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Varieties of Chinese. There are hundreds of local Chinese language varieties [b] forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family, many of which are not mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast part of mainland China.
Local varieties of Chinese are conventionally classified into seven dialect groups, largely based on the different evolution of Middle Chinese voiced initials: [52] [53] Mandarin, including Standard Chinese, the Beijing dialect, Sichuanese, and also the Dungan language spoken in Central Asia.
- Overview
- Linguistic characteristics
Chinese languages, principal language group of eastern Asia, belonging to the Sino-Tibetan language family. Chinese exists in a number of varieties that are popularly called dialects but that are usually classified as separate languages by scholars. More people speak a variety of Chinese as a native language than any other language in the world, and Modern Standard Chinese is one of the six official languages of the United Nations.
The spoken varieties of Chinese are mutually unintelligible to their respective speakers. They differ from each other to about the same extent as the modern Romance languages. Most of the differences among them occur in pronunciation and vocabulary; there are few grammatical differences. These languages include Mandarin in the northern, central, and western parts of China; Wu; Northern and Southern Min; Gan (Kan); Hakka (Kejia); and Xiang; and Cantonese (Yue) in the southeastern part of the country.
All the Chinese languages share a common literary language (wenyan), written in characters and based on a common body of literature. This literary language has no single standard of pronunciation; a speaker of a language reads texts according to the rules of pronunciation of his own language. Before 1917 the wenyan was used for almost all writing; since that date it has become increasingly acceptable to write in the vernacular style (baihua) instead, and the old literary language is dying out in the daily life of modern China. (Its use continues in certain literary and scholarly circles.)
In the early 1900s a program for the unification of the national language, which is based on Mandarin, was launched; this resulted in Modern Standard Chinese. In 1956 a new system of romanization called Pinyin, based on the pronunciation of the characters in the Beijing dialect, was adopted as an educational instrument to help in the spread of the modern standard language. Modified in 1958, the system was formally prescribed (1979) for use in all diplomatic documents and foreign-language publications in English-speaking countries.
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Languages & Alphabets
All modern Sinitic languages—i.e., the “Chinese dialects”—share a number of important typological features. They have a maximum syllabic structure of the type consonant–semivowel–vowel–semivowel–consonant. Some languages lack one set of semivowels, and, in some, gemination (doubling) or clustering of vowels occurs. The languages also employ a system of tones (pitch and contour), with or without concomitant glottal features, and occasionally stress. For the most part, tones are lexical (i.e., they distinguish otherwise similar words); in some languages tones also carry grammatical meaning. Nontonal grammatical units (i.e., affixes) may be smaller than syllables, but usually the meaningful units consist of one or more syllables. Words can consist of one syllable, of two or more syllables each carrying an element of meaning, or of two or more syllables that individually carry no meaning. For example, Modern Standard Chinese tian ‘sky, heaven, day’ is a one-syllable word; ritou ‘sun’ is composed of ri ‘sun, day,’ a word element that cannot occur alone as a word, and the noun suffix tou; and hudie ‘butterfly’ consists of two syllables, each having no meaning in itself (this is a rare type of word formation). The Southern languages have more monosyllabic words and word elements than the Northern ones.
The Sinitic languages distinguish nouns and verbs with some overlapping, as do Sino-Tibetan languages in general. There are noun suffixes that form different kinds of nouns (concrete nouns, diminutives, abstract nouns, and so on), particles placed after nouns indicating relationships in time and space, and verb particles for modes and aspects. Adjectives act as one of several kinds of verbs. Verbs can occur in a series (concatenation) with irreversible order (e.g., the verbs ‘take’ and ‘come’ placed next to one another denote the concept ‘bring’). Nouns are collective in nature, and only classifiers can be counted and referred to singly. Specific particles are used to indicate the relationship of nominals (e.g., nouns and noun phrases) to verbs, such as transitive verb–object, agent–passive verb; in some of the languages this system forms a sentence construction called ergative, in which all nominals are marked for their function and the verb stays unchanged. Final sentence particles convey a variety of meanings (defining either the whole sentence or the predicate) that indicate ‘question, command, surprise, or new situation.’ The general word order of subject–verb–object and complement and modifier–modified is the same in all the languages, but the use of the preposed particles and verbs in a series varies considerably. Grammatical elements of equal or closely related values in various languages are very often not related in sounds.
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The predominant language is Standard Chinese, which is based on Beijingese, but there are hundreds of related Chinese languages, collectively known as Hanyu (simplified Chinese: 汉语; traditional Chinese: 漢語; pinyin: Hànyǔ, 'Han language'), that are spoken by 92% of the population.
- Mandarin (官话 / 官話) Standard Chinese language, or Putonghua, is mainland China’s official national language. It acts as a lingua franca among the Mandarin-speaking areas.
- Wu (吳語 / 吴语) The Wu or Shanghainese is a significant group of Sinitic languages. These dialects are spoken mainly in China’s eastern area, particularly in Shanghai and the southeastern provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang.
- Yue (粤语 / 粤語) Yue is another language in China that is distinct and not mutually intelligible from the other Chinese dialects. We popularly know it as Cantonese but also go by the names of Yueyu, Yuet Yue, and Yueh in regional terms.
- Xiang (湘语 / 湘語) They root the Xiang or Hunanese dialect of the Chinese language in Hunan province in Southern China. Here, this is the most commonly spoken dialect.
Dec 8, 2023 · The first category includes Mandarin Chinese, which belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family and is the most commonly spoken language in China. In addition, it also includes languages which are considered variants of Chinese, such as Cantonese.
Information about written and spoken Chinese, including details of the Chinese script, and of different varieties of spoken Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, etc).
