Chinese language is one of the world’s oldest languages. Almost all of the people of China and Taiwan speak Chinese, and approximately three-fourths of the people of Singapore speak it.
Chinese is written the same way throughout China. However, the language consists of seven major dialect groups with some variations within each group. These dialects differ so greatly that a person who lives in one area may not be able to converse with someone from another area. The pronunciation of many words depends on the dialect being spoken.
According to some language experts, Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. This family includes Burmese and Tibetan. See Language (Other language families).
Written Chinese
has no alphabet. Instead, it consists of about 50,000 characters. The Chinese writing system is logographic, meaning that each character stands for a word or part of a word. A person who knows about 4,000 of the most frequently used characters can read a Chinese newspaper or modern novel. Scholars who read ancient Chinese literature and documents must learn many more characters.
The earliest forms of Chinese script were pictograms. The characters, also called pictographs or graphs, were drawings or pictures of the objects they represented. As Chinese script developed, characters became more simplified and less pictographic.
Some characters are not pictures but represent abstract words. Examples include the characters for up and down. Such characters, called simple graphs, are few in number. Compound graphs, however, are more numerous. Compound graphs are formed by two or more characters. For example, the character meaning to bark is a compound graph formed by the characters for mouth and dog.
The Chinese also developed a technique called character borrowing. It involves “borrowing” the character of one word to represent another word that has a similar pronunciation.
The meaning of a character that stands for more than one word may be difficult to determine. To make the meaning of such a character clear, the Chinese developed phonetic compounds. A phonetic compound is a character that is composed of two elements, one that gives the approximate pronunciation, and one that relates to the meaning.
Spoken Chinese.
The common dialect of Chinese is Northern Chinese or Mandarin. Mandarin is the official language of China, where it is called Putonghua, which means common or standard language. The language is taught in all the nation’s schools. Hundreds of millions of people speak it throughout northern China and in several southwestern provinces. Mandarin is also the official language in Taiwan, where it is called Guoyu, which means national language. Other major Chinese dialects and their alternate names include Yue or Cantonese, Xiang or Hunanese, Gan or Jiangxinese, Hakka, Min or Fukienese, and Wu. They are spoken in many areas of China and in the Chinese communities of various cities in other countries.
Chinese dialects differ in the use of tones. A tone is the pitch used in saying a particular word. Northern Chinese has four tones—high-level (high and unwavering), rising, low-dipping (falling and rising), and falling. Some other dialects have as many as nine tones. The use of tone is an important means of separating words of different meanings but similar pronunciation. For example, ma means mother in a high-level tone, horse in a low-dipping tone, scold in a falling tone, and hemp in a rising tone. Each of these words has a different character in written Chinese.
Chinese is spoken with no tenses. For example, the sentence Ta shi xuezhe could mean He is a scholar or He was a scholar, depending on how it is used.
Many language experts consider Chinese to be monosyllabic—that is, almost all the words have only one syllable. Even words of more than one syllable can be broken down into single-syllable words. For example, xuezhe (scholar) consists of two single-syllable words—xue (learn) and zhe (one who).
Development.
The earliest known examples of Chinese writing are inscriptions carved in bones and shells during the Shang dynasty (c. 1766-c. 1045 B.C.). Language from this dynasty formed the basis of a later language called classical, or literary, Chinese.
Present-day Chinese dialects developed from classical Chinese. Mandarin began to be used during the A.D. 1300’s. From the mid-1400’s to the mid-1700’s, the standard form of Mandarin was based on the language of Nanjing (also spelled Nan-ching or Nanking). By the 1800’s, the standard shifted to the language of the capital, Beijing (also spelled Peking). In the early 1900’s, Beijing Mandarin was adopted as the national language.
Through the years, the Chinese government has promoted the use of Mandarin through the nation’s educational program. In 1919, Chinese schools began to use a system of phonetic signs to teach standard pronunciation. This method involved books that taught the pronunciation in Mandarin of Chinese characters. In 1949, educators in the People’s Republic of China began to simplify characters to make them easier to learn and write. Taiwan educators have continued to teach the older, complex characters.
In the mid-1950’s, the government introduced pinyin, a system of writing Chinese using the Roman alphabet. This alphabet consists of the 26 letters used to write English and many other languages except the letter v. In 1978, the government directed that Chinese names and words used in English and other foreign language publications be written in pinyin. Pinyin replaced the Wade-Giles system and other writing systems that use the Roman alphabet. Two British diplomats, Thomas Wade and Herbert Giles, developed this system during the late 1800’s and early 1900’s.
See also China (Languages).
