Chinese Language

Chinese is a group of closely related languages spoken in the People's Republic of China, Taiwan, and Singapore. Though most native speakers consider Chinese to be a single language with a number of dialects, linguists point out that these dialects are as diverse as the Romance languages, resulting in mutual unintelligibility among the least similar. As in other countries where strong dialects have flourished, a standardized form of the language, called Standard Chinese or Mandarin, has been adopted as the official language of China and Taiwan and as one of the four official languages of Singapore. Spoken Standard Chinese is widely understood, but only about 80 percent of the Chinese population speak it themselves.

The Chinese writing system provided the original basis for the writing systems of Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Chinese loan words are common in the languages of these countries as well.

Background

Chinese languages are all part of the Sino-Tibetan language family, which may derive from a hypothetical Sino-Tibetan protolanguage. The Sino-Tibetan family can be subdivided in many ways, but it includes hundreds of languages and dialects spoken throughout East, Southeast, and South Asia. "Sino" is the Late Latin prefix for Chinese.

Early examples of written Chinese are attested in the thirteenth century BCE in divination tools and other artifacts and in subsequent centuries in documents like the I Ching and the Classic of Poetry, written in the language historians call Old Chinese. A late form of Old Chinese, Literary Chinese (sometimes called Classical Chinese), developed from the fifth century BCE to the second century CE. Just as European scholars of different native languages could communicate in Latin or French, the scholarly languages of their day, Literary Chinese was the literary language of East Asia for the twentieth century, meaning that written and spoken Chinese were distinctly different forms of the language. While the term Literary Chinese may make the language sound poetic and colorful, it is actually a concise and pragmatic language, relying almost entirely on single-syllable words and leaving out any words that are unnecessary for context or meaning.

Written Chinese uses logograms, a form of writing system in which symbols represent whole morphemes or syllables. This allows words to be written with fewer characters than in a phonetic language like English, but by extension this also requires a much larger character set, since English uses the Latin alphabet in various combinations to form numerous sounds. Chinese characters are called Hanzi in Standard Chinese, and have been adapted to Japanese kanji, Koran hanja, and Vietnamese chu nom. Since the 1950s, the Chinese government has also promoted the use of simplified Chinese, an alternative character set for written Chinese, also called jianhuazi or jiantizi. In theory, the government’s program of simplifying the Chinese character set in order to increase literacy is an ongoing process, although the largest later round of simplification, produced in 1977, was retracted several years after adoption.

Topic Today

The most common system of classifying modern Chinese dialects arranges them into seven groups: Mandarin (including Sichuanese, the Dungan language of Central Asia, and the Beijing dialect that forms the basis for Standard Chinese); Wu (including the Shanghai dialect); Gan; Xiang (including new Xiang and old Xiang); Min (including Taiwanese and many dialects spoken in Southeast Asia); Hakka, and Yue (including Cantonese). Some classification systems are based on more specific regional language criteria and include thirteen groups or more. Some Chinese dialects are not part of a group, such as the Shaozhou Tuhua dialect of northern Guangdong. The large size and population of East Asia, the great age of the Chinese languages, and the relative isolation (at least historically) of many of these population groups are among the reasons for the great variability among these dialects. Of these dialect groups, Mandarin is overwhelmingly the most common, accounting for at least two-thirds of native speakers, depending on the classification system; the second largest group, Wu, accounts for only about 8 percent.

Of necessity, most native Chinese speakers speak both the dialect of the area where they live and Standard Chinese. When an entire language community speaks the same two languages or dialects in this manner, linguists refer to this as diglossia rather than bilingualism. Just as bilingual speakers may mix and match terms and phrases from two languages in their speech, in diglossic communities, the community as a whole tends to do this, and the mixture of languages may extend to signs and advertising as well as conversational speech.

Though Literary Chinese is made up almost entirely of single-syllable words, most Chinese dialects have developed to favor words compounded from two or more morphemes. The prevalence of dialects is itself one reason for this: when most words consist of a single syllable, there is more room for confusion, whether because of dialect differences or accents (such as the zone of English speakers who pronounce "pin" and "pen" the same way). An additional morpheme helps clarify meaning. The Mandarin word for shampoo, for instance, is made up of the morphemes for "wash hair essence." However, Chinese disambiguates in an additional way, often confusing to speakers of European languages. Like many Asian languages, it is a tonal language, meaning that the tone at which a sound is pronounced affects its meaning. Mandarin, for example, uses four tones (and a fifth, neutral tone). Most Min dialects use seven tones, and some Yue dialects use nine. While English uses a rising tone at the end of sentences to form questions, Chinese uses tones for each morpheme.

Formal grammar education in Chinese-language schools is much less extensive than grammar instruction in Western schools. Most Chinese words cannot be classified as nouns, verbs, or other parts of speech except when used in a specific context. Chinese grammar traditionally divides words into "meaningful" and "empty" words, the latter referring to particles that alter or clarify the meaning of other words in a sentence. Because word order and context are emphasized rather than complex verb conjugations and sentence structures, grammar study is less formal in school.

Because the Chinese government promotes Mandarin as the primary language, regional dialects are used less often, and some have become extinct. Traditional Chinese handwriting also declined in the first decades of the twenty-first century as young individuals used more slang, informal communication, and abbreviations, particularly online. As technology use expanded, the use of the phonetic alphabet also increased.

Bibliography

Baxter, William H., and Laurent Sargent. Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction. Oxford UP, 2014.

Dong, Hongyuan. A History of the Chinese Language. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2021.

Fallows, Deborah. Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love, and Language. Walker Books, 2011.

Herzberg, Qin Xue, and Larry Herzberg. Chinese Proverbs and Popular Sayings: With Observations on Culture and Language. Stone Bridge, 2012.

Liang, Sihua. Language Attitudes and Identities in Multilingual China: A Linguistic Ethnography. Springer, 2015.

Lombardo, Jennifer. The Chinese Language. Rosen Publishing Group, 2025.

McNaughton, William. Reading and Writing Chinese. Tuttle, 2013.

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Shei, Chris. Understanding the Chinese Language: A Comprehensive Linguistic Introduction. Routledge, 2014.