Chinese (, especially when referring to
written Chinese) is a group of
languages spoken natively by the ethnic
Han Chinese majority and
many minority ethnic groups in
Greater China. About 1.3 billion people (or approximately 16% of the world's population) speak a variety of Chinese as their
first language.
Chinese languages form the
Sinitic branch of the
Sino-Tibetan languages family. The spoken
varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be
variants of a single language. However, their lack of
mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered separate languages in a
family. Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from
Middle Chinese, of which the most spoken by far is
Mandarin (with about 800 million speakers, or 66%), followed by
Min (75 million, e.g.
Southern Min
Southern Min (), Minnan (Mandarin pronunciation: ) or Banlam (), is a group of linguistically similar and historically related Sinitic languages that form a branch of Min Chinese spoken in Fujian (especially the Minnan region), most of Taiwan ( ...
),
Wu (74 million, e.g.
Shanghainese
The Shanghainese language, also known as the Shanghai dialect, or Hu language, is a variety of Wu Chinese spoken in the Districts of Shanghai, central districts of the Shanghai, City of Shanghai and its surrounding areas. It is classified as ...
), and
Yue (68 million, e.g.
Cantonese). These branches are unintelligible to each other, and many of their subgroups are unintelligible with the other varieties within the same branch (e.g. Southern Min). There are, however, transitional areas where varieties from different branches share enough features for some limited intelligibility, including
New Xiang with
Southwest Mandarin,
Xuanzhou Wu with
Lower Yangtze Mandarin,
Jin with
Central Plains Mandarin and certain divergent dialects of
Hakka with
Gan (though these are unintelligible with mainstream Hakka). All varieties of Chinese are
tonal to at least some degree, and are largely
analytic.
The earliest Chinese written records are
Shang dynasty-era
oracle bone inscriptions, which can be dated to 1250 BCE. The phonetic categories of
Old Chinese can be reconstructed from the rhymes of ancient poetry. During the
Northern and Southern dynasties period, Middle Chinese went through several
sound changes and split into several varieties following prolonged geographic and political separation. ''
Qieyun
The ''Qieyun'' () is a Chinese language, Chinese rhyme dictionary, published in 601 during the Sui dynasty. The book was a guide to proper reading of classical texts, using the ''fanqie'' method to indicate the pronunciation of Chinese characters ...
'', a
rime dictionary
A rime dictionary, rhyme dictionary, or rime book () is an ancient type of Chinese dictionary that collates Chinese character, characters by tone (linguistics), tone and rhyme, instead of by radical (Chinese character), radical. The most import ...
, recorded a compromise between the pronunciations of different regions. The royal courts of the Ming and early
Qing dynasties operated using a
koiné language (
Guanhua) based on
Nanjing dialect
The Nanjing dialect, also known as Nankinese, or Nanjing Mandarin, is a dialect of Mandarin Chinese spoken in Nanjing, China. It is part of the Jianghuai group of Chinese varieties.
Phonology
A number of features distinguish the Nanjing dialec ...
of
Lower Yangtze Mandarin.
Standard Chinese
Standard Chinese ()—in linguistics Standard Northern Mandarin or Standard Beijing Mandarin, in common speech simply Mandarin, better qualified as Standard Mandarin, Modern Standard Mandarin or Standard Mandarin Chinese—is a modern Standar ...
(Standard Mandarin), based on the
Beijing dialect of Mandarin, was adopted in the 1930s and is now an official language of both the
People's Republic of China and the
Republic of China
Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the northeast ...
(Taiwan), one of the four
official languages of Singapore, and one of the six
official languages of the United Nations. The written form, using the
logograms known as
Chinese characters, is shared by literate speakers of mutually unintelligible dialects. Since the 1950s,
simplified Chinese characters have been promoted for use by the government of the People's Republic of China, while Singapore officially adopted simplified characters in 1976.
Traditional characters remain in use in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and other countries with significant overseas Chinese speaking communities such as Malaysia (which although adopted simplified characters as the ''de facto'' standard in the 1980s, traditional characters still remain in widespread use).
Classification
Linguists classify all varieties of Chinese as part of the
Sino-Tibetan language family, together with
Burmese
Burmese may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Myanmar, a country in Southeast Asia
* Burmese people
* Burmese language
* Burmese alphabet
* Burmese cuisine
* Burmese culture
Animals
* Burmese cat
* Burmese chicken
* Burmese (hor ...
,
Tibetan
Tibetan may mean:
* of, from, or related to Tibet
* Tibetan people, an ethnic group
* Tibetan language:
** Classical Tibetan, the classical language used also as a contemporary written standard
** Standard Tibetan, the most widely used spoken dial ...
and many other languages spoken in the
Himalayas and the
Southeast Asian Massif. Although the relationship was first proposed in the early 19th century and is now broadly accepted, reconstruction of Sino-Tibetan is much less developed than that of families such as
Indo-European or
Austroasiatic. Difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of
inflection in many of them, and the effects of language contact. In addition, many of the smaller languages are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to reach and are often also sensitive
border zones. Without a secure reconstruction of proto-Sino-Tibetan, the higher-level structure of the family remains unclear. A top-level branching into Chinese and
Tibeto-Burman languages is often assumed, but has not been convincingly demonstrated.
History
The first written records appeared over 3,000 years ago during the
Shang dynasty. As the language evolved over this period, the various local varieties became mutually unintelligible. In reaction, central governments have repeatedly sought to promulgate a unified standard.
Old and Middle Chinese
The earliest examples of Chinese (
Old Chinese) are divinatory inscriptions on
oracle bones from around 1250 BCE in the late
Shang dynasty. The next attested stage came from
inscriptions on bronze artifacts of the
Western Zhou period (1046–771 BCE), the ''
Classic of Poetry'' and portions of the ''
Book of Documents
The ''Book of Documents'' (''Shūjīng'', earlier ''Shu King'') or ''Classic of History'', also known as the ''Shangshu'' (“Venerated Documents”), is one of the Five Classics of ancient Chinese literature. It is a collection of rhetorica ...
'' and ''
I Ching
The ''I Ching'' or ''Yi Jing'' (, ), usually translated ''Book of Changes'' or ''Classic of Changes'', is an ancient Chinese divination text that is among the oldest of the Chinese classics. Originally a divination manual in the Western Zho ...
''. Scholars have attempted to reconstruct the
phonology of Old Chinese
Scholars have attempted to reconstruct the phonology of Old Chinese from documentary evidence. Although the writing system does not describe sounds directly, shared phonetic components of the most ancient Chinese characters are believed to link ...
by comparing later varieties of Chinese with the rhyming practice of the ''Classic of Poetry'' and the phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters. Although many of the finer details remain unclear, most scholars agree that Old Chinese differs from Middle Chinese in lacking retroflex and palatal obstruents but having initial
consonant clusters of some sort, and in having voiceless nasals and liquids. Most recent reconstructions also describe an atonal language with consonant clusters at the end of the syllable, developing into
tone distinctions in Middle Chinese. Several
derivational affix
Morphological derivation, in linguistics, is the process of forming a new word from an existing word, often by adding a prefix or suffix, such as For example, ''unhappy'' and ''happiness'' derive from the root word ''happy.''
It is different ...
es have also been identified, but the language lacks
inflection, and indicated grammatical relationships using word order and
grammatical particle
In grammar, the term ''particle'' (abbreviated ) has a traditional meaning, as a part of speech that cannot be inflected, and a modern meaning, as a function word associated with another word or phrase, generally in order to impart meaning. Altho ...
s.
Middle Chinese was the language used during
Northern and Southern dynasties and the
Sui,
Tang, and
Song dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the ''
Qieyun
The ''Qieyun'' () is a Chinese language, Chinese rhyme dictionary, published in 601 during the Sui dynasty. The book was a guide to proper reading of classical texts, using the ''fanqie'' method to indicate the pronunciation of Chinese characters ...
''
rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by
rhyme tables such as the ''
Yunjing'' constructed by ancient Chinese philologists as a guide to the ''Qieyun'' system. These works define phonological categories, but with little hint of what sounds they represent. Linguists have identified these sounds by comparing the categories with pronunciations in modern
varieties of Chinese,
borrowed Chinese words in Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean, and transcription evidence. The resulting system is very complex, with a large number of consonants and vowels, but they are probably not all distinguished in any single dialect. Most linguists now believe it represents a
diasystem encompassing 6th-century northern and southern standards for reading the classics.
Classical and literary forms
The relationship between spoken and written Chinese is rather complex ("
diglossia"). Its spoken varieties have evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less.
Classical Chinese literature began in the
Spring and Autumn period
The Spring and Autumn period was a period in Chinese history from approximately 770 to 476 BC (or according to some authorities until 403 BC) which corresponds roughly to the first half of the Eastern Zhou period. The period's name derives fr ...
.
Rise of northern dialects
After the fall of the
Northern Song dynasty and subsequent reign of the
Jin (Jurchen) and
Yuan (Mongol) dynasties in northern China, a common speech (now called
Old Mandarin
Old Mandarin or Early Mandarin was the speech of northern China during the Jurchen-ruled Jin dynasty (1115–1234), Jin dynasty and the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty (12th to 14th centuries). New genres of vernacular literature were based on this langu ...
) developed based on the dialects of the
North China Plain
The North China Plain or Huang-Huai-Hai Plain () is a large-scale downfaulted rift basin formed in the late Paleogene and Neogene and then modified by the deposits of the Yellow River. It is the largest alluvial plain of China. The plain is bord ...
around the capital.
The ''
Zhongyuan Yinyun'' (1324) was a dictionary that codified the rhyming conventions of new ''
sanqu'' verse form in this language.
Together with the slightly later ''
Menggu Ziyun'', this dictionary describes a language with many of the features characteristic of modern
Mandarin dialects.
Up to the early 20th century, most Chinese people only spoke their local variety.
Thus, as a practical measure, officials of the
Ming and
Qing
The Qing dynasty ( ), officially the Great Qing,, was a Manchu-led imperial dynasty of China and the last orthodox dynasty in Chinese history. It emerged from the Later Jin dynasty founded by the Jianzhou Jurchens, a Tungusic-speaki ...
dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using a
common language based on Mandarin varieties, known as ''Guānhuà'' (/, literally "language of officials").
For most of this period, this language was a
koiné based on dialects spoken in the
Nanjing area, though not identical to any single dialect.
By the middle of the 19th century, the Beijing dialect had become dominant and was essential for any business with the imperial court.
In the 1930s, a
standard national language, ''Guóyǔ'' (/ ; "national language") was adopted. After much dispute between proponents of northern and southern dialects and an abortive attempt at an artificial pronunciation, the
National Language Unification Commission finally settled on the Beijing dialect in 1932. The People's Republic founded in 1949 retained this standard but renamed it ''pǔtōnghuà'' (/; "common speech"). The national language is now used in education, the media, and formal situations in both Mainland China and Taiwan. Because of their colonial and linguistic history, the language used in education, the media, formal speech, and everyday life in
Hong Kong and
Macau is the local
Cantonese, although the standard language, Mandarin, has become very influential and is being taught in schools.
Influence
Historically, the Chinese language has spread to its neighbors through a variety of means. Northern Vietnam was incorporated into the
Han empire in 111 BCE, marking the beginning of a
period of Chinese control that ran almost continuously for a millennium. The
Four Commanderies were established in northern Korea in the first century BCE, but disintegrated in the following centuries.
Chinese Buddhism spread over East Asia between the 2nd and 5th centuries CE, and with it the study of scriptures and literature in
Literary Chinese. Later
Korea,
Japan
Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...
, and
Vietnam developed strong central governments modeled on Chinese institutions, with Literary Chinese as the language of administration and scholarship, a position it would retain until the late 19th century in
Korea and (to a lesser extent) Japan, and the early 20th century in Vietnam. Scholars from different lands could communicate, albeit only in writing, using Literary Chinese.
Although they used Chinese solely for written communication, each country had its own tradition of reading texts aloud, the so-called
Sino-Xenic pronunciations. Chinese words with these pronunciations were also extensively imported into the
Korean,
Japanese and
Vietnamese languages, and today comprise over half of their vocabularies. This massive influx led to changes in the phonological structure of the languages, contributing to the development of
mora
Mora may refer to:
People
* Mora (surname)
Places Sweden
* Mora, Säter, Sweden
* Mora, Sweden, the seat of Mora Municipality
* Mora Municipality, Sweden
United States
* Mora, Louisiana, an unincorporated community
* Mora, Minnesota, a city
* M ...
ic structure in Japanese and the disruption of
vowel harmony
In phonology, vowel harmony is an Assimilation (linguistics), assimilatory process in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – have to be members of the same natural class (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is t ...
in Korean.
Borrowed Chinese morphemes have been used extensively in all these languages to coin compound words for new concepts, in a similar way to the use of
Latin and
Ancient Greek roots in European languages. Many new compounds, or new meanings for old phrases, were created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to name Western concepts and artifacts. These coinages, written in shared Chinese characters, have then been borrowed freely between languages. They have even been accepted into Chinese, a language usually resistant to loanwords, because their foreign origin was hidden by their written form. Often different compounds for the same concept were in circulation for some time before a winner emerged, and sometimes the final choice differed between countries. The proportion of vocabulary of Chinese origin thus tends to be greater in technical, abstract, or formal language. For example, in Japan,
Sino-Japanese words account for about 35% of the words in entertainment magazines, over half the words in newspapers, and 60% of the words in science magazines.
Vietnam, Korea, and Japan each developed writing systems for their own languages, initially based on
Chinese characters, but later replaced with the ''
hangul'' alphabet for Korean and supplemented with ''
kana'' syllabaries for Japanese, while Vietnamese continued to be written with the complex ''
chữ nôm'' script. However, these were limited to popular literature until the late 19th century. Today Japanese is written with a composite script using both Chinese characters (''
kanji'') and kana. Korean is written exclusively with hangul in North Korea (although knowledge of the supplementary Chinese characters - ''
hanja'' - is still required), and hanja are increasingly rarely used in South Korea. As a result of former
French colonization
The French colonial empire () comprised the overseas colonies, protectorates and mandate territories that came under French rule from the 16th century onward. A distinction is generally made between the "First French Colonial Empire", that exist ...
, Vietnamese switched to
a Latin-based alphabet.
Examples of
loan words in English include "
tea", from
Hokkien (Min Nan) (), "
dim sum
Dim sum () is a large range of small Chinese dishes that are traditionally enjoyed in restaurants for brunch. Most modern dim sum dishes are commonly associated with Cantonese cuisine, although dim sum dishes also exist in other Chinese cuis ...
", from Cantonese ''dim
2 sam
1'' () and "
kumquat", from Cantonese ''gam
1gwat
1'' ().
Varieties
Jerry Norman estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese. These varieties form a
dialect continuum, in which differences in speech generally become more pronounced as distances increase, though the rate of change varies immensely. Generally, mountainous South China exhibits more linguistic diversity than the
North China Plain
The North China Plain or Huang-Huai-Hai Plain () is a large-scale downfaulted rift basin formed in the late Paleogene and Neogene and then modified by the deposits of the Yellow River. It is the largest alluvial plain of China. The plain is bord ...
. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may only be marginally intelligible to close neighbors. For instance,
Wuzhou is about upstream from
Guangzhou, but the
Yue variety spoken there is more like that of Guangzhou than is that of
Taishan, southwest of Guangzhou and separated from it by several rivers. In parts of
Fujian the speech of neighboring counties or even villages may be mutually unintelligible.
Until the late 20th century, Chinese emigrants to Southeast Asia and North America came from southeast coastal areas, where Min, Hakka, and Yue dialects are spoken.
The vast majority of Chinese immigrants to North America up to the mid-20th century spoke the
Taishan dialect
Taishanese (), alternatively romanized in Cantonese as Toishanese or Toisanese, in local dialect as Hoisanese or Hoisan-wa, is a dialect of Yue Chinese native to Taishan, Guangdong. Although it is related to Cantonese, Taishanese has little ...
, from a small coastal area southwest of
Guangzhou.
Grouping
Local varieties of Chinese are conventionally classified into seven dialect groups, largely on the basis of the different evolution of
Middle Chinese voiced initials:
*
Mandarin, including
Standard Chinese
Standard Chinese ()—in linguistics Standard Northern Mandarin or Standard Beijing Mandarin, in common speech simply Mandarin, better qualified as Standard Mandarin, Modern Standard Mandarin or Standard Mandarin Chinese—is a modern Standar ...
,
Pekingese,
Sichuanese, and also the
Dungan language
Dungan ( or ) is a Sinitic language spoken primarily in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan by the Dungan people, an ethnic group related to the Hui people of China. Although it is derived from the Central Plains Mandarin of Gansu and Shaanxi, it is w ...
spoken in
Central Asia
*
Wu, including
Shanghainese
The Shanghainese language, also known as the Shanghai dialect, or Hu language, is a variety of Wu Chinese spoken in the Districts of Shanghai, central districts of the Shanghai, City of Shanghai and its surrounding areas. It is classified as ...
,
Suzhounese, and
Wenzhounese
*
Gan
*
Xiang
*
Min, including
Fuzhounese,
Hainanese
Hainanese (Hainan Romanised: ', Hainanese Pinyin: ',), also known as Qióngwén, Heng2 vun2 () or Qióngyǔ, Heng2 yi2 (), is a group of Min Chinese varieties spoken in the southern Chinese island province of Hainan and Overseas Chinese su ...
,
Hokkien and
Teochew
*
Hakka
*
Yue, including
Cantonese and
Taishanese
The classification of
Li Rong, which is used in the ''
Language Atlas of China'' (1987), distinguishes three further groups:
*
Jin, previously included in Mandarin.
*
Huizhou, previously included in Wu.
*
Pinghua
Pinghua (; Yale romanization of Cantonese, Yale: ''Pìhng Wá''; sometimes disambiguated as /) is a pair of Sinitic languages spoken mainly in parts of the Guangxi, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, with some speakers in Hunan province. Pinghua ...
, previously included in Yue.
Some varieties remain unclassified, including
Danzhou dialect (spoken in
Danzhou, on
Hainan Island),
Waxianghua (spoken in western
Hunan) and
Shaozhou Tuhua (spoken in northern
Guangdong).
Standard Chinese
Standard Chinese
Standard Chinese ()—in linguistics Standard Northern Mandarin or Standard Beijing Mandarin, in common speech simply Mandarin, better qualified as Standard Mandarin, Modern Standard Mandarin or Standard Mandarin Chinese—is a modern Standar ...
, often called Mandarin, is the official
standard language
A standard language (also standard variety, standard dialect, and standard) is a language variety that has undergone substantial codification of grammar and usage, although occasionally the term refers to the entirety of a language that includes ...
of
China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...
, de facto official language of
Taiwan, and one of the four official languages of
Singapore (where it is called "Huáyŭ" / or Chinese). Standard Chinese is based on the
Beijing dialect, the dialect of
Mandarin as spoken in
Beijing. The governments of both China and Taiwan intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore, it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools.
In China and Taiwan,
diglossia has been a common feature. For example, in addition to Standard Chinese, a resident of
Shanghai might speak
Shanghainese
The Shanghainese language, also known as the Shanghai dialect, or Hu language, is a variety of Wu Chinese spoken in the Districts of Shanghai, central districts of the Shanghai, City of Shanghai and its surrounding areas. It is classified as ...
; and, if they grew up elsewhere, then they are also likely to be fluent in the particular dialect of that local area. A native of
Guangzhou may speak both Cantonese and Standard Chinese. In addition to Mandarin, most
Taiwanese
Taiwanese may refer to:
* Taiwanese language, another name for Taiwanese Hokkien
* Something from or related to Taiwan ( Formosa)
* Taiwanese aborigines, the indigenous people of Taiwan
* Han Taiwanese, the Han people of Taiwan
* Taiwanese people, ...
also speak
Taiwanese Hokkien (commonly "Taiwanese" ),
Hakka, or an
Austronesian language. A Taiwanese may commonly mix pronunciations, phrases, and words from Mandarin and other
Taiwanese languages
The languages of Taiwan consist of several varieties of languages under the families of Austronesian languages and Sino-Tibetan languages. The Formosan languages, a branch of Austronesian languages, have been spoken by the Taiwanese indigenous pe ...
, and this mixture is considered normal in daily or informal speech.
Due to their traditional cultural ties to
Guangdong province and colonial histories,
Cantonese is used as the standard variant of Chinese in
Hong Kong and
Macau instead.
Nomenclature
The official Chinese designation for the major branches of Chinese is ''fāngyán'' (, literally "regional speech"), whereas the more closely related varieties within these are called ''dìdiǎn fāngyán'' (/ "local speech"). Conventional English-language usage in Chinese linguistics is to use ''dialect'' for the speech of a particular place (regardless of status) and ''dialect group'' for a regional grouping such as Mandarin or Wu. Because varieties from different groups are not
mutually intelligible
In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. It is sometimes used as an ...
, some scholars prefer to describe Wu and others as separate languages.
Jerry Norman called this practice misleading, pointing out that Wu, which itself contains many mutually unintelligible varieties, could not be properly called a single language under the same criterion, and that the same is true for each of the other groups.
Mutual intelligibility is considered by some linguists to be the main criterion for determining whether varieties are separate languages or dialects of a single language, although others do not regard it as decisive, particularly when cultural factors interfere as they do with Chinese. As explains, linguists often ignore mutual intelligibility when varieties share intelligibility with a central variety (i.e.
prestige variety, such as
Standard Mandarin
Standard Chinese ()—in linguistics Standard Northern Mandarin or Standard Beijing Mandarin, in common speech simply Mandarin, better qualified as Standard Mandarin, Modern Standard Mandarin or Standard Mandarin Chinese—is a modern standar ...
), as the issue requires some careful handling when mutual intelligibility is inconsistent with language identity.
John DeFrancis argues that it is inappropriate to refer to Mandarin, Wu and so on as "dialects" because the mutual unintelligibility between them is too great. On the other hand, he also objects to considering them as separate languages, as it incorrectly implies a set of disruptive "religious, economic, political, and other differences" between speakers that exist, for example, between
French Catholics
, native_name_lang = fr
, image = 060806-France-Paris-Notre Dame.jpg
, imagewidth = 200px
, alt =
, caption = Cathedral Notre-Dame de Paris
, abbreviation =
, type ...
and English Protestants in Canada, but not between speakers of Cantonese and Mandarin in China, owing to China's near-uninterrupted history of centralized government.
Because of the difficulties involved in determining the difference between language and dialect, other terms have been proposed. These include ''vernacular'', ''
lect'', ''regionalect'', ''topolect'', and ''
variety''.
Most Chinese people consider the spoken varieties as one single language because speakers share a common culture and history, as well as a shared national identity and a common written form.
Phonology
Syllables in the Chinese languages have some unique characteristics. They are tightly related to the
morphology and also to the characters of the writing system; and
phonologically they are structured according to fixed rules.
The structure of each syllable consists of a
nucleus that has a
vowel (which can be a
monophthong,
diphthong
A diphthong ( ; , ), also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech o ...
, or even a
triphthong in certain varieties), preceded by an
onset (a single
consonant, or consonant+
glide; zero onset is also possible), and followed (optionally) by a
coda
Coda or CODA may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Films
* Movie coda, a post-credits scene
* ''Coda'' (1987 film), an Australian horror film about a serial killer, made for television
*''Coda'', a 2017 American experimental film from Na ...
consonant; a syllable also carries 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
Nasal is an adjective referring to the nose, part of human or animal anatomy. It may also be shorthand for the following uses in combination:
* With reference to the human nose:
** Nasal administration, a method of pharmaceutical drug delivery
** ...
sonorant
In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant or resonant is a speech sound that is produced with continuous, non-turbulent airflow in the vocal tract; these are the manners of articulation that are most often voiced in the world's languages. Vowels are ...
consonants and can stand alone as their own syllable.
In Mandarin much more than in other spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda (assuming that a final
glide is not analyzed as a coda), but syllables that do have codas are restricted to nasals , , , the retroflex approximant , and voiceless stops , , , or . Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as
Standard Chinese
Standard Chinese ()—in linguistics Standard Northern Mandarin or Standard Beijing Mandarin, in common speech simply Mandarin, better qualified as Standard Mandarin, Modern Standard Mandarin or Standard Mandarin Chinese—is a modern Standar ...
, are limited to only , , and .
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, which is only about an eighth as many as English.
Tones
All varieties of spoken Chinese use
tones to distinguish words. A few dialects of north China may have as few as three tones, while some dialects in south China have up to 6 or 12 tones, depending on how one counts. One exception from this is
Shanghainese
The Shanghainese language, also known as the Shanghai dialect, or Hu language, is a variety of Wu Chinese spoken in the Districts of Shanghai, central districts of the Shanghai, City of Shanghai and its surrounding areas. It is classified as ...
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 is the application of the four tones of
Standard Chinese
Standard Chinese ()—in linguistics Standard Northern Mandarin or Standard Beijing Mandarin, in common speech simply Mandarin, better qualified as Standard Mandarin, Modern Standard Mandarin or Standard Mandarin Chinese—is a modern Standar ...
(along with the neutral tone) to the syllable ''ma''. The tones are exemplified by the following five Chinese words:
Standard
Cantonese, in contrast, has six tones. Historically, finals that end in a
stop consonant
In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases.
The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), lips ...
were considered to be "
checked tones" and thus counted separately for a total of nine tones. However, they are considered to be duplicates in modern linguistics and are no longer counted as such:
Grammar
Chinese is often described as a "monosyllabic" language. However, this is only partially correct. It is largely accurate when describing
Classical Chinese and
Middle Chinese; in Classical Chinese, for example, perhaps 90% of words correspond to a single syllable and a single character. In the modern varieties, it is usually the case that a
morpheme (unit of meaning) is a single syllable; in contrast, English has many multi-syllable morphemes, both bound and free, such as "seven", "elephant", "para-" and "-able".
Some of the conservative southern varieties of modern Chinese have largely monosyllabic words, especially among the more basic vocabulary. In modern Mandarin, however, most
nouns,
adjectives and
verbs are largely disyllabic. A significant cause of this is
phonological attrition.
Sound change
A sound change, in historical linguistics, is a change in the pronunciation of a language. A sound change can involve the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature value) by a different one (called phonetic chang ...
over time has steadily reduced the number of possible syllables. In modern Mandarin, there are now only about 1,200 possible syllables, including tonal distinctions, compared with about 5,000 in
Vietnamese (still largely monosyllabic) and over 8,000 in English.
This phonological collapse has led to a corresponding increase in the number of
homophone
A homophone () is a word that is pronounced the same (to varying extent) as another word but differs in meaning. A ''homophone'' may also differ in spelling. The two words may be spelled the same, for example ''rose'' (flower) and ''rose'' (p ...
s. As an example, the small Langenscheidt Pocket Chinese Dictionary lists six words that are commonly pronounced as ''shí'' (tone 2): 'ten'; / 'real, actual'; / 'know (a person), recognize'; 'stone'; / 'time'; 'food, eat'. These were all pronounced differently in
Early Middle Chinese; in
William H. Baxter's transcription they were , , , , and respectively. They are still pronounced differently in today's
Cantonese; in
Jyutping they are ''sap9'', ''sat9'', ''sik7'', ''sek9'', ''si4'', ''sik9''. In modern spoken Mandarin, however, tremendous ambiguity would result if all of these words could be used as-is;
Yuen Ren Chao's modern poem
Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den exploits this, consisting of 92 characters all pronounced ''shi''. As such, most of these words have been replaced (in speech, if not in writing) with a longer, less-ambiguous compound. Only the first one, 'ten', normally appears as such when spoken; the rest are normally replaced with, respectively, ''shíjì'' / (lit. 'actual-connection'); ''rènshi'' / (lit. 'recognize-know'); ''shítou'' / (lit. 'stone-head'); ''shíjiān'' / (lit. 'time-interval'); ''shíwù'' (lit. 'foodstuff'). In each case, the homophone was disambiguated by adding another morpheme, typically either a synonym or a generic word of some sort (for example, 'head', 'thing'), the purpose of which is to indicate which of the possible meanings of the other, homophonic syllable should be selected.
However, when one of the above words forms part of a compound, the disambiguating syllable is generally dropped and the resulting word is still disyllabic. For example, ''shí'' alone, not ''shítou'' /, appears in compounds meaning 'stone-', for example, ''shígāo'' 'plaster' (lit. 'stone cream'), ''shíhuī'' 'lime' (lit. 'stone dust'), ''shíkū'' 'grotto' (lit. 'stone cave'), ''shíyīng'' 'quartz' (lit. 'stone flower'), ''shíyóu'' 'petroleum' (lit. 'stone oil').
Most modern varieties of Chinese have the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character
compounds. In some cases, monosyllabic words have become disyllabic without compounding, as in ''kūlong'' from ''kǒng'' 孔; this is especially common in
Jin.
Chinese
morphology is strictly bound to a set number of
syllable
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "bu ...
s with a fairly rigid construction. Although many of these single-syllable morphemes (''zì'', ) can stand alone as individual
words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic
compounds, known as ''cí'' (/), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese ''cí'' ('word') can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
For example:
* / 'cloud'
* , /, / 'hamburger'
* 'I, me'
* / 'goalkeeper'
* 'people, human, mankind'
* 'The Earth'
* / 'lightning'
* / 'dream'
All varieties of modern Chinese are
analytic language
In linguistic typology, an analytic language is a language that conveys relationships between words in sentences primarily by way of ''helper'' words (particles, prepositions, etc.) and word order, as opposed to using inflections (changing the ...
s, in that they depend on
syntax
In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituency) ...
(word order and sentence structure) rather than
morphology—i.e., changes in form of a word—to indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has very few
grammatical inflections—it possesses no
tenses, no
voices
Voices or The Voices may refer to:
Film and television
* ''Voices'' (1920 film), by Chester M. De Vonde, with Diana Allen
* ''Voices'' (1973 film), a British horror film
* ''Voices'' (1979 film), a film by Robert Markowitz
* ''Voices'' (19 ...
, no
numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few
articles
Article often refers to:
* Article (grammar), a grammatical element used to indicate definiteness or indefiniteness
* Article (publishing), a piece of nonfictional prose that is an independent part of a publication
Article may also refer to:
G ...
(i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English).
They make heavy use of
grammatical particle
In grammar, the term ''particle'' (abbreviated ) has a traditional meaning, as a part of speech that cannot be inflected, and a modern meaning, as a function word associated with another word or phrase, generally in order to impart meaning. Altho ...
s to indicate
aspect and
mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like ''le'' (perfective), ''hái'' / ('still'), ''yǐjīng'' / ('already'), and so on.
Chinese has a
subject–verb–object word order, and like many other
languages of East Asia, makes frequent use of the
topic–comment construction to form sentences. Chinese also has an extensive system of
classifiers and
measure words, another trait shared with neighboring languages like
Japanese and
Korean. Other notable grammatical features common to all the spoken varieties of Chinese include the use of
serial verb construction,
pronoun dropping and the related
subject dropping.
Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess differences.
Vocabulary
The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 50,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are in use and only about 3,000 are frequently used in Chinese media and newspapers. However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words. Because most Chinese words are made up of two or more characters, there are many more Chinese words than characters. A more accurate equivalent for a Chinese character is the
morpheme, as characters represent the smallest grammatical units with individual meanings in the Chinese language.
Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and lexicalized phrases vary greatly. The ''
Hanyu Da Zidian'', a compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including
bone oracle versions. The ''
Zhonghua Zihai'' (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The
CC-CEDICT project (2010) contains 97,404 contemporary entries including idioms, technology terms and names of political figures, businesses and products. The 2009 version of the Webster's Digital Chinese Dictionary (WDCD), based on
CC-CEDICT, contains over 84,000 entries.
The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volume ''
Hanyu Da Cidian'', records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised ''
Cihai'', a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms.
The 7th (2016) edition of ''
Xiandai Hanyu Cidian'', an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in
mainland China, has 13,000 head characters and defines 70,000 words.
Loanwords
Like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizable number of
loanwords
A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because the ...
from other cultures. Most Chinese words are formed out of native Chinese
morphemes, including words describing imported objects and ideas. However, direct phonetic borrowing of foreign words has gone on since ancient times.
Some early
Indo-European loanwords in Chinese have been proposed, notably ''mì'' "honey", / ''shī'' "lion," and perhaps also / ''mǎ'' "horse", / ''zhū'' "pig", ''quǎn'' "dog", and / ''é'' "goose".
Ancient words borrowed from along the
Silk Road
The Silk Road () was a network of Eurasian trade routes active from the second century BCE until the mid-15th century. Spanning over 6,400 kilometers (4,000 miles), it played a central role in facilitating economic, cultural, political, and reli ...
since
Old Chinese include ''pútáo'' "
grape", ''shíliu''/''shíliú'' "
pomegranate" and / ''shīzi'' "
lion
The lion (''Panthera leo'') is a large Felidae, cat of the genus ''Panthera'' native to Africa and India. It has a muscular, broad-chested body; short, rounded head; round ears; and a hairy tuft at the end of its tail. It is sexually dimorphi ...
". Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including ''Fó'' "Buddha" and / ''Púsà'' "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as ''hútòng'' "
hutong". Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as "grape," generally have
Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from
Sanskrit or
Pāli, the
liturgical languages of
North India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the
Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have
Altaic etymologies, such as ''pípá'', the Chinese lute, or ''lào''/''luò'' "cheese" or "
yogurt", but from exactly which source is not always clear.
Modern borrowings
Modern neologisms are primarily translated into Chinese in one of three ways: free translation (''
calque'', or by meaning), phonetic translation (by sound), or
a combination of the two. Today, it is much more common to use existing Chinese morphemes to coin new words to represent imported concepts, such as technical expressions and
international scientific vocabulary
International scientific vocabulary (ISV) comprises scientific and specialized words whose language of origin may or may not be certain, but which are in current use in several modern languages (that is, translingually, whether in naturalized, loa ...
. Any
Latin or
Greek etymologies are dropped and converted into the corresponding Chinese characters (for example, ''anti-'' typically becomes "", literally ''opposite''), making them more comprehensible for Chinese but introducing more difficulties in understanding foreign texts. For example, the word ''telephone'' was initially loaned phonetically as / (Shanghainese: ''télífon'' , Mandarin: ''délǜfēng'') during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later / ''diànhuà'' (lit. "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent ( is in fact from the Japanese ''denwa''; see below for more Japanese loans). Other examples include / ''diànshì'' (lit. "electric vision") for television, / ''diànnǎo'' (lit. "electric brain") for computer; / ''shǒujī'' (lit. "hand machine") for mobile phone, / ''lányá'' (lit. "blue tooth") for
Bluetooth, and / ''wǎngzhì'' (lit. "internet logbook") for blog in Hong Kong and Macau Cantonese. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as / ''hànbǎobāo'' ( ''hànbǎo'' "Hamburg" + ''bāo'' "bun") for "hamburger". Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes (
phono-semantic matching), such as / Mǎlì'ào for the video game character
Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example / ''bēnténg'' (lit. "dashing-leaping") for
Pentium and / ''Sàibǎiwèi'' (lit. "better-than hundred tastes") for
Subway restaurants.
Foreign words, mainly
proper nouns, continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, "Israel" becomes ''Yǐsèliè'', "Paris" becomes ''Bālí''. A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including / ''shāfā'' "sofa", / ''mǎdá'' "motor", ''yōumò'' "humor", / ''luóji''/''luójí'' "logic", / ''shímáo'' "smart, fashionable", and ''xiēsīdǐlǐ'' "hysterics". The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghai dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. For example, / "sofa" and / "motor" in Shanghainese sound more like their English counterparts. Cantonese differs from Mandarin with some transliterations, such as ''so
1 faa
3*2'' "sofa" and ''mo
1 daa
2'' "motor".
Western foreign words representing Western concepts have influenced Chinese since the 20th century through transcription. From
French
French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to France
** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents
** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
came ''bālěi'' "ballet" and / ''xiāngbīn'', "champagne"; from
Italian, ''kāfēi'' "caffè". English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed, such as / ''gāoěrfū'' "golf" and the above-mentioned / ''shāfā'' "sofa". Later, the United States
soft influences gave rise to ''dísikē''/''dísīkē'' "disco", / ''kělè'' "cola", and ''mínǐ'' "mini
kirt
KIRT is a radio station at 1580 AM in Mission, Texas
Mission is a city in Hidalgo County, Texas, United States. Its population was 77,058 at the 2010 census and an estimated 84,331 in 2019. Mission is part of the McAllen–Edinburg–Mission ...
. Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English, such as ''kaa
1 tung
1'' "cartoon", ''gei
1 lou
2'' "gay people", ''dik
1 si
6*2'' "taxi", and ''baa
1 si
6*2'' "bus". With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, for example, / ''fěnsī'' "fans", ''hēikè'' "hacker" (lit. "black guest"), and ''bókè'' "blog". In Taiwan, some of these transliterations are different, such as ''hàikè'' for "hacker" and ''bùluògé'' for "blog" (lit. "interconnected tribes").
Another result of the English influence on Chinese is the appearance in Modern Chinese texts of so-called / ''zìmǔcí'' (lit. "lettered words") spelled with letters from the English alphabet. This has appeared in magazines, newspapers, on web sites, and on TV: / "3rd generation cell phones" ( ''sān'' "three" + G "generation" + / ''shǒujī'' "mobile phones"), "IT circles" (IT "information technology" + ''jiè'' "industry"), HSK (''Hànyǔ Shuǐpíng Kǎoshì'', /), GB (''Guóbiāo'', /), / (CIF "Cost, Insurance, Freight" + / ''jià'' "price"), "e-home" (e "electronic" + ''jiātíng'' "home"), / "wireless era" (W "wireless" + / ''shídài'' "era"), "TV watchers" (TV "television" + ''zú'' "social group; clan"), / "post-PC era" (/ ''hòu'' "after/post-" + PC "personal computer" + /), and so on.
Since the 20th century, another source of words has been
Japanese using existing
kanji (Chinese characters used in Japanese). Japanese re-molded European concepts and inventions into , and many of these words have been re-loaned into modern Chinese. Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, ''jīngjì'' (/; ''keizai'' in Japanese), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was narrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then
reimported into Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this loaning, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese share a corpus of linguistic terms describing modern terminology, paralleling the similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin and shared among European languages.
Writing system
The Chinese
orthography centers on
Chinese characters, which are written within imaginary square blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns, despite alternative arrangement with rows of characters from left to right within a row and from top to bottom across rows (like English and other Western writing systems) having become more popular since the 20th century. Chinese characters denote
morphemes independent of phonetic variation in different languages. Thus the character ("one") is uttered in
Standard Chinese
Standard Chinese ()—in linguistics Standard Northern Mandarin or Standard Beijing Mandarin, in common speech simply Mandarin, better qualified as Standard Mandarin, Modern Standard Mandarin or Standard Mandarin Chinese—is a modern Standar ...
, in
Cantonese and ''it'' in
Hokkien (a form of Min).
Most written Chinese documents in the modern time, especially the more formal ones, are created using the grammar and syntax of the
Standard Mandarin Chinese
Standard Chinese ()—in linguistics Standard Northern Mandarin or Standard Beijing Mandarin, in common speech simply Mandarin, better qualified as Standard Mandarin, Modern Standard Mandarin or Standard Mandarin Chinese—is a modern standar ...
variants, regardless of dialectical background of the author or targeted audience. This replaced the old writing language standard of
Literary Chinese before the 20th century. However, vocabularies from different Chinese-speaking areas have diverged, and the divergence can be observed in written Chinese.
Meanwhile, colloquial forms of various Chinese language variants have also been written down by their users, especially in less formal settings. The most prominent example of this is the
written colloquial form of Cantonese, which has become quite popular in
tabloids,
instant messaging applications, and on the internet amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere.
Because some Chinese variants have diverged and developed a number of unique morphemes that are not found in Standard Mandarin (despite all other common morphemes), unique characters rarely used in Standard Chinese have also been created or inherited from archaic literary standard to represent these unique morphemes. For example, characters like and for Cantonese and
Hakka, are actively used in both languages while being considered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese.
The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system for most of its speakers until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early
rime books and dictionaries. Early
Indian translators, working in
Sanskrit and
Pali, were the first to attempt to describe the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted in some Latin character transcription/writing systems, based on various variants of Chinese languages. Some of these Latin character based systems are still being used to write various Chinese variants in the modern era.
In
Hunan, women in certain areas write their local Chinese language variant in
Nü Shu, a
syllabary
In the linguistic study of written languages, a syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent the syllables or (more frequently) moras which make up words.
A symbol in a syllabary, called a syllabogram, typically represents an (optiona ...
derived from
Chinese characters. The
Dungan language
Dungan ( or ) is a Sinitic language spoken primarily in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan by the Dungan people, an ethnic group related to the Hui people of China. Although it is derived from the Central Plains Mandarin of Gansu and Shaanxi, it is w ...
, considered by many a dialect of Mandarin, is nowadays written in
Cyrillic
, bg, кирилица , mk, кирилица , russian: кириллица , sr, ћирилица, uk, кирилиця
, fam1 = Egyptian hieroglyphs
, fam2 = Proto-Sinaitic
, fam3 = Phoenician
, fam4 = G ...
, and was previously written in the
Arabic script
The Arabic script is the writing system used for Arabic and several other languages of Asia and Africa. It is the second-most widely used writing system in the world by number of countries using it or a script directly derived from it, and the ...
. The
Dungan people are primarily Muslim and live mainly in
Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan, and
Russia; some of the related
Hui people
The Hui people ( zh, c=, p=Huízú, w=Hui2-tsu2, Xiao'erjing: , dng, Хуэйзў, ) are an East Asian ethnoreligious group predominantly composed of Chinese-speaking adherents of Islam. They are distributed throughout China, mainly in the ...
also speak the language and live mainly in China.
Chinese characters
Each Chinese character represents a monosyllabic Chinese word or morpheme. In 100 CE, the famed
Han dynasty scholar
Xu Shen classified characters into six categories, namely
pictographs, simple
ideograph
An ideogram or ideograph (from Greek "idea" and "to write") is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept, independent of any particular language, and specific words or phrases. Some ideograms are comprehensible only by familiarit ...
s, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, including many of the simplest characters, such as ''rén'' (human), ''rì'' (sun), ''shān'' (mountain; hill), ''shuǐ'' (water). Between 80% and 90% were classified as phonetic compounds such as ''chōng'' (pour), combining a phonetic component ''zhōng'' (middle) with a semantic
radical
Radical may refer to:
Politics and ideology Politics
*Radical politics, the political intent of fundamental societal change
*Radicalism (historical), the Radical Movement that began in late 18th century Britain and spread to continental Europe and ...
(water). Almost all characters created since have been made using this format. The 18th-century
Kangxi Dictionary recognized 214 radicals.
Modern characters are styled after the
regular script. Various other written styles are also used in
Chinese calligraphy, including
seal script,
cursive script and
clerical script. Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but they tend to use traditional characters for traditional art.
There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The
traditional system, used in
Hong Kong,
Taiwan,
Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except
Singapore and
Malaysia) outside
mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty. The
Simplified Chinese character system, introduced by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass
literacy, simplifies most complex traditional
glyph
A glyph () is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A g ...
s to fewer strokes, many to common cursive
shorthand variants.
Singapore, which has a large Chinese community, was the second nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the ''de facto'' standard for younger ethnic Chinese in
Malaysia.
The
Internet provides the platform to practice reading these alternative systems, be it traditional or simplified. Most Chinese users in the modern era are capable of, although not necessarily comfortable with, reading (but not writing) the alternative system, through experience and guesswork.
A well-educated Chinese reader today recognizes approximately 4,000 to 6,000 characters; approximately 3,000 characters are required to read a
Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. School-children typically learn around 2,000 characters whereas scholars may memorize up to 10,000. A large unabridged
dictionary
A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically (or by radical and stroke for ideographic languages), which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies ...
, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; fewer than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.
Romanization
Romanization is the process of transcribing a language into the
Latin script. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese varieties, due to the lack of a native phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western
Christian missionaries
A Christian mission is an organized effort for the propagation of the Christian faith. Missions involve sending individuals and groups across boundaries, most commonly geographical boundaries, to carry on evangelism or other activities, such as ...
in the 16th century.
Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin is ''
Hanyu Pinyin
Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally written in Chinese for ...
'', introduced in 1956 by the
People's Republic of China, and later adopted by
Singapore and
Taiwan. Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across the
Americas
The Americas, which are sometimes collectively called America, are a landmass comprising the totality of North and South America. The Americas make up most of the land in Earth's Western Hemisphere and comprise the New World.
Along with th ...
,
Australia
Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...
, and
Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones of new words. In school books that teach Chinese, the Pinyin romanization is often shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the
Wade–Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is largely an
Anglicization
Anglicisation is the process by which a place or person becomes influenced by Culture of England, English culture or Culture of the United Kingdom, British culture, or a process of cultural and/or linguistic change in which something non-English ...
, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade–Giles was found in academic use in the
United States, particularly before the 1980s, and
until 2009 was widely used in Taiwan.
When used within European texts, the
tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade–Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade–Giles' extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with ''Beijing'' than they will be with ''Běijīng'' (pinyin), and with ''Taipei'' than ''T'ai²-pei³'' (Wade–Giles). This simplification presents syllables as homophones which really are none, and therefore exaggerates the number of homophones almost by a factor of four.
Here are a few examples of ''Hanyu Pinyin'' and Wade–Giles, for comparison:
Other systems of romanization for Chinese include
Gwoyeu Romatzyh
Gwoyeu Romatzyh (), abbreviated GR, is a system for writing Mandarin Chinese in the Latin alphabet. The system was conceived by Yuen Ren Chao and developed by a group of linguists including Chao and Lin Yutang from 1925 to 1926. Chao himself lat ...
, the French
EFEO
The French School of the Far East (french: École française d'Extrême-Orient, ), abbreviated EFEO, is an associated college of PSL University dedicated to the study of Asian societies. It was founded in 1900 with headquarters in Hanoi in wh ...
, the
Yale system (invented during WWII for U.S. troops), as well as separate systems for
Cantonese,
Min Nan
Southern Min (), Minnan (Mandarin pronunciation: ) or Banlam (), is a group of linguistically similar and historically related Sinitic languages that form a branch of Min Chinese spoken in Fujian (especially the Minnan region), most of Taiwan ...
,
Hakka, and other Chinese varieties.
Other phonetic transcriptions
Chinese varieties have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The
'Phags-pa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of premodern forms of Chinese.
Zhuyin (colloquially ''bopomofo''), a
semi-syllabary
A semi-syllabary is a writing system that behaves partly as an alphabet and partly as a syllabary. The main group of semi-syllabic writing are the Paleohispanic scripts of ancient Spain, a group of semi-syllabaries that transform redundant plosive ...
is still widely used in Taiwan's
elementary school
A primary school (in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Australia, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and South Africa), junior school (in Australia), elementary school or grade school (in North America and the Philippines) is a school for primary ed ...
s to aid standard pronunciation. Although zhuyin characters are reminiscent of
katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system. A comparison table of zhuyin to pinyin exists in the
zhuyin article. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles:
*
Pinyin table
*
Zhuyin table
There are also at least two systems of
cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the
Palladius system.
As a foreign language
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally,
Mandarin instruction has been gaining popularity in schools throughout East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Western world.
Besides Mandarin,
Cantonese is the only other Chinese language that is widely taught as a foreign language, largely due to the economic and cultural influence of Hong Kong and its widespread usage among significant Overseas Chinese communities.
In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official
Chinese Proficiency Test
The ''Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi'' (HSK; ), translated as the Chinese Proficiency Test, is the standardized test of Standard Chinese (a type of Mandarin Chinese) language proficiency of China, Mainland China for non-native speakers such as Internat ...
(also known as HSK, comparable to the English
Cambridge Certificate), then the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660 in 2005 and 750,000 in 2010.
See also
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Chinese exclamative particles The Chinese language involves a number of spoken exclamative words and written onomatopoeia which are used in everyday speech and informal writing. Such "exclamations" have their own Chinese character, but they are rarely used in formal written docu ...
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Chinese honorifics
Chinese honorifics () and honorific language are words, word constructs, and expressions in the Chinese language that convey self-deprecation, social respect, politeness, or deference. Once ubiquitously employed in ancient China, a large percent ...
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Chinese numerals
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Chinese punctuation
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Classical Chinese grammar
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Four-character idiom
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Han unification
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Languages of China
There are several hundred languages in China. The predominant language is Standard Chinese, which is based on central Mandarin, but there are hundreds of related Chinese languages, collectively known as ''Hanyu'' (, 'Han language'), that are spo ...
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North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
The North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL) is an annual academic conference that focuses on research in Chinese language and linguistics.
The conference was first held in 1989 at Ohio State University, as the Northeast Conferen ...
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Protection of the Varieties of Chinese
Notes
References
Citations
Sources
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Further reading
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* R. L. G.
Language borrowing Why so little Chinese in English? ''
The Economist''. 6 June 2013.
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External links
Classical Chinese texts– Chinese Text Project
Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks at the Ohio State University with hundreds of links to Chinese related web pages
{{DEFAULTSORT:Chinese Language
Analytic languages
Isolating languages
Language
Languages of China
Languages of Hong Kong
Languages of Macau
Languages of Singapore
Languages of Taiwan
Languages with own distinct writing systems
Lingua francas