Chinese Language

I

Introduction

Chinese Language, language of the Han Chinese people, the majority ethnic group of China. It is the official language of China and one of the official languages of Singapore. Of China's more than 1 billion people, approximately 95 percent speak Chinese, as opposed to the non-Chinese languages—such as Tibetan, Mongolian, Lolo, Miao, and Tai—spoken by minorities. Chinese is also spoken by large emigrant communities, such as those in Southeast Asia, North and South America, and the Hawaiian Islands. More people speak Chinese than any other language in the world.

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

II

General Characteristics

Chinese—together with Tibetan, Burmese, and many other languages of South and Southeast Asia—belongs to the family of Sino-Tibetan languages (see Language). Besides a core vocabulary and sounds, Chinese and many related languages share features that distinguish them from most Western languages: They have even less inflection than the English language and are tonal. In order to indicate differences in meaning between words similar in sound, tonal languages assign to words a distinctive relative pitch—high or low—or a distinctive pitch contour—level, rising, or falling.

III

Language Versus Dialects

Spoken Chinese comprises many regional variants, called dialects. Although they employ a common written form, they are mutually unintelligible, and for this reason controversy exists over whether they can legitimately be called dialects or whether they should be classified as separate languages. The differences among them are analogous to the differences in pronunciation and vocabulary among the Romance languages. Generally, however, the variants of Chinese are referred to as dialects. Most Chinese speak one of the Mandarin dialects, which are largely mutually intelligible. The dialect spoken in Beijing constitutes the base for standard Mandarin dialect. It forms the basis both of the modern written vernacular, Baihua, which supplanted classical Chinese in the schools after 1917, and of the official spoken language, Putonghua, prescribed in 1956 for nationwide use in schools.

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Chinese also has six other dialect groups, all spoken in China's southeastern provinces. The Yue dialects, also called Cantonese, are spoken in Hong Kong, most of Guangdong, southern Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, parts of Hainan, and in many overseas settlements. Most of the inhabitants of Hunan use the Xiang dialects, also known as Hunanese. The Min dialects are spoken in most of Fujian, large areas of Taiwan and Hainan, parts of eastern Guangdong and the Leizhou Peninsula, and in areas of Southeast Asia. Most of the people living in Jiangxi and the southeastern corner of Hubei use the Gan dialects. The majority of the inhabitants of Zhejiang, as well as people living in southern areas of Jiangsu and Anhui, speak the Wu dialects. Some Wu speakers share marginal mutual intelligibility with Mandarin and Gan speakers. The Kejia, or Hakka, dialects are spoken in northeastern Guangdong, southern Jiangxi, southwestern Fujian, and in pockets throughout southeastern China and Southeast Asia.

IV

Grammar

Highly inflected languages such as the Latin language and the Russian language make scores of additions to, or changes in, the sound of a word to indicate grammatical differences. Modern Chinese, on the other hand, never changes, and seldom adds, sounds for such purposes. Because no inflection of nouns exists to show whether they are, for example, subject or object, and no indication is given that verbs, nouns, and adjectives agree with one another in number and case, word order is even more important than it is in English as an indicator of the relation of words to one another in the sentence. In broad outline, Chinese word order is quite like that of English: subject-verb-object, modifier-modified. On closer inspection, however, the grammar reveals greater differences between the languages. In English every sentence must have a subject, but in Chinese a subject is not an obligatory element. For example, in the English sentence “It rains,” the pronoun it serves as the subject. In Chinese the equivalent might be “xia yu” (fall rain), which does not require a subject.

In general, verb tense is not expressed in Chinese either. Instead, Chinese verbs can have suffixes that express different aspects, such as perfective. In the sentence “Ta chi-le yi-wan fan” (“He has eaten a bowl of rice” or “He had eaten a bowl of rice”), the verbal marker “-le” indicates either present or past perfect tense.

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