chinese

In general, all varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. However, spoken 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 (Yue; c. 70 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 then speakers of English as a first and second language number more, though Mandarin still holds the title for most native speakers.

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 on Taiwan, as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Spoken in the form of Standard Cantonese, Chinese is one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of 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.

Listen to the introductory section of the article (help·info)

Spoken Chinese

Main article: spoken Chinese

The map on the right depicts the subdivisions (“languages” or “dialect groups”) within Chinese. The mountainous southern part of 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

Main article: Standard Mandarin

Standard Mandarin is the official standard language used by China (the People's Republic of China), Taiwan (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 China (the People's Republic of China), Taiwan (the Republic of China), 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 diglossia: it is common for speakers of Chinese to be able to speak several varieties of the language, typically Standard Mandarin, the local dialect, and occasionally a regional lingua franca, 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 perhaps Mandarin.

Classification of variations within the Chinese language

Main article: Identification of the varieties of Chinese

The diversity of spoken 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 dialects, 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 idiolects, 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. Because many Chinese people make a distinction between "written language" (wén; 文) and "spoken language" (yǔ; 语/語), and of the use of classical Chinese until relatively recently, the concept of written and spoken forms of language are therefore different in the West than in China. Hence, many Chinese continue to take the Chinese language as a single language owing to the fact that there is only one written language. Speakers of different varieties of Chinese all use one formal standard written language, although this written language in modern times is itself based on one variety of spoken Chinese, standard Mandarin.

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, as in ancient times before they were assimilated and sinicized by the Chinese empire, 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, Uyghurs, 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 Polynesians.

Phonology

For more specific information on phonology of Chinese see the respective main articles of each spoken variety.

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:

• 媽/妈(mā) “mother” — high level
• 麻(má) “hemp” — high rising
• 馬/马(mǎ) “horse” — low falling-rising
• 罵/骂(mà) “scold” — high falling
• 嗎/吗(ma) question particle — neutral

Morphology

Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest building blocks, of the language. Some of these single-syllable morphemes can stand alone as individual words, but contrary to what is often claimed, Chinese is not a monosyllabic language. Most words in the modern Chinese spoken varieties are in fact multisyllabic, consisting of more than one morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.

The confusion arises in how one thinks about the language. In the Chinese writing system, each individual single-syllable morpheme corresponds to a single character, referred to as a zì (字). Most Chinese speakers think of words as being zì, but this view is not entirely accurate. Many words are multisyllabic, and are composed of more than one zì. This composition is what is known as a cí (词/詞), and more closely resembles the traditional Western definition of a word. However, the concept of cí was historically a technical linguistic term that until only the past century, the average Chinese speaker was not aware of. Even today, most Chinese speakers think of words as being zì. This can be illustrated in the following Mandarin Chinese sentence (romanized using pinyin):

Jīguāng, zhè liǎng ge zì shì shénme yìsi?

激光, 這兩個字是甚麼意思?

激光, 这两个字是什么意思?

The sentence literally translates to, “Jī 激 and guāng 光, these two zì 字, what do they mean?” However, the more natural English translation would probably be, “Laser, this word, what does it mean?” Even though jīguāng 激光 is a single word, speakers tend to think of its constituents as being separate (Ramsey, 1987).

Old Chinese and Middle Chinese had many more monosyllabic words due to greater variability in possible sounds. The modern Chinese varieties lost many of these sound distinctions, leading to homonyms in words that were once distinct. Multisyllabic words arose in order to compensate for this loss. Most natively derived multisyllabic words still feature these original monosyllabic morpheme roots. Many Chinese morphemes still have associated meaning, even though many of them no longer can stand alone as individual words. This situation is analogous to the use of the English prefix pre-. Even though pre- can never stand alone by itself as an individual word, it is commonly understood by English speakers to mean “before”, such as in the words predawn, previous, and premonition. Taking the previous example, jīguāng, jī and guāng literally mean “stimulated light”, resulting in the meaning, “laser”. However, jī is never found as a single word by itself.

Although not a matter of morphology, it is worth noting that cí made up of multiple zì may serve to help disambiguate homophones (different zì that are pronounced the same). For instance, the morphemes that correspond to the meanings “chicken” 雞/鸡, “machine” 機/机, “basic” 基, “hit” 擊/击, “hunger” 饑/饥, and “sum” 積/积 are also pronounced jī in Mandarin, although they are clearly different morphemes (which we know in part because they are written differently, but for other reasons as well). By combining zì to make cí, it may be more readily possible for a hearer to determine which of many identally-sounding zì was meant in a particular utterance.

Here are some other instances of jī:

It is very common for Mandarin speakers to put characters in context as a natural part of conversation. For example, when telling each other their names (which are often rare, or at least non-colloquial, combinations of zì), Mandarin speakers often state which words their names are found in. As a specific example, a speakers might say 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyīng, Jiālíngjiāng de jiā, Yīngguó de yīng “My name is Jiāyīng, the Jia of Jialing River and the Ying in England(Yingguo)”.

The problem of homonyms also exists but is less severe in southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Taiwanese, which preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese. For instance, the previous examples of jī for “stimulated”, “chicken”, and “machine” have distinct pronunciations in Cantonese (romanized using jyutping): gik1, gai1, and gei1, respectively. For this reason, southern varieties tend to employ fewer multisyllabic words. (Citation needed.)

There are a few morphemes in Chinese, many of them loanwords, that consist of more than one syllable. These words cannot be further divided into single-syllable meaningful units, however in writing each syllable is still written as separate zì. One example is the word for “spider”, zhīzhū, which is written as 蜘蛛. Even in this case, Chinese tend to try to make some kind of meaning out of the constituent syllables. For this reason, the two characters 蜘 and 蛛 each have an associated meaning of “spider” when seen alone as individual characters. When spoken though, they can never occur apart.

Written Chinese

Main article: 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 languages. 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 morphemes 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.

Chinese characters

Main article: Chinese character

The Chinese written language employs Chinese characters (漢字/汉字 pinyin: hànzì), which are logograms: each symbol represents a sememe 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 pictographs (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 first introduced by the government of the People's Republic of China in the 1950s and finalized in 1986. 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 typefaces exist for printed Chinese characters, a great number of which are often based on the styles of single calligraphers or schools of calligraphy.

Romanization

Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages; this is due to the complex history of interaction between China and the West, and to the Chinese languages' lack of phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries of the 16th century, but may have been written down by Western travelers or missionaries of earlier periods.

At present, the most common romanization system for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin 漢語拼音/汉语拼音, also known simply as Pinyin. Pinyin is the official Mandarin romanization system for the People's Republic of China, and the official one used in Singapore (see also Chinese language romanisation in Singapore). Pinyin is also very commonly used when teaching Mandarin in schools and universities of North America and Europe.

Before Hanyu Pinyin was developed the most common system of romanization for Mandarin was Wade-Giles. Wade-Giles is often found in academic use in the U.S., and until recently was widely used in Taiwan (Taipei city now officially uses Hanyu Pinyin and the rest of the island officially uses Tōngyòng Pinyin 通用拼音/通用拼音).

Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison:

Regardless of system, tone transcription is often left out, either due to difficulties of typesetting or propriety for audience. Wade-Giles' extensive use of easily-forgotten apostrophes adds to the confusion. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng, and with Taipei than with T'ai²-pei³. Regardless of romanization, the words are pronounced the same.

Systems of romanization serve to represent Chinese sounds. The sound indicated by a letter or combination is generally similar, but not identical, to sounds represented by the same letter in other languages. For example, the sound represented by <j> in Hanyu Pinyin is similar to the sound of <j> in English <James>.

Hanyu Pinyin uses certain letters and combinations to represent sounds that seem surprising to a western reader. Hanyu Pinyin evolved from an earlier system devised by Soviet sinologists around A.A. Dragunov in the 1930s. As a result, some Roman letters are assigned sound values based on similar Cyrillic letters. For example, ‹q› (resembling Cyrillic <ч> "che") represents a sound similar to the English ‹ch› but pronounced further forward (an aspirated alveolo-palatal fricative, /tɕʰ/). It has been claimed that these spelling idiosyncrasies serve to alert a second language learner to the fact that they will have to learn a new pronunciation for such sounds. With languages that use similar orthography, the temptation to pronounce words just as in one's mother tongue can lead to great misunderstanding.^{citation needed]}

There are many other systems of romanization for Mandarin, as well as systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages. See the article category Chinese language romanization.

History

Main article: History of the Chinese language

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 (T:上古漢語S:上古汉语P:Shànggǔ Hànyǔ), 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.

Middle Chinese (T:中古漢語S:中古汉语P:Zhōnggǔ Hànyǔ) was the language used during the Suí, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (7th through 10th centuries AD). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the Qièyùn (切韻) rhyme table (601 AD), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the Guǎngyùn (廣韻) rhyme table. Linguists are confident of having reconstructed how Middle Chinese sounded. The evidence for the pronunciation of Middle Chinese comes from several sources: modern dialect variations, rhyming dictionaries, foreign transliterations, “rhyming tables” constructed by ancient Chinese philologists to summarize the phonetic system, and Chinese phonetic translations of foreign words. However, all reconstructions are tentative; for example, scholars have shown 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. 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^{citation needed]}.

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 (T:正音書院S:正音书院P:Zhèngyīn Shūyuàn) 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 and Macau) of an education system which used Standard Mandarin as the language of instruction. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all people in mainland China and on Táiwān^{citation needed]}. 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 characters (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 news print and to eliminate ambiguity in scholarly literature. (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 loanwords from Chinese. Sino-Korean "words today make up over 50% (and by some estimates up to 70%) of the Korean vocabulary," also, Sino-Vietnamese "account for about 60% of the Vietnamese vocabulary," and "more than 60% of modern Japanese vocabulary is estimated to consist of" Sino-Japanese. 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.

Loanwords

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. Words borrowed from along the Silk Road in ancient times include 葡萄 “grape”, 石榴 “pomegranate” and 狮子/獅子 “lion”. Some words were borrowed from Sanskrit Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 “Buddha” and 菩萨/菩薩 “bodhisattva”. Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 哥哥 “elder brother” and 胡同 “hutong”.

Foreign words continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations; characters in this case are usually taken strictly for their phonetic values. For example, “Israel” becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè). The Chinese characters used here literally mean “using-colour-rank”, or “ranking using colour”, but the sense is automatically ignored because it is understood that the characters are used for their phonetic values only. The Chinese name of some countries take the form of: syllable similar to name of country + guó (Chinese for country), e.g. the Chinese word for Germany is déguó, (dé from Deutschland). Generally, characters which do not carry negative meanings are used to write the phonetic part. Characters which are used nearly exclusively in the transcription of foreign words are present in Chinese; many of these characters date back to Middle Chinese when they were used to translate Sanskrit phonemes. For example, 斯 sī and 尔/爾 ěr, which are Classical Chinese words for “this” and “you”, are never used in their original senses (except in a limited number of idiomatic expressions) and more often used to transcribe the sounds /s/ and /l/ in foreign words. Nevertheless, this method tends to yield somewhat strange results, and is therefore overwhelmingly used to transcribe foreign names only. A rather small number of direct phonetic borrowings have survived as common words, including 沙發 shāfā “sofa”, 马达/馬達 mǎdá “motor”, 幽默 yōumò “humour”, 逻辑/邏輯 luójí “logic”, 时髦/時髦 shímáo “smart, fashionable”, 麦克风/麥克風 màikèfēng “microphone”, and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ “hysterics”. The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghainese dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin are quite off from the English. For example, 沙发/沙發 and 马达/馬達 in Shanghainese actually sound like English “sofa” and “motor”.

Today, it is much more common to use existing Chinese morphemes to coin new words in order to represent imported concepts, such as technical expressions. Any Latin or Greek etymologies are dropped, making them more comprehensible for Chinese but introducing more difficulties in understanding foreign texts. For example, the word telephone was loaned phonetically as 德律风/德律風 (Shanghainese: télífon [təlɪfoŋ], Standard Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese and Vietnamese 电话/電話 (diànhuà or điện thoại “electric speech”), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include 电视/電視 (diànshì or điện ảnh “electric vision”) for television, 电脑/電腦 (diànnǎo or điện não “electric brain”) for computer; 手机/手機 (shǒujī “hand machine”, yídòng diànhuà or điện thoại di động "mobile phone") for cellphone, and 蓝牙/藍牙 (lányá “blue tooth”) for Bluetooth. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 汉堡包/漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo or hambua bao, “Hamburg bun”) for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as 拖拉机/拖拉機 (tuōlājī or máy kéo, “tractor”, literally “dragging-pulling machine”). This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾/奔騰 (bēnténg “running leaping”) for Pentium and 赛百味/賽百味 (Sàibǎiwèi “better-than hundred tastes”) for Subway restaurants.

Another important source came from a related writing system, kanji, which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language, and Hán Tự, which is the Vietnamese term for classical Chinese writing produced in Vietnam. The Japanese used kanji to translate many European words in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Likewise, the Vietnamese utilized Hán Tự to morph copious Western vocabularies. These words are called wasei-kango in Japanese (和製漢語 literally Japanese-made Chinese), and many of these Japanese words were then loaned into Chinese. While in Vietnamese, these words are called Từ Hán-Việt (literally "Word(s) Sino-Vietnamese.") Examples include diànhuà (電話, denwa, điện thoại, “telephone”), shèhuì (社会, shakai, xã hội, “society”), kēxué (科學, kagaku, khoa học, “science”), zhéxué (哲學, tetsugaku, triết lý, “philosophy”), chōuxiàng (抽象, chūshō, trừu tượng, “abstract”), zhǔyì (主義, shugi, chủ nghĩa, “-ism” or “ideology”) and làngmàn (浪漫, roman or rōman, lãng mạng, French “roman”). Other terms were coined by the Japanese and Vietnamese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature, these include zìyóu (自由, jiyuu, “freedom”), jīngjì which in the original Chinese meant only “able to move freely”, and keizai, (經濟 kinh tế) which in the original Chinese meant “the workings of the state” but in Japanese and Vietnamese was narrowed to “economy,” this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese, Vietnamese, or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this to-and-fro process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese continue to share many terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European languages.

Grammar

Main article: Chinese grammar

In general, all spoken varieties of Chinese are isolating languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology (changes in the form of the word through inflection). Because they are isolating languages, they make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood.

Chinese features Subject Verb Object word order, and like many other languages in East Asia, makes frequent use of the topic-comment construction to form sentences. Even though Chinese has no grammatical gender, it has an extensive system of measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring (but not related) languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese measure words for an extensive coverage of this subject.

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), and the use of aspect rather than tense.

Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess various differences. 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.

Learning Chinese

Interest in learning Mandarin Chinese has recently risen in the Western world. While in the mid 1990s, there were very few students of Chinese in the Western world, despite it being the most spoken language in the world, by the mid 2000s, more and more schools introduced it, one independent school in Great Britain going as far as to make Mandarin compulsory for its students in 2006. [2]

Number of learners

In 1991 2,000 people took China's official Chinese Proficiency Test (comparable to English's Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005 40,000 candidates took it. China's Ministry of Education estimates the number of worldwide learners to be 30 million. This includes all students of Chinese in universities, community colleges and specialised training courses; it also takes into account the number of students taking private tuition in the subject. [3] More and more students in American schools are also electing to study Mandarin in lieu of more traditional foreign languages like French or German. [4]

Methods of learning

The existence of Hanyu Pinyin and its status for foreign learners as the standard method of writing in Chinese has made it vastly easier for non-Chinese to begin to learn the language.

• The first step in many Chinese classes is to teach students how to use Pinyin (how to read and pronounce it).
• Listening to a native speaker pronouncing Chinese will help a lot. Later, it will not take too much effort, since pronunciation is always regular.
• Characters are generally the most difficult aspect facing new learners, taking most of their time.
• In comparison, Chinese grammar is considerably easier than that of many other languages.

See also

• Chinese numerals
• Chinese number gestures
• Haner language
• Four-character idiom
• Common phrases in different languages
• Chinese measure words
• Nü shu
• Han unification
• Hanzi
• HSK test
• Subgroups of the Han nationality
• Chinese character encoding
• List of writing systems
• Numbers in various languages
• Chinese honorifics
• Pinyin
• Zhuyin
• List of ISO 639 codes for Chinese languages

References

• DeFrancis, John (1984). The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0-8248-1068-6.
• Hannas, William C. (1997). Asia's Orthographic Dilemma. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0-8248-1892-X.
• Norman, Jerry (1988). Chinese. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-29653-6.
• Qiu, Xigui (2000). Chinese Writing. Society for the Study of Early China and Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. ISBN 1-55729-071-7.
• Ramsey, S. Robert (1987). The Languages of China. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01468-X.

External links

• Chinese Language & Culture Community - Dedicated for people who want to learn about Chinese Language and Culture.
• The Chinese script and language
• A large collection of web resources by a professor of linguistics at Ohio State University
• Learn Chinese material
• A free Chinese textbook on the Standard Mandarin dialect
• A website that has interesting facts about the Chinese language