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Spoken Chinese in China and Taiwan
Spoken Chinese in China and Taiwan

Spoken Chinese comprises many regional variants. A spoken language is a human Natural language in which the Words are uttered through the Mouth. Although the English word dialect is often used to translate the Chinese term fangyan (Chinese: 方言; literally "regional speech"), the differences between the major variants Chinese are great enough that they are mutually unintelligible, a criterion used by many linguists to distinguish different languages from different dialects of a single language. A dialect (from the Greek word διάλεκτος dialektos) is a variety of a Language that is characteristic of a particular group of In Linguistics, mutual intelligibility is recognized as a relationship between Languages in which speakers of different but related languages can readily understand However, this does not take into account whether most Chinese view all of them as variants of a single Chinese language or as different languages, which is also often a defining feature of 'dialect' vs. 'language'. (See Identification of the varieties of Chinese for more details)

Contents

Classification

Chinese people make an impressional strong distinction between written language (文, Pinyin: wén) and spoken language (语/語 yǔ). Written Chinese comprises the written symbols used to represent Spoken Chinese and the rules about how they are arranged and punctuated They tend to conceptualize the variations of Chinese as different spoken languages.

Branches of spoken Chinese

The many dialects of Spoken Chinese are usually divided into the following branches. (See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of individual dialects. The following is a list of Chinese dialects and languages. Classification Linguists classify these languages as the )

One distinctive feature of Mandarin is the employment of four categories of tonal types during word creation. This stands as a partial loss of tones employed, in comparison to Middle Chinese and the other dialects, however. Middle Chinese ( or Ancient Chinese as used by linguist Bernhard Karlgren, refers to the Chinese language spoken during Southern and Northern Another is the loss of consonants on the ends of syllables, so that while Middle Chinese had an inventory of "-p, -t, -k, -m, -n, ng", Mandarin only has "-n, -ng". (A few dialects, such as that of Nanjing, also have the glottal stop. ( Chinese: 南京 Romanizations Nánjīng ( Pinyin) Nan-ching ( Wade-Giles This article is about the sound in spoken language For the letter see Glottal stop (letter. ) In addition, Mandarin underwent fewer tone splits than the other dialects. As a result, many words which sound different in dialects such as Cantonese are homophones in Mandarin. Mandarin has adjusted by developing compound words in order to make up for the development of homophones. The use of compounds is generally less frequent in other dialects.

(The following three dialect branches are not always classed separately. )

Some varieties remain unclassified. These include:

In addition, the Dungan language (东干语/東干語) is a dialect of Mandarin spoken in Kyrgyzstan. The Dungan language is a Sinitic language spoken by the Dungan of Central Asia, an ethnic group related to the Hui people of China Kyrgyzstan (ˈkɻ̩gɪztɑn (AmE or /'kɝgəztan/ (BrE Kyrgyz: Кыргызстан; Russian: Киргизия or Киргизстан or Кыргызстан However, it is written in the Cyrillic alphabet as a result of Soviet rule. The Cyrillic alphabet (səˈrɪlɪk also called azbuka, from the old name of the first two letters is actually a family of Alphabets, subsets of which are used by

Sociolinguistics

Bilingualism with Mandarin

In southern China (not including Hong Kong and Macau), where the difference between Standard Mandarin and local dialects are particularly pronounced, well-educated Chinese are generally fluent in Standard Mandarin, and most people have at least a good passive knowledge of it, in addition to being native speakers of the local dialect. Standard Mandarin, also known as Standard Spoken Chinese, is the official modern Chinese spoken language used in mainland China and Taiwan The choice of dialect varies based on the social situation. Standard Mandarin is usually considered more formal and is required when speaking to a person who does not understand the local dialect. The local dialect (be it nonstandard Mandarin or non-Mandarin altogether) is generally considered more intimate and is used among close family members and friends and in everyday conversation within the local area. Chinese speakers will frequently code switch between Standard Mandarin and the local dialect. Code-switching is a term in Linguistics referring to using more than one language or variety in conversation Parents will generally speak to their children in dialect, and the relationship between dialect and Mandarin appears to be mostly stable.

Knowing the local dialect is of considerable social benefit and most Chinese who permanently move to a new area will attempt to pick up the local dialect. Learning a new dialect is usually done informally through a process of immersion and recognizing sound shifts. Typically, a speaker of one dialect of Chinese will need about a year of immersion to understand the local dialect and about three to five years to become fluent in speaking it. Because of the variety of dialects spoken, there are usually few formal methods for learning a local dialect.

Political issues

Within the People's Republic of China there has been a consistent drive towards promoting the standard language （大力推广普通话）; for instance, the education system is entirely Mandarin-medium from the second year onwards. Talk People's Republic of China) PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA ARTICLE GUIDELINES However, usage of local dialect is tolerated, and in many informal situations socially preferred. Unlike in Hong Kong, where colloquial Cantonese characters are often used for formal occasions, within the PRC a character set closer to Mandarin tends to be used. Hong Kong ( officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, is a territory located on China 's south coast on the Pearl River Delta, and borders At the national level, differences in dialect generally do not correspond to political divisions or categories, and this has for the most part prevented dialect from becoming the basis of identity politics. Identity politics is Political action to advance the interests of members of a group whose members are oppressed by virtue of a shared and marginalized Identity (such Historically, many of the people who promoted Chinese nationalism were from southern China and did not natively speak the national standard language, and even leaders from northern China rarely spoke with the standard accent. Chinese nationalism ( sometimes synonymous with Chinese Patriotism ( lit For example, Mao Zedong often emphasized his Hunan origins in speaking, rendering much of what he said incomprehensible to many Chinese. Mao Zedong ( 26 December 1893 – 9 September 1976) was a Chinese Military and political leader who led One consequence of this is that China does not have a well developed tradition of spoken political rhetoric, and most Chinese political works are intended primarily as written works rather than spoken works.

Another factor that limits the political implications of dialect is that it is very common within an extended family for different people to know and use different dialects. In addition, while speaking similar dialect provides very strong group identity at the level of a city or county, the high degree of linguistic diversity limits the amount of group solidarity at larger levels. Finally, the linguistic diversity of southern China makes it likely that in any large group of Chinese, Standard Mandarin will be the only form of speech that everyone understands.

On the other hand, in the Republic of China on Taiwan, the government had a policy until the mid-1980s of promoting Standard Mandarin as high-status and the local languages—Taiwanese and Hakka—as low-status, a situation which caused much resentment and resulted in considerable backlash in the 1990s, manifested in the Taiwanese localization movement. REPUBLIC OF CHINA ARTICLE GUIDELINES Taiwan ( Taiwanese: Tâi-oân/Tāi-oân (historically 大灣/台員/大員/台圓/大圓/台窩灣 is an Island in East Asia. Standard Mandarin, also known as Standard Spoken Chinese, is the official modern Chinese spoken language used in mainland China and Taiwan

Examples of variations

The Min dialects are often regarded as being furthest removed linguistically from Standard Mandarin, in phonology, grammar, and vocabulary. Standard Mandarin, also known as Standard Spoken Chinese, is the official modern Chinese spoken language used in mainland China and Taiwan To illustrate: in Taiwanese, a variety of Min, to express the idea that one is feeling a little ill ("I am not feeling well. "), one might say (in Pe̍h-oē-jī):

Goá kā-kī lâng ū tām-po̍h-á bô sóng-khoài. Pe̍h-ōe-jī ( POJ) ( is an Orthography in the Latin alphabet created and introduced to Fujian and Taiwan by Presbyterian

我家己人有淡薄仔無爽快

which, when translated cognate-by-cognate into Mandarin would be spoken as an awkward or semantically unrecognizable sentence:

Wǒ jiājǐ rén yǒu dànbó [no cognate] wú shuǎngkuài. Cognates in Linguistics are words that have a common origin They may occur within a language such as shirt and skirt as two English words descended from Semantics is the study of meaning in communication The word derives from Greek σημαντικός ( semantikos) "significant" from

Where as when spoken colloquially in Mandarin, one would either say:

Wǒ zìjǐ yǒu yīdiǎn bù shūfu.

我自己有一點不舒服

or:

Wǒ yǒu yīdiǎn bù shūfu.

我有一點不舒服

the latter omitting the reflexive pronoun (zìjǐ), not usually needed in Mandarin.

Some people, particularly in northern China, would say:

Wǒ yǒu yīdiĕr bù shūfu.

我有一點兒不舒服

Phonology

For more specific information on phonology of Chinese see the respective main articles of each spoken variety.

The phonological structure of each syllable consists of a nucleus consisting of a vowel (which can be a monophthong, diphthong, or even a triphthong in certain varieties) with an optional onset or coda consonant as well as a tone. Phonology ( Greek φωνή (phōnē voice sound + λόγος (lógos word speech subject of discussion is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning In Phonetics, a vowel is a Sound in spoken Language, such as English ah! or oh!, pronounced with an open Vocal tract A monophthong ( Greek μονόφθογγος "monophthongos" = single note) is a "pure" Vowel sound one whose articulation at In Phonetics, a diphthong (also gliding vowel) (from Greek grc δίφθογγος "diphthongos" literally "with two sounds" or "with In Phonetics, a triphthong (from Greek τρίφθογγος, "triphthongos" literally "with three sounds" or "with three In Phonetics and Phonology, a syllable onset is the part of a Syllable that precedes the Syllable nucleus. In Phonology, a syllable coda comprises the Consonant sounds of a Syllable that follow the nucleus, which is usually a Vowel In Articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a Speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the upper Vocal tract, the upper vocal Tone is the use of pitch in Language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is to distinguish or inflect words There are some instances where a non-vowel is 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. A nasal consonant (also called nasal stop or nasal continuant) is produced with a lowered velum in the mouth allowing air to escape freely through the In Phonetics and Phonology, a sonorant is a Speech sound that is produced without turbulent airflow in the Vocal tract.

Across all the spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda, but syllables that do have codas are restricted to /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, /p/, /t/, /k/, or /ʔ/. Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Mandarin, are limited to only two, namely /n/ and /ŋ/. Consonant clusters do not generally occur in either the onset or coda. In Linguistics, a consonant cluster (or consonant blend) is a group of Consonants which have no intervening Vowel. The onset may be an affricate or a consonant followed by a semivowel, but these are not generally considered consonant clusters. Affricate Consonants begin as stops (most often an alveolar, such as or) but release as a fricative (such as or or occasionally into Semivowels — also known as glides or non-syllabic vowels —are Vowels that form Diphthongs with full syllabic vowels

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. Middle Chinese ( or Ancient Chinese as used by linguist Bernhard Karlgren, refers to the Chinese language spoken during Southern and Northern The Mandarin dialects in particular have experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds and so have far more multisyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. The total number of syllables in some varieties is therefore only about a thousand, including tonal variation.

All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones. Tone is the use of pitch in Language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is to distinguish or inflect words A few dialects of north China may have as few as three tones, while some dialects in south China have up to 6 or 10 tones, depending on how one counts. One exception from this is Shanghainese which has reduced the set of tones to a two-toned pitch accent system much like modern Japanese. Shanghainese (上海閒話 in Shanghainese sometimes referred to as the Shanghai dialect, is a dialect of Wu Chinese spoken in the city of Shanghai Pitch accent is a linguistic term of convenience for a variety of restricted tone systems that use variations in pitch to give prominence to a Syllable

A very common example used to illustrate the use of tones in Chinese are the four main tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable ma. Standard Mandarin, also known as Standard Spoken Chinese, is the official modern Chinese spoken language used in mainland China and Taiwan The tones correspond to these five characters:

Listen to the tones

This is a recording of the four main tones. A Chinese character, also known as a Han character ( is a Logogram used in writing Chinese (hanzi Japanese ( Fifth, or neutral, tone is not included.
Problems listening to the file? See media help.

Morphology

Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest building blocks, of the language. Morphology is the field of Linguistics that studies the internal structure of words A syllable ( Greek:) is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds In Morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning. Some of these single-syllable morphemes can stand alone as individual words, but contrary to what is often claimed, Chinese is not a monosyllabic language. A word is a unit of Language that carries meaning and consists of one or more Morphemes which are linked more or less tightly together and has a Phonetic Most words in the modern Chinese spoken varieties are in fact multisyllabic, consisting of more than one morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.

The confusion arises in how one thinks about the language. In the Chinese writing system, each individual single-syllable morpheme corresponds to a single character, referred to as a zì (字). Most Chinese speakers think of words as being zì, but this view is not entirely accurate. Many words are multisyllabic, and are composed of more than one zì. This composition is what is known as a cí (词/詞), and more closely resembles the traditional Western definition of a word. However, the concept of cí was historically a technical linguistic term that, until only the past century, the average Chinese speaker was not aware of. Even today, most Chinese speakers think of words as being zì. This can be illustrated in the following Mandarin Chinese sentence (romanized using pinyin):

Jīguāng, zhè liǎng ge zì shì shénme yìsi? 激光, 這兩個字是什麼意思? 激光, 这两个字是什么意思?

The sentence literally translates to, “Jī 激 and guāng 光, these two zì 字, what do they mean?” However, the more natural English translation would probably be, “Laser, this word, what does it mean?” Even though jīguāng 激光 is a single word, speakers tend to think of its constituents as being separate (Ramsey, 1987). In Linguistics, romanization (or latinization, also spelled romanisation or latinisation) is the representation of a Word or Pinyin, more formally Hanyu pinyin, is the most common Standard Mandarin Romanization system in use

Old Chinese and Middle Chinese had many more monosyllabic words due to greater variability in possible sounds. The modern Chinese varieties lost many of these sound distinctions, leading to homonyms in words that were once distinct. In linguistics a homonym is one of a group of words that share the same pronunciation but have different meanings and are usually spelled differently Multisyllabic words arose in order to compensate for this loss. Most natively derived multisyllabic words still feature these original monosyllabic morpheme roots. Many Chinese morphemes still have associated meaning, even though many of them no longer can stand alone as individual words - they are bound morphemes. In Etymology, a bound morpheme is a Root morpheme that cannot stand alone as an independent word This situation is analogous to the use of the English prefix pre-. An affix is a Morpheme that is attached to a stem to form a word Even though pre- can never stand alone by itself as an individual word, it is commonly understood by English speakers to mean “before”, such as in the words predawn, previous, and premonition.

Taking the previous example, jīguāng, jī and guāng literally mean “stimulated light”, resulting in the meaning, “laser”. However, jī is never found as a single word by itself, because there are too many other morphemes that are also pronounced in the same way. For instance, the morphemes that correspond to the meanings “chicken” 雞/鸡, “machine” 機/机, “basic” 基, “hit” 擊/击, “hunger” 饑/饥, and “sum” 積/积 are also pronounced jī in Mandarin. It is only in the context of other morphemes that an exact meaning of a zì can be known. In certain ways, the logographic writing system helps to reinforce meaning in zì that are homophonous, since even though several morphemes may be pronounced the same way, they are written using different characters. A logogram, or logograph, is a Grapheme which represents a word or a Morpheme (a meaningful unit of language Continuing with the example, we have:

Pinyin Traditional Characters Simplified Characters Meaning
jīguāng 激光 激光 laser (“stimulated light”)
jīqǐ 激起 激起 to arouse (“stimulated rise”)
jīdàn 雞蛋 鸡蛋 chicken egg
gōngjī 公雞 公鸡 rooster (“male chicken”)
fēijī 飛機 飞机 aeroplane (“flying machine”)
jīqiāng 機槍 机枪 machine gun

For this reason, it is very common for Mandarin speakers to put characters in context as a natural part of conversation. For example, when telling each other their names (which are often rare, or at least non-colloquial, combinations of zì), Mandarin speakers often state which words their names are found in. As a specific example, a speakers might say 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyīng, Jiālíngjiāng de jiā, Yīngguó de yīng “My name is Jiāyīng, the Jia of Jialing River and the Ying in England (Yingguo in Chinese)”.

The problem of homonyms also exists but is less severe in southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Taiwanese, which preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese. In the study of Phonology in Linguistics, the rime or rhyme of a Syllable consists of a nucleus and an optional coda For instance, the previous examples of jī for “stimulated”, “chicken”, and “machine” have distinct pronunciations in Cantonese (romanized using jyutping): gik1, gai1, and gei1, respectively. Jyutping (sometimes spelled Jyutpin) is a Romanization system for Standard Cantonese developed by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong (LSHK For this reason, southern varieties tend to employ fewer multisyllabic words.

There are a few morphemes in Chinese, many of them loanwords, that consist of more than one syllable. These words cannot be further divided into single-syllable meaningful units, however in writing each syllable is still written as separate zì. One example is the word for “spider”, zhīzhū, which is written as 蜘蛛. Even in this case, Chinese tend to try to make some kind of meaning out of the constituent syllables. For this reason, the two characters 蜘 and 蛛 each have an associated meaning of “spider” when seen alone as individual characters. When spoken though, they can never occur apart.

See also

References

External links

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