of several different nations, challenge the notion of a single Han Chinese " Race ," and legitimize secessionist movements. Furthermore, for some, suggesting that Chinese is more correctly described as multiple languages implies that the notion of a single Chinese language and a single Chinese state or nationality is artificial. However, the links between ethnicity, politics, and language can be complex. Many Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese speakers consider their own varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese race as one entity. They do not regard these two positions as contradictory, but consider the Han Chinese an entity of great internal diversity. Moreover, the government of the People's Republic Of China officially states that China is a Multinational State , and that the term "Chinese" refers to a broader concept '' Zhonghua Minzu '' that incorporates groups that do not natively speak Chinese, such as Tibetans , Uyghur s, and Mongols . (Groups that do speak Chinese are properly called Han Chinese , and are regarded as one component of a multiethnic whole.) Similarly, on Taiwan, some supporters of Chinese Reunification promote the local language, while some supporters of Taiwan independence have little interest in the topic. Additionally, the Taiwanese identity incorporates Taiwanese Aborigines , who are not considered Han Chinese because they speak Austronesian Languages , predate Han Chinese settlement, and are culturally and genetically linked to other Austronesian-speaking peoples such as Polynesia ns. WRITTEN CHINESE See Also: Chinese written language The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is complex. It is compounded by the fact that spoken variations evolved for centuries, since at least the late Hàn Dynasty , while written Chinese changed much less. Until the 20th century, most formal Chinese writing was done in Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese (文言 ''wényán''), which was very different from any spoken variety of Chinese, much as Classical Latin differs from modern Romance Language s. Since the May Fourth Movement of 1919 , the formal standard for written Chinese was changed to Vernacular Chinese (白話/白话 ''báihuà''), which, while not completely identical to the grammar and vocabulary of dialects of Mandarin, was based mostly on them. The term ''standard written Chinese'' now refers to Vernacular Chinese. Chinese characters are Morpheme s independent of phonetic change. Thus, although the number one is "yi" in Mandarin , "yat" in Cantonese and "tsit" in Hokkien (form of Min), they derive from a common ancient Chinese word and still share an identical character ("一"). Nevertheless, the orthographies of Chinese dialect groups are not completely identical, and their vocabularies have diverged. In addition, while literary vocabulary is mostly used by all dialects, colloquial vocabularies are often different. Colloquial non-standard written Chinese usually involves "dialectal characters" which may not be understood in other dialects or characters that are considered archaic in standard written Chinese. Cantonese is unique among non-Mandarin Regional Language s in having a written colloquial standard, used in Hong Kong and by non- Standard Mandarin speaking Cantonese speakers overseas, with a large number of unofficial characters for words particular to this variety of Chinese. By contrast, the other regional languages do not have such widely-used alternative written standards. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online Chat Room s and Instant Messaging , although for formal written communications Cantonese speakers still normally use standard written Chinese. Also, in Hunan, some women wrote their local language in Nü Shu , a Syllabary derived from Chinese Character s. The Dungan Language , considered a dialect of Mandarin, is also nowadays written in Cyrillic , and was formerly written in the Arabic Alphabet , although the Dungan people live outside China . Chinese characters See Also: Chinese character The Chinese written language employs or morpheme (a meaningful unit of language), as well as one syllable; the written language can thus be termed a morphemo-syllabic script. They are not just Pictograph s (pictures of their meanings), but are highly stylized and carry much abstract meaning. Only some characters are derived from pictographs. In 100 AD, the famed scholar ''Xǚ Shèn'' in the Hàn Dynasty classified characters into 6 categories, only 4% as pictographs, and 82% as phonetic complexes consisting of a ''semantic'' element that indicates meaning, and a ''phonetic'' element that arguably once indicated the pronunciation. All modern characters are or are based on the Standard Script (楷书/楷書 ''kǎishū'') (see styles, below). There are currently two standards for Chinese characters. One is the Traditional System , still used in Hong Kong , Taiwan , and Macau . The other is the Simplified System adopted during the 1950s Chinese Cultural Revolution in Mainland China . The simplified system requires fewer strokes to write certain components and has fewer synonymous characters. Singapore , which has a large Chinese community, is the first and only foreign country to recognize and officially adopt the simplified characters. Various written styles are used in Chinese Calligraphy , including Seal Script (篆书/篆書 ''zhuànshū''), Cursive Script (草书/草書 ''cǎoshū''), Clerical Script (隶书/隸書 ''lìshū''), and Standard Script (楷书/楷書 ''kǎishū'', aka regular script). Calligraphers can write in traditional and simplified characters, but they tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. As with Latin Script , a wide variety of Fonts exist for printed Chinese characters, a great number of which are often based on the styles of single calligraphers or schools of calligraphy. There is no concrete record of the origin of Chinese characters. Legend suggests that Cāng Jié , a bureaucrat of the legendary emperor Huángdì of China about 2600 BC , invented Chinese characters. A few symbols exist on pottery shards from the Neolithic period in China, but whether or not they constitute writing or are ancestral to the Chinese writing system is a topic of much controversy among scholars. Archaeological evidence, mainly the Oracle Bones found in the 19 - 20th Centuries , at present only dates Chinese characters to the Shāng Dynasty , specifically to the 14th to 11th centuries BC, although this fully mature script implies an earlier period of development. The vast majority of oracle bone inscriptions were found in The Ruins Of Yīn of the late Shāng Dynasty, although a few Zhōu Dynasty -related ones were also found. The forms of the characters in the inscriptions changed slightly over the 200 to 300 years, and scholars date the inscriptions of the Shāng to the ruler by the content, particularly from the name of the diviners who inscribed the shell or bone artifacts. Contemporaneous with the late Shāng and the Western Zhōu periods are a number of Bronze Inscriptions . Over the last century, a great many ancient bronze artifacts have been unearthed in China which contain dedicational texts of the Zhōu aristocrats where the characters show similarities and innovations compared to the oracle bone inscriptions. In the period between the oracle bones and the bamboo books of the Warring States period, inscriptions on bronzes are the most important record of the written script. Note however that since this spans such a broad period of time, it is hardly meaningful to speak of ''bronzeware script'' or ''bronze script'' as a single entity. 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 , analogous to Proto-Indo-European , from which the Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman languages descended. The relations between Chinese and other Sino-Tibetan languages are 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 of 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 in the early 1900s . The system was much revised, but always heavily relying on Karlgren's insights and methods. Old Chinese (), sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese," was the language common during the early and middle Zhōu Dynasty ( 1122 BC - 256 BC ), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the '' Shījīng ,'' the history of the '' Shūjīng ,'' and portions of the '' Yìjīng '' (''I Ching''). The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters also provide hints to their Old Chinese pronunciations. The pronunciation of the borrowed Chinese characters in Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean also provide valuable insights. Old Chinese was not wholly uninflected. It possessed a rich sound system in which aspiration or rough breathing differentiated the consonants, but probably was still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qīng Dynasty philologists. 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. Most northern Chinese people, in Sìchuān and in a broad arc from the northeast (Manchuria) to the southwest ( Yúnnán ), use various Mandarin dialects as their Home Language . The prevalence of Mandarin throughout northern China is largely due to north China's plains. By contrast, the mountains and rivers of southern China promoted linguistic diversity. The presence of Mandarin in Sìchuān 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 southern Chinese only spoke their native local variety of Chinese. However, despite the mix of officials and commoners speaking various Chinese dialects, Nanjing Mandarin became dominant at least during the officially Manchu -speaking Qīng Empire . Since the 17th Century , the Empire had set up Orthoepy academies () to make pronunciation conform to the Qīng capital Běijīng's standard, but had little success. During the Qīng's last 50 years in the late 19th century, the Běijīng Mandarin finally replaced Nánjīng Mandarin in the imperial court. 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 use their various regionalects for every aspect of life. The new Běijīng Mandarin court standard was thus fairly limited. This situation changed with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of an elementary school education system committed to teaching Standard Mandarin . As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all people in Mainland China and on Táiwān . At the time of the widespread introduction of Standard Mandarin in Mainland China and Táiwān , Hong Kong was a British colony and Standard Mandarin was never used. In Hong Kong , the language of education, formal speech, and daily life remains the local Cantonese , but Mandarin is becoming increasingly influential. INFLUENCE ON OTHER LANGUAGES Throughout history Chinese Culture and Politics has had a great influence on unrelated languages such as Korean , Vietnamese , and Japanese . Korean and Japanese both have writing systems employing Chinese Character s (Hanzi), which are called Hanja and Kanji , respectively. The Vietnamese term for Chinese writing is Hán Tự . It was the only available method for writing Vietnamese until the 14th Century , used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese elites. From the 14th to the late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chữ Nôm , a modified Chinese script incorporating sounds and syllables for native Vietnamese speakers. This is now completely replaced by a modified Latin script that incorporates a system of diacritical marks to indicate tones, as well as modified consonants. The Vietnamese language exhibits multiple elements similar to Cantonese in regard to the specific intonations and sharp consonant endings. There is also a slight influence from Mandarin, including the sharper vowels and "kh" sound missing from other Asiatic languages. 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.) Since the modernization of Japan in the late 19th century, there has been debate about abandoning the use of Chinese characters, but the practical benefits of a radically new script have so far not been considered sufficient. Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of Loanword s from Chinese. 50% or more of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin and the influence on Japanese and Vietnamese has been considerable. 10% of Philippine language vocabularies are of Chinese origin. Chinese also shares a great many grammatical features with these and neighboring languages, notably the lack of Gender and the use of Classifiers . The Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese languages seem to retain sounds of Classical Chinese that are otherwise only found in southern China. PHONOLOGY For more specific information on phonology of Chinese see the respective main articles of each Spoken Variety . The Phonological structure of each syllable consists of a Nucleus consisting of a Vowel (which can be a Monophthong , Diphthong , or even a Triphthong in certain varieties) with an optional Onset or Coda Consonant as well as a Tone . There are some instances where a vowel is not used as a nucleus. An example of this is in Cantonese , where the Nasal Sonorant consonants and can stand alone as their own syllable. Across all the spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda, but syllables that do have codas are restricted to , , , , , , or . Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Mandarin , are limited to only two, namely and . Consonant Cluster s do not generally occur in either the onset or coda. The onset may be an Affricate or a consonant followed by a Semivowel , but these are not generally considered consonant clusters. The number of sounds in the different spoken dialects varies, but in general there has been a tendency to a reduction in sounds from Middle Chinese . The Mandarin dialects in particular have experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds and so have far more multisyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. The total number of syllables in some varieties is therefore only about a thousand, including tonal variation. All varieties of spoken Chinese use Tones . 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 from this is Shanghainese which has reduced the set of tones to a two-toned Pitch Accent system much like modern Japanese. A very common example used to illustrate the use of tones in Chinese are the five tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable "ma." The tones correspond to these five Characters : |
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