Chinese spoken language
Chinese linguistics map
The Chinese spoken languages comprise many regional variants. Although the English word dialect is often used to translate the Chinese term fangyan, the differences between the major spoken variations of Chinese are such that they are mutually unintelligible.
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2 List of spoken Chinese languages 3 Sociolinguistics of spoken variations of Chinese 4 Manifestations of language differentiation 5 Related topics 6 References |
Linguists divide the variations in spoken Chinese language into seven to ten groups. Within these groups, there are many subgroups, many of which are mutually unintelligible.
Chinese can be divided into a number of categories. However, because two people are speaking dialects within the same category does not mean that they can necessarily completely understand each other. The general situation is one of dialect continuum where one can understand perfectly people speaking the local dialect and that the intelligibility decreases as the speaker comes from more and more distant regions.
In addition, the categories that speakers use to self-classify the variety they are speaking may not correspond exactly to a classification based strictly on linguistic features. For example, two speakers of Cantonese from different cities (say Taishan and Hong Kong) tend to think of themselves as speaking the same dialect, whereas speaker of Wu from Hangzhou and one from Shanghai would tend to think of themselves as speaking the different dialects.
Well-educated Chinese in southern China are generally fluent in Mandarin, and most people have at least a good passive knowledge of it, in addition to being native speakers of the local dialect. The choice of dialect varies based on the social situation. Mandarin is usually considered more formal and is required when speaking to a person who does not understand the local dialect. The local dialect 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 Mandarin and the local dialect. 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.
Within the People's Republic of China there has been a consistent drive towards promoting the standard language; for instance, the education system is entirely Mandarin-medium from the second year onwards. However, the use of local dialect has generally been tolerated - with certain exceptions; for example, Cantonese dialect writing (see Cantonese (linguistics)) has been suppressed at times.
On the other hand, in the Republic of China, the government had a policy until the mid-1980s of promoting Mandarin as high status and the local languages—Taiwanese and Hakka—as low status, a situation which caused a great deal of resentment and has produced somewhat of a backlash in the 1990s as part of the Taiwanese localization movement.
Although, the term dialect may imply that the forms of Chinese only vary in small ways as one moves from area to area of the country, in fact the differences are in some cases quite stark. For instance, in Taiwanese, to express the idea that one is feeling a little ill, one might say
Classification
Most Chinese do not think of these variations as separate languages because they share a common written standard and literary and cultural tradition. Linguists, however, generally consider spoken language to be the fundamental form for classification of a language, and the standard of intelligibility is the one that is most commonly used to divide languages. By the standard of mutual intelligibility, the varieties of Chinese would be classed as separate languages.List of spoken Chinese languages
One distinctive feature of Mandarin is the partial loss of tones in comparison to Middle Chinese and the other dialects. 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.) 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. This is less common in other dialects.
(The following three dialect groups are not always classified separately.)Sociolinguistics of spoken variations of Chinese
Manifestations of language differentiation
which, when translated cognate-by-cognate into Mandarin would be something like:
An awkward sentence, if not simply non-productive. A little more colloquially it would be:
A little better would be:
which removes the reflexive pronoun (zÃÂìjǐ), not usually needed in Mandarin.
Instead, some people, particularly in the north of China, would say:Related topics
References