NationMaster - Encyclopedia: Han Chinese language

The Chinese language (汉语/漢語, 华语/華語, or 中文; Pinyin: H�nyǔ, Hu�yǔ, or Zhōngw�n) is a member of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Although Chinese is often regarded as a single language, regional variations in dialect, grammar and vocabulary are comparable to those of Romance languages. However, all of the spoken varieties of Chinese share a common formal written language, Vernacular Chinese, written using a nearly identical set of Chinese characters.

About one-fifth of the world speaks some forms of Chinese as its 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 in mainland 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 two 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 standard throughout its entire history, despite the fact that its actual diversity in spoken language has always been comparable to Europe. As a result, Chinese (unlike Westerners) 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 script and written standard continues to be used for all the spoken varieties of Chinese.

Spoken Chinese is a tonal language related to Tibetan and Burmese, but genetically unrelated to other neighbouring languages, such as Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, and Japanese. However, these languages were strongly influenced by Chinese in the course of history, linguistically and also extralinguistically. Korean and Japanese both have writing systems employing Chinese characters, which are called Hanja and Kanji, respectively.

In North Korea, Hanja has been completely discontinued and Hangul is the sole way to express their language, while in South Korea, Hanja is used as a form of bold face. 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.

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 Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing, and is intended to transcend all Chinese-speakers as a common language of communication. It is therefore the common Chinese language (as these are often called) that is the language of government, of the media, and of instruction in schools.

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 later on. 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.)

This diversity in spoken forms and commonality in written form has created a linguistic context that is very different from that of Europe, and this has profound implications for how to describe spoken variations of Chinese.

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, and so even categorizing variations can be difficult, in part because different dialects merge into each other. As a result, linguists will disagree among themselves as to classification.

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 "laypeople awareness" 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 distinct from Beijing dialect as 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, there are many linguists who follow this definition, and regard Chinese as a single language and its variations as dialects; others follow the intelligibility requirement and consider Chinese to be a group of anywhere from seven to seventeen related "languages", since these languages are not at all mutually intelligible, and show variation comparable to the Romance languages. Interestingly, the complexity of the situation can be demonstrated by the fact among those who consider Chinese to be separate languages, there is no consensus on how many languages there are, and where the dividing lines between the languages should be.

It is to be noted that this distinction has major political overtones, and the amount of emotion put into this issue arises from political implications. Describing Chinese as different languages can imply that China should actually be considered several different nations, and that the Han Chinese race is in fact several different races. For this reason, some Chinese are uncomfortable with the idea that Chinese is not a single language, as this perception might legitimize secessionist movements. On the other hand, supporters of Taiwanese independence also tend to be strong promoters of Min- and Hakka-language education. Furthermore, the implication that describing Chinese as multiple languages is more correct often 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 race 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, 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 (1919), the formal standard for written Chinese has been baihua, or Vernacular Chinese, the grammar and vocabulary of which are similar, but not identical, to the grammar and vocabulary of modern spoken Mandarin.

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.

Cantonese is unique among non-Mandarin regional languages in having a widely used written standard. The other regional languages do not have widely used alternative written standards, but many have local characters or use characters that are archaic in "baihua".

Chinese characters

The Chinese written language employs Chinese characters (漢字/汉字 pinyin h�nz�), 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.

Phonology

All spoken Chinese dialects use tones, where the meaning of a word is determined not only by consonant and vowel, but also by the tone in 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 6–10 tones, depending on how one counts.

See articles on individual dialects for detailed information. If you are looking for information on how to pronounce Chinese, please see 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 Chinese dialects 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.

Spoken Chinese

Is Chinese a language or a family of languages?

Written Chinese

Chinese characters

History

Phonology

Grammar

Related topics

References

External links

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Is Chinese a language or a family of languages?

Written Chinese

Chinese characters

History

Phonology

Grammar

Related topics

References

External links

Spoken Chinese