Chinese Language

I

Introduction

Chinese Language, language of the Chinese, or Han, people, the majority ethnic group of China, including both the People's Republic of China and Taiwan. Of China's more than 1 billion people, approximately 95 per cent speak Chinese languages, as opposed to the non-Chinese languages—such as Tibetan, Mongolian, Lolo, Miao, and Tai—spoken by minorities. Chinese is also spoken by large immigrant communities in South East Asia, North and South America, and in the Hawaiian Islands. Chinese has more native speakers than any other language in the world; English ranks second in number of speakers and Spanish third.

As the dominant language of East Asia, Chinese has greatly influenced the writing systems and vocabularies of neighbouring languages not related to it by origin, such as Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. It has been estimated that until the 18th century more than half of the world's printed books were Chinese.

II

General Characteristics

Chinese languages, together with Tibetan and Burmese and the many tribal languages of South and South East Asia, belong to the Sino-Tibetan family of languages, forming a sub-group of their own called Chinese. Besides a core vocabulary and sounds, Chinese and most related languages share features that make them unlike most Western languages: they are monosyllabic, have even less inflection than English, and are tonal. In order to indicate differences in meaning between words similar in sound, tone languages assign to words a distinctive relative pitch—high or low—or a distinctive pitch contour—level, rising, or falling.

III

Language vs Dialect

Spoken Chinese comprises 13 languages, the most distinct of which are shown in the table (left). Many people incorrectly speak of a single Chinese language because all Chinese languages employ a common written form and represent a cultural union. However, they are mutually unintelligible and have their own dialects, and for these reasons are classed as languages, not dialects; the differences among them are analogous to the differences in pronunciation and vocabulary among the Romance languages. Most Chinese speak the same language, which Westerners call Mandarin Chinese; the Beijing dialect being the basis for the written standard. Mandarin forms the basis of the official spoken language in China, Putonghua (a Mandarin dialect), prescribed in 1956 for nationwide use in schools. Mandarin is the official language in Taiwan, and one of Singapore’s official languages.

IV

Development of the Language

The modern Chinese languages (from the 11th century ad) evolved from Old (or Archaic) Chinese (8th-3rd century BC), the sounds of which have been tentatively reconstructed. Although monosyllabic, Old Chinese was not wholly uninflected. The next stage of Chinese that has been carefully analysed was Middle (or Ancient) Chinese (to about the 11th century ad). By this time the rich sound system of Old Chinese had progressed far towards the extreme simplification seen in the modern languages. For instance, Old Chinese possessed series of consonants such as p, ph, b, bh (where h stands for aspiration or rough breathing). In Middle Chinese this had become p, ph, bh; in Mandarin only p and ph (now spelled b and p) are left.

The modern Mandarin syllable consists, at the least, of a so-called final element, namely, a vowel (a, e) or semivowel (i, u) or some combination of these (a diphthong or triphthong), with a tone (level, rising, dipping, or falling) and sometimes a final consonant—which, however, can only be an n, ng, or r. Old Chinese, however, had in addition a final p, t, k, b, d, g, and m. The final element may be preceded by an initial consonant but never by a consonant cluster; Old Chinese probably had clusters, as at the beginning of klam and glam. As sonic distinctions became fewer—for example, as final n absorbed final m, so that syllables such as lam and lan became simply lan—the number of Mandarin syllables different from one another in sound fell to about 1,300. No fewer words existed, but more words were homonyms. Thus, the words for poetry, bestow, moist, lose, corpse, and louse had all been pronounced differently from one another in Middle Chinese; in Mandarin they all become shi in the level tone. In fact, so many homonyms came to exist that ambiguity would have become intolerable if compound words had not simultaneously developed. Thus, poetry, became shi-ge, “poetry-song”; teacher became shi-zhang, “teacher-elder”. Although a modern Chinese dictionary contains many more such compounds than one-syllable expressions, most of the compounds still break down into independently meaningful syllables.