This article is about the Chinese language, which includes many varieties. For the standardized form, seeStandard Chinese. For other languages in China, seeLanguages of China. For different varieties, seeSinitic languages.
Chinese languages form theSinitic branch of theSino-Tibetan language family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to bedialects of a single language. However, their lack ofmutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered to be separate languages in afamily.[e] 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 fromMiddle Chinese, of which the most spoken by far isMandarin with 66%, or around 800 million speakers, followed byMin (75 million, e.g.Southern Min),Wu (74 million, e.g.Shanghainese), andYue (68 million, e.g.Cantonese).[5] 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, includingNew Xiang withSouthwestern Mandarin,Xuanzhou Wu Chinese withLower Yangtze Mandarin,Jin withCentral Plains Mandarin and certain divergent dialects ofHakka withGan. All varieties of Chinese aretonal at least to some degree, and are largelyanalytic.
Linguists classify all varieties of Chinese as part of theSino-Tibetan language family, together withBurmese,Tibetan and many other languages spoken in theHimalayas and theSoutheast Asian Massif.[6] 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 asIndo-European orAustroasiatic. Difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack ofinflection 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.[7] Without a secure reconstruction of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, the higher-level structure of the family remains unclear.[8] A top-level branching into Chinese andTibeto-Burman languages is often assumed, but has not been convincingly demonstrated.[9]
The first written records appeared over 3,000 years ago during theShang 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.[10]
The earliest examples of Old Chinese are divinatory inscriptions onoracle bones dated toc. 1250 BCE, during theLate Shang.[11] The next attested stage came frominscriptions on bronze artifacts dating to theWestern Zhou period (1046–771 BCE), theClassic of Poetry and portions of theBook of Documents andI Ching.[12] Scholars have attempted to reconstruct thephonology of Old Chinese by comparing later varieties of Chinese with the rhyming practice of theClassic of Poetry and the phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters.[13] 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 initialconsonant clusters of some sort, and in having voiceless nasals and liquids.[14] Most recent reconstructions also describe an atonal language with consonant clusters at the end of the syllable, developing intotone distinctions in Middle Chinese.[15] Severalderivational affixes have also been identified, but the language lacksinflection, and indicated grammatical relationships using word order andgrammatical particles.[16]
Middle Chinese was the language used duringNorthern and Southern dynasties and theSui,Tang, andSong dynasties (6th–10th centuries). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by theQieyun rhyme dictionary (601), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected byrhyme tables such as theYunjing constructed by ancient Chinese philologists as a guide to theQieyun system.[17] These works define phonological categories but with little hint of what sounds they represent.[18] Linguists have identified these sounds by comparing the categories with pronunciations in modernvarieties of Chinese,borrowed Chinese words in Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean, and transcription evidence.[19] 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 adiasystem encompassing 6th-century northern and southern standards for reading the classics.[20]
The complex relationship between spoken and written Chinese is an example ofdiglossia: as spoken, Chinese varieties have evolved at different rates, while the written language used throughout China changed comparatively little, crystallizing into a prestige form known asClassical or Literary Chinese. Literature written distinctly in the Classical form began to emerge during theSpring and Autumn period. Its use in writing remained nearly universal until the late 19th century, culminating with the widespread adoption ofwritten vernacular Chinese with theMay Fourth Movement beginning in 1919.
Rise of northern dialects
After the fall of theNorthern Song dynasty and subsequent reign of the JurchenJin and MongolYuan dynasties in northern China, a common speech (now calledOld Mandarin) developed based on the dialects of theNorth China Plain around the capital.[21]The 1324Zhongyuan Yinyun was a dictionary that codified the rhyming conventions of newsanqu verse form in this language.[22]Together with the slightly laterMenggu Ziyun, this dictionary describes a language with many of the features characteristic of modern Mandarin dialects.[23]
Until the early 20th century, most Chinese people only spoke their local variety.[24] Thus, as a practical measure, officials of theMing andQing dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using acommon language based on Mandarin varieties, known as官话;官話;Guānhuà; 'language of officials'.[25] For most of this period, this language was akoiné based on dialects spoken in theNanjing area, though not identical to any single dialect.[26] By the middle of the 19th century, the Beijing dialect had become dominant and was essential for any business with the imperial court.[27]
In the 1930s, astandard national language (国语;國語;Guóyǔ), was adopted. After much dispute between proponents of northern and southern dialects and an abortive attempt at an artificial pronunciation, theNational Language Unification Commission finally settled on the Beijing dialect in 1932. The People's Republic founded in 1949 retained this standard but renamed it普通话;普通話;pǔtōnghuà; 'common speech'.[28] The national language is now used in education, the media, and formal situations in both mainland China and Taiwan.[29]
InHong Kong andMacau, Cantonese is the dominant spoken language due to cultural influence from Guangdong immigrants and colonial-era policies, and is used in education, media, formal speech, and everyday life—though Mandarin is increasingly taught in schools due to the mainland's growing influence.[30]
Historically, the Chinese language has spread to its neighbors through a variety of means. Northern Vietnam was incorporated into theHan dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE) in 111 BCE, marking the beginning of aperiod of Chinese control that ran almost continuously for a millennium. TheFour Commanderies of Han were established in northern Korea in the 1st century BCE but disintegrated in the following centuries.[31]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.[32] Later, strong central governments modeled on Chinese institutions were established in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, with Literary Chinese serving 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.[33] Scholars from different lands could communicate, albeit only in writing, using Literary Chinese.[34]
Although they used Chinese solely for written communication, each country had its own tradition of reading texts aloud using what are known asSino-Xenic pronunciations. Chinese words with these pronunciations were also extensively imported into theKorean,Japanese andVietnamese languages, and today comprise over half of their vocabularies.[35] This massive influx led to changes in the phonological structure of the languages, contributing to the development ofmoraic structure in Japanese[36] and the disruption ofvowel harmony in Korean.[37]
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 ofLatin andAncient Greek roots in European languages.[38] 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.[39] 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.[40]
Vietnam, Korea, and Japan each developed writing systems for their own languages, initially based onChinese characters, but later replaced with thehangul alphabet for Korean and supplemented withkana syllabaries for Japanese, while Vietnamese continued to be written with the complexchữ 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 calledkanji, and kana. Korean is written exclusively with hangul in North Korea, although knowledge of the supplementary Chinese characters calledhanja is still required, and hanja are increasingly rarely used in South Korea. As a result of its historical colonization by France, Vietnamese now uses the Latin-basedVietnamese alphabet.
The sinologistJerry Norman has estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese.[41] These varieties form adialect 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 theNorth China Plain. Until the late 20th century, Chinese emigrants to Southeast Asia and North America came from southeast coastal areas, where Min, Hakka, and Yue dialects were spoken. Specifically, most Chinese immigrants to North America until the mid-20th century spokeTaishanese, a variety of Yue from a small coastal area aroundTaishan, Guangdong.[42]
In parts of South China, the dialect of a major city may be only marginally intelligible to its neighbors. For example,Wuzhou and Taishan are located approximately 260 km (160 mi) and 190 km (120 mi) away fromGuangzhou respectively, but the Yue variety spoken in Wuzhou is more similar to the Guangzhou dialect than is Taishanese. Wuzhou is located directly upstream from Guangzhou on thePearl River, whereas Taishan is to Guangzhou's southwest, with the two cities separated by several river valleys.[43] In parts ofFujian, the speech of some neighbouring counties or villages is mutually unintelligible.[44]
Grouping
Range of dialect groups inChina proper and Taiwan according to theLanguage Atlas of China[45]
Local varieties of Chinese are conventionally classified into seven dialect groups, largely based on the different evolution ofMiddle Chinese voiced initials:[46][47]
Standard Chinese is thestandard language of China (where it is called普通话;pǔtōnghuà) and Taiwan, and one of the four official languages of Singapore (where it is called either华语;華語;Huáyǔ or汉语;漢語;Hànyǔ). Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. 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.
Diglossia is common among Chinese speakers. For example, a Shanghai resident may speak both Standard Chinese andShanghainese; if they grew up elsewhere, they are also likely fluent in the dialect of their home region. In addition to Standard Chinese, a majority ofTaiwanese people also speakTaiwanese Hokkien (also called台語; 'Taiwanese'[50][51]),Hakka, or anAustronesian language.[52] A speaker in Taiwan may mix pronunciations and vocabulary from Standard Chinese and otherlanguages of Taiwan in everyday speech.[53] In part due to traditional cultural ties withGuangdong, Cantonese is used as an everyday language inHong Kong andMacau.
Nomenclature
The designation of various Chinese branches remains controversial. Some linguists and most ordinary Chinese people consider all the spoken varieties as one single language, as speakers share a common national identity and a common written form.[54] Others instead argue that it is inappropriate to refer to major branches of Chinese such as Mandarin, Wu, and so on as "dialects" because the mutual unintelligibility between them is too great.[55][56] However, calling major Chinese branches "languages" would also be wrong under the same criterion, since a branch such as Wu, itself contains many mutually unintelligible varieties, and could not be properly called a single language.[41]
There are also viewpoints pointing out that linguists often ignore mutual intelligibility when varieties share intelligibility with a central variety (i.e. prestige variety, such as Standard Mandarin), as the issue requires some careful handling when mutual intelligibility is inconsistent with language identity.[57]
The Chinese government's official Chinese designation for the major branches of Chinese is方言;fāngyán; 'regional speech', whereas the more closely related varieties within these are called地点方言;地點方言;dìdiǎn fāngyán; 'local speech'.[58]
Because of the difficulties involved in determining the difference between language and dialect, other terms have been proposed. These includetopolect,[59]lect,[60]vernacular,[61]regional,[58] andvariety.[62][63]
Syllables in the Chinese languages have some unique characteristics. They are tightly related to themorphology and also to the characters of the writing system, andphonologically they are structured according to fixed rules.
The structure of each syllable consists of anucleus that has avowel (which can be amonophthong,diphthong, or even atriphthong in certain varieties), preceded by anonset (a singleconsonant, or consonant +glide; a zero onset is also possible), and followed (optionally) by acoda consonant; a syllable also carries atone. There are some instances where a vowel is not used as a nucleus. An example of this is in Cantonese, where the nasal sonorant consonants/m/ and/ŋ/ 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/m/,/n/,/ŋ/, the retroflex approximant/ɻ/, and voiceless stops/p/,/t/,/k/, or/ʔ/. Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Standard Chinese, are limited to only/n/,/ŋ/, and/ɻ/.
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 polysyllabic 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.[f]
Tones
All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones to distinguish words.[64] 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 which has reduced the set of tones to a two-tonedpitch 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, along with the neutral tone, to the syllablema. The tones are exemplified by the following five Chinese words:
The syllablema with each of the primary tones in Standard Chinese
In contrast, Standard Cantonese has six tones. Historically, finals that end in astop consonant 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:[65]
Chinese is often described as a 'monosyllabic' language. However, this is only partially correct. It is largely accurate when describing Old and Middle Chinese; in Classical Chinese, around 90% of words consist of a single character that corresponds one-to-one with amorpheme, the smallest unit of meaning in a language. In modern varieties, it usually remains the case that morphemes are monosyllabic—in contrast, English has many multi-syllable morphemes, bothbound and free, such as 'seven', 'elephant', 'para-' and '-able'. Some of the more conservative modern varieties, usually found in the south, have largely monosyllabicwords, especially with basic vocabulary. However, most nouns, adjectives, and verbs in modern Mandarin are disyllabic. A significant cause of this isphonetic erosion: sound changes over time have steadily reduced the number of possible syllables in the language's inventory. In modern Mandarin, there are only around 1,200 possible syllables, including the tonal distinctions, compared with about 5,000 in Vietnamese (still a largely monosyllabic language), and over 8,000 in English.[f]
Most modern varieties tend to form new words through polysyllabiccompounds. In some cases, monosyllabic words have become disyllabic formed from different characters without the use of compounding, as in窟窿;kūlong from孔;kǒng; this is especially common in Jin varieties. This phonological collapse has led to a corresponding increase in the number ofhomophones. As an example, the smallLangenscheidt Pocket Chinese Dictionary[66] lists six words that are commonly pronounced asshí in Standard Chinese:
In modern spoken Mandarin, however, tremendous ambiguity would result if all of these words could be used as-is. The 20th centuryYuen Ren Chao poemLion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den exploits this, consisting of 92 characters all pronouncedshi. As such, most of these words have been replaced in speech, if not in writing, with less ambiguous disyllabic compounds. Only the first one,十, normally appears in monosyllabic form in spoken Mandarin; the rest are normally used in the polysyllabic forms of
Word
Pinyin
Gloss
实际;實際
shíjì
'actual-connection'
认识;認識
rènshi
'recognize-know'
石头;石頭
shítou
'stone-head'
时间;時間
shíjiān
'time-interval'
食物
shíwù
'foodstuff'
respectively. In each, the homophone was disambiguated by the addition of another morpheme, typically either a near-synonym or some sort of generic word (e.g. 'head', 'thing'), the purpose of which is to indicate which of the possible meanings of the other, homophonic syllable is specifically meant.
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,石;shí alone, and not石头;石頭;shítou, appears in compounds as meaning 'stone' such as石膏;shígāo; 'plaster',石灰;shíhuī; 'lime',石窟;shíkū; 'grotto',石英; 'quartz', and石油;shíyóu; 'petroleum'. Although many single-syllable morphemes (字;zì) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllable compounds known as词;詞;cí, which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinesecí can consist of more than one character–morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
Examples of Chinese words of more than two syllables include汉堡包;漢堡包;hànbǎobāo; 'hamburger',守门员;守門員;shǒuményuán; 'goalkeeper', and电子邮件;電子郵件;diànzǐyóujiàn; 'e-mail'.
Chinese has asubject–verb–object word order, and like many other languages of East Asia, makes frequent use of thetopic–comment construction to form sentences. Chinese also has an extensive system ofclassifiers andmeasure words, another trait shared with neighboring languages such as Japanese and Korean. Other notable grammatical features common to all the spoken varieties of Chinese include the use ofserial verb construction,pronoun dropping, and the relatedsubject 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.[68] 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. TheHanyu Da Zidian, a compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including oracle bone versions. TheZhonghua Zihai (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. TheCC-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),[69] based on CC-CEDICT, contains over 84,000 entries.
The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumeHanyu Da Cidian, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revisedCihai, 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 2016 edition ofXiandai 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 many other languages, Chinese has absorbed a sizable number ofloanwords 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 'honey' (蜜;mì), 'lion' (狮;獅;shī), and perhaps 'horse' (马;馬;mǎ), 'pig' (猪;豬;zhū), 'dog' (犬;quǎn), and 'goose' (鹅;鵝;é).[70]Ancient words borrowed from along theSilk Road during the Old Chinese period include 'grape' (葡萄;pútáo), 'pomegranate' (石榴;shíliú), and 'lion' (狮子;獅子;shīzi). Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 'Buddha' (佛;Fó) and 'bodhisattva' (菩萨;菩薩;Púsà). Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 'hutong' (胡同). Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 'grape' (葡萄), generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived fromSanskrit orPali, the liturgical languages of northern India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of theGobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally haveAltaic etymologies, such as琵琶 (pípá), the Chinese lute, or 'cheese or yogurt' (酪;lào), but from exactly which source is not always clear.[71]
Modern neologisms are primarily translated into Chinese in one of three ways: free translation (calques), phonetic translation (by sound), ora 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 andinternational scientific vocabulary, wherein the Latin and Greek components are usually converted one-for-one into the corresponding Chinese characters. The word 'telephone' was initially loaned phonetically as德律风;德律風 (délǜfēng; Shanghainesetélífon[təlɪfoŋ])—this word was widely used in Shanghai during the 1920s, but the later电话;電話 (diànhuà; 'electric speech'), built out of native Chinese morphemes became prevalent. Other examples include
Occasionally, compromises between the transliteration and translation approaches become accepted, such as汉堡包;漢堡包 (hànbǎobāo; 'hamburger') from汉堡; 'Hamburg' +包 ('bun'). Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes (phono-semantic matching), such as马利奥;馬利奧 (Mǎlì'ào) for the video game character 'Mario'. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example奔腾;奔騰 (bēnténg; 'dashing-leaping') for 'Pentium' and赛百味;賽百味 (Sàibǎiwèi; 'better-than hundred tastes') for 'Subway'.
Foreign words, mainlyproper 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以色列 (Yǐsèliè), and 'Paris' becomes巴黎 (Bālí). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including沙发;沙發 (shāfā; 'sofa'),马达;馬達 (mǎdá; 'motor'),幽默 (yōumò; 'humor'),逻辑;邏輯 (luóji, luójí; 'logic'),时髦;時髦 (shímáo; 'smart (fashionable)'), and歇斯底里 (xiēsīdǐlǐ; 'hysterics'). The bulk of these words were originally coined in Shanghai during the early 20th century and later loaned from there into Mandarin, hence their Mandarin pronunciations occasionally being quite divergent from the English. For example, in Shanghainese沙发;沙發 (sofa) and马达;馬達 ('motor') sound more like their English counterparts. Cantonese differs from Mandarin with some transliterations, such as梳化 (so1 faa3,2; 'sofa') and摩打 (mo1 daa2; 'motor').
Western foreign words representing Western concepts have influenced Chinese since the 20th century through transcription. From French,芭蕾 (bālěi) and香槟;香檳 (xiāngbīn) were borrowed for 'ballet' and 'champagne' respectively;咖啡 (kāfēi) was borrowed from Italiancaffè 'coffee'. The influence of English is particularly pronounced: from the early 20th century, many English words were borrowed into Shanghainese, such as高尔夫;高爾夫 (gāo'ěrfū; 'golf') and the aforementioned沙发;沙發 (shāfā; 'sofa'). Later, Americansoft power gave rise to迪斯科 (dísīkē; 'disco'),可乐;可樂 (kělè; 'cola'), and迷你裙;mínǐqún ('miniskirt'). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English, such as卡通 (kaa1 tung1; 'cartoon'),基佬 (gei1 lou2; 'gay people'),的士 (dik1 si6,2; 'taxi'), and巴士 (baa1 si6,2; 'bus'). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, for example,粉丝;粉絲 (fěnsī; 'fans'),黑客 (hēikè; 'hacker'), and博客 (bókè; 'blog'). In Taiwan, some of these transliterations are different, such as駭客 (hàikè; 'hacker') and部落格 (bùluògé; 'interconnected tribes') for 'blog'.
Another result of English influence on Chinese is the appearance of so-called字母词;字母詞 (zìmǔcí; 'lettered words') spelled with letters from the English alphabet. These have appeared in colloquial usage, as well as in magazines and newspapers, and on websites and television:
三G手机 'third generation of cell phones'
←
三 (sān; 'three')
+
G; 'generation'
+
手机;shǒujī ('cell phone')
IT界 'IT circles'
←
IT
+
界 (jiè; 'industry')
CIF价 'Cost, Insurance, Freight'
←
CIF
+
价;jià; 'price'
e家庭 'e-home'
←
e; 'electronic'
+
家庭;jiātíng; 'home'
W时代 'wireless era'
←
W; 'wireless'
+
时代;shídài; 'era'
TV族 'TV-watchers'
←
TV; 'television'
+
族;TV zú; 'clan'
Since the 20th century, another source of words has been kanji: Japan re-molded European concepts and inventions into和製漢語,wasei-kango, 'Japanese-made Chinese', 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,经济;經濟;jīngjì;経済,keizai in Japanese, which in the original Chinese meant 'the workings of the state', narrowed to 'economy' in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then re-imported 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.
The Chineseorthography centers onChinese 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.[72] Chinese characters denotemorphemes independent of phonetic variation in different languages. Thus the character一 ('one') is pronounced asyī in Standard Chinese,yat1 in Cantonese andit in Hokkien, a form of Min.
Most modern written Chinese is in the form ofwritten vernacular Chinese, based on spoken Standard Chinese, regardless of dialectical background. Written vernacular Chinese largely replaced Literary Chinese in the early 20th century as the country's standard written language.[73] However, vocabularies from different Chinese-speaking areas have diverged, and the divergence can be observed in written Chinese.[74][better source needed]
Due to the divergence of variants, some unique morphemes are not found in Standard Chinese. Characters rarely used in Standard Chinese have also been created or inherited from archaic literary standards to represent these unique morphemes. For example, characters like冇 and係 are actively used in Cantonese and Hakka, while being archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. The most prominent example of a non-Standard Chinese orthography isWritten Cantonese, which is used in tabloids and on the internet among Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong and elsewhere.[75][better source needed]
Chinese had no uniform system of phonetic transcription until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in earlyrhyme dictionaries and dictionaries. Early Indian translators, working inSanskrit andPali, 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.[76]
InHunan, women in certain areas write their local Chinese language variant inNüshu, asyllabary derived from Chinese characters. TheDungan language, considered by many a dialect of Mandarin, is nowadays written inCyrillic and was previously written in theArabic script. TheDungan people are primarily Muslim and live mainly in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia; manyHui people, living mainly in China, also speak the language.
永 is often used to illustrate the eight basic types of strokes of Chinese characters
Each Chinese character represents a monosyllabic Chinese word or morpheme. In 100 CE, the famed Han dynasty scholarXu Shen classified characters into six categories:pictographs, simpleideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds, and derivative characters. Only 4% were categorized as pictographs, including many of the simplest characters, such as人 (rén; 'human'),日 (rì; 'Sun'),山 (shān; 'mountain'), and水 (shuǐ; 'water'). Between 80% and 90% were classified as phonetic compounds such as沖 (chōng; 'pour'), combining a phonetic component中 (zhōng) with a semantic component of theradical氵, a reduced form of水; 'water'. Almost all characters created since have been made using this format. The 18th-centuryKangxi Dictionary classified characters under a now-common set of 214 radicals.
Modern characters are styled after theregular script. Various other written styles are also used inChinese calligraphy, includingseal script,cursive script andclerical 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.Traditional characters, used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau, and many overseas Chinese-speaking communities, largely take their form from received character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty and standardized during the Ming.Simplified characters, introduced by the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditionalglyphs to fewer strokes, especially by adopting common cursiveshorthand variants and merging characters with similar pronunciations to the one with the least strokes, among other methods. Singapore, which has a large Chinese community, was the second nation to officially adopt simplified characters—first bycreating its own simplified characters, then by adopting entirely the PRC simplified characters. It has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia.
The Internet provides practice reading each of these systems, and most Chinese readers are capable of, if not necessarily comfortable with, reading the alternative system through experience and guesswork.[77]
A well-educated Chinese reader today recognizes approximately 4,000 to 6,000 characters; approximately 3,000 characters are required to read amainland newspaper. The PRC 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.[78] A large unabridged dictionary like theKangxi dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; fewer than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.
国语;國語;Guóyǔ; 'National language' written in traditional and simplified forms, followed by various romanizations
Romanization is the process of transcribing a language into theLatin 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 WesternChristian missionaries in the 16th century.
Today the most common romanization for Standard Chinese isHanyu Pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the PRC, 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, Australia, 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, theWade–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–it is largely ananglicization, 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 was widely used in Taiwan until 2009.
When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade–Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade–Giles's extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar withBeijing than they will be withBěijīng (pinyin), and withTaipei thanT'ai2-pei3 (Wade–Giles). This simplification presents syllables as homophones which are not, and therefore exaggerates the number of homophones almost by a factor of four.
Other systems includeGwoyeu Romatzyh, the FrenchEFEO, theYale system (invented for use by US troops during World War II), as well as distinct systems for the phonetic requirements of Cantonese, Min Nan, Hakka, and other 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.Bopomofo (orzhuyin) is asemi-syllabary that is still widely used in Taiwan to aid standard pronunciation. There are also at least two systems ofcyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is thePalladius system.
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Standard Chinese instruction has been gaining popularity in schools throughout East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Western world.[79]
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.[80]
In 1991, there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test, calledHanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK), comparable to the EnglishCambridge Certificate, but by 2005 the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660[81] and in 2010 to 750,000.[82]
^"Chinese" refers collectively to the various language varieties that have descended from Old Chinese: native speakers often consider these to be "dialects" of a single language—though the Chinese term方言;fāngyán; 'dialect' does not carry the precise connotations of "dialect" in English—while linguists typically analyze them as separate languages. SeeDialect continuum andVarieties of Chinese for details.
David Crystal,The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 312. "The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages."
Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson.Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p. 2. "The Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family."
Norman (1988), p. 1, " ... the modern Chinese dialects are really more like a family of languages ... "
DeFrancis (1984), p. 56, "To call Chinese a single language composed of dialects with varying degrees of difference is to mislead by minimizing disparities that according to Chao are as great as those between English and Dutch. To call Chinese a family of languages is to suggest extralinguistic differences that in fact do not exist and to overlook the unique linguistic situation that exists in China."
Linguists in China often use a formulation introduced byFu Maoji in theEncyclopedia of China:《汉语在语言系属分类中相当于一个语族的地位。》; "In language classification, Chinese has a status equivalent to a language family."[4]
^abDeFrancis (1984), p. 42 counts Chinese as having 1,277 tonal syllables, and about 398 to 418 if tones are disregarded; he cites Jespersen, Otto (1928)Monosyllabism in English; London, p. 15 for a count of over 8000 syllables for English.
^There are plural markers in the language, such as们;們;men, used with personal pronouns.
^A distinction is made between他; 'he' and她; 'she' in writing, but this was only introduced in the 20th century—both characters remain exactly homophonous.
^Sumadinata, Leo (2013), "Southeast Asian government policies toward the ethnic Chinese: a revisit", in Tan, Chee-Beng (ed.),Routledge Handbook of the Chinese Diaspora, London: Routledge, p. 284,ISBN978-1-136-23096-7
Egerod, Søren Christian (12 April 2024),"Chinese languages",Encyclopædia Britannica,Old Chinese vocabulary already contained many words not generally occurring in the other Sino-Tibetan languages. The words for 'honey' and 'lion', and probably also 'horse', 'dog', and 'goose', are connected with Indo-European and were acquired through trade and early contacts. (The nearest known Indo-European languages were Tocharian and Sogdian, a middle Iranian language.) Some words have Austroasiatic cognates and point to early contacts with the ancestral language of Muong–Vietnamese and Mon–Khmer.
Ulenbrook, Jan (1967),Einige Übereinstimmungen zwischen dem Chinesischen und dem Indogermanischen (in German) proposes 57 items.
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