About Chinese

by Pisith Phlong

Number of speakers:
Chinese is the language of China and spoken as the first language by over one billion people in the world. (Brown, p.351) An estimated 23 million people, accounting for 4.5% of all people in Southeast Asia, speak Chinese (in 1999), and a majority of them are in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, The Philippines and Cambodia. Of the hundreds of dialects of Chinese, Mandarin is an official language of the People's Republic of China, and Taiwan. In Singapore, Mandarin (Huayu) is considered to be one of the four official languages, spoken by about 2.7 million. (Armstrong, p.1)

Language group:
Mandarin is based on the pronunciation of the Beijing dialect. It belongs to the Northern Chinese group, Sinitic branch, of the Sino-Tibetan language family. (Frawley, p.310) It is known as Putonghua in People's Republic of China which means the common language, as Guoyu in Taiwanwhich means the national language and Huayu in Singapore, meaning the old language. (Strazny, p.194)

History of written language and script:
The Chinese language is one of the oldest written languages in the world with at least 3500 years of history. The earliest writings are on oracle bones, dated back to 1400-1100BC, during the Shang dynasty (1766-1122 BC). (Brown, p.333)

Language:
The Chinese written language is an ideographic writing system, in which symbols represent ideas rather than sounds. (Brown, p.363) From this system, the characters are formed to represent different words. There are two basic types of Chinese characters, the primary elements and compound characters made from two or more primary elements. Most primary elements are derived from pictographs which stylize some physical objects and some others are also graphs which are abstract and nondepictive. (Brown, p.338)

The Chinese language flourished through its constant reproduction of books and dictionaries for dynasties. The first Chinese dictionary, Shuo wen jie zi, in the modern sense of the word wasprepared by Xu Shen in 100 A.D to 212 A.D, during the Eastern Han Dynasty (25 - 220A.D).  It contains about 10,000 characters and a list of over 540 graphic components with pronunciations and definitions. It is an important writing record, for it contains several lexicographic inventions that have lasted up to now in modern Chinese literature. Contact with Sanscrit around the 1st century A.D brought new insight into the Chinese writing system. The ideographs are split into two parts in order to analyze the phonology and to establish a better way of writing by analyzing of the initial sound (sheng) and the final sound (yun). According to this new system, words are arranged phonologically according to the initial sound. In the 20th century, through contact with the West, Chinese adopted the western way of studying the language by focusing more on grammar and syntax in order to spare time from traditional memorization of the thousands of Chinese characters. The government of the People's Republic of China adopted three reform measures for the language: (1) a Romanization alphabet know as Pinyin which is used to mark the pronunciations of characters; (2) a simplification scheme according to which 1754 characters has been simplified; and (3) duplication of a total of 1055 characters that were abolished. (Brown, p.347, p.358-362)

Chinese is a tonal language with four tones, high, rising, low and falling. The choice of tone can change the meaning of a word.

Scripts:
There are two common recording forms of the Chinese script, the inscribed style and the ink-brush style. The inscribed style is found written on seal, bronze and bone. The oldest writing, called oracle bone inscription, was dated to about 3500 years ago, of the Shang dynasty (1766-1122 BC) and the seal scripts have long been used on the signature seal during the Qin dynasty (221-206 B.C) and Han dynasty (206 B.C-211 A.D). The ink-brush style might have been written since before the inscribed style, but the surviving evidence is not as old as the inscribed style. The oldest form of ink-brush writing was on bamboo splints and silk from 4th and 3rd century B.C in cursive form. There are three common writing styles in Chinese writing, the clerical style, the ‘running' and ‘grass' style and the modern square script. The clerical style was found during the Qin and the Han dynasty, and it took place in square form, which derived from the cursive form. The ‘running' and ‘grass' style was found during the Western Han dynasty (206 B.C-8 A.D), and was adopted into calligraphy writing. The modern square form seems to have developed from the old square scripts of about the 3rd century AD, and is written in vertical lines, from top to bottom, and from right to left. In the 20th century, it became more common for Chinese writing to start from left to right in rows, but some classical literature and philology scholars still follow the traditional style. Notably, traditional writing sources usually contain no punctuation. By the early 20th century, modern Chinese started to use punctuation which derived from the Western usage such as the period, the comma, colon, semicolon, quotation marks, question mark, and exclamation point. (Brown, p.331-337)

Although the Chinese written system has changed over time, the principles of the language characters have remained basically the same. The characters are constructed from basic strokes and each character contains about twelve strokes on average. As the Chinese written language continues using single characters to represent each word of the vocabulary, it requires recognizing 2,000 to 3,000 characters at least in order to read a newspaper. (Brown, p.347, p.352)

Other Dialects:
Beside Mandarin, which is used as the official language of China, the Chinese language has a number of different dialects, and they are so widely spread throughout China and around the world that some Chinese speakers cannot communicate with one another due to substantial dialect differences. However, the Chinese speakers can overcome the barrier of communication of different dialects through reading and writing, as there is a uniform grammar common to all the dialects.

Dialects in China
There are seven major dialect groups within the Chinese language group. They are: 1) Mandarin, spoken by a large majority of the Chinese in North China, West China, part of central China, Sinchuan province, Guizhou and Yunnan provinces in the South. It is divided into four subgroups, Northern Mandarin, Northwestern Mandarin, Southwestern Mandarin and Eastern or Lower Yangtze River Mandarin. 2) Wu, spoken in Zhejiang province and areas south of the Yangtze river in Jiangsu province, contains five dialects, Taihu, Taizhou, Wenzhou, Wuzhou and Liqu. 3) Yue (Cantonese) spoken in Guangdong province, Guangzhou province and the area around Hong Kong and Macau, contains Yuehai, Siyi, Gaoyang and Guinan. 4) Min, spoken in Fujian province, Leizhou Peninsula and Hainan Island. It is divided into five subgroups, Min Nan (Southern Min), Min Dong (Eastern Min), Min Bei (Northern Min), Min Zhong (Central Min) and Pu-xian. Among these five groups, Min Nan is the largest group, and it contains Hokkien, Chao-Shan, Leizhou, Hainan and Zhenan. 5) Hakka (Gejia), spoken in a widespread area between northeastern Guangdong, southern Jiangxi and southwestern Fujian, but they are spoken in different small groups. Hakka contains the Min-Ke, Yue-Tai, Yuezhong, Yuebei, Yugui, and Tonggu dialects. 6) Gan, spoken primarily in Jiangxi province, contains five major dialects, Chang-Jing, Yi-Liu, Ji-Cha, Fu-Guang, and Ying-Yi. 7) Xiang, spoken mainly in eastern half of Hunan province, contains two dialects, ‘Old Xiang' and ‘New Xiang' which have become more assimilated with Mandarin. (Brown, p.339-340; Strazny, p.190-192; Frawley, p.310-312)

Dialects in Southeast Asia
The history of Chinese presence in Southeast Asia has been dated back to about the 1st century B.C, during which time Chinese traders involved in the international sea trade visited Southeast Asian countries and India. Many of the Chinese traders at that time were Hokkien speakers from Fujian province and Teochiew speakers from Guangdong province. (Armstrong, p.21) The relationship between Southeast Asia and China continued since then through the centuries, and the history of Chinese migration into Southeast Asia happened along the way. From the 1840s to the 1930s, millions of Chinese migrated to Southeast Asian countries as manual labor workers. They mainly came from the southeastern China provinces of Zhejiang, Fujian, Guangdong, Hainan and Guanxi. As a result, many different Chinese dialects are spoken in Southeast Asia, and they vary according to their regions of migration. The largest numbers of Chinese speaking people in Southeast Asia are in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, and the largest proportions of national populations are in Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei.

Different dialects spoken in Southeast Asia are 1) Mandarin, the official language of China, from the North China, spoken in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Philippines, and Vietnam. In Singapore, Mandarin is considered to be one of the four official languages. 2) Hokkien, from Fujian province, spoken in Singapore, Malaysia and Philippines. 3) Teochiew, from the Shantou district of Guangdong, spoken in Malaysia, Singapore, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia. 4) Cantonese, from Guangdong and eastern Guanxi, spoken in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. 5) Hakka, from northern Guangdong, spoken in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and Thailand. Besides these, a few other dialects spoken in Southeast Asia are Hainanese from Hainan; Hokchiu, Hokchia, and Henghua from districts around Fuzhou in Fujian; Kwongsai from Guanxi; and Wenzhounese from near Wenzhou in Zhejiang. (Frawley, p.315-316; Armstrong, p.3)

An estimate of 23 million people (in 1999) speaks Chinese in Southeast Asia of which about 5 to 6 million are in Indonesia, 4.5 to 6 million in Thailand, 5.5 million in Malaysia, 2.7 million in Singapore, 1 million in the Philippines, and about half a million in Cambodia. (Armstrong, p.x)

Comparison to Western languages:
Chinese language differs from the Western European languages in a number of ways. It has no agreement, either in gender or number; characters are based on pictographs and ideographs which represent ideas rather than sounds; words are formed based on combinations of characters rather than derivation. Tone is significant in Chinese language for the choice of tone can change meaning of a word. The Chinese sentence structure is arranged in Subject-Verb-Object, and the adjective precedes the noun in the compound noun. (Frawley, p.313; Strazny, p.197)

References:

Brown, K. Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Volume 2. (2nd ed.). Elsevier: Oxford, 2006. Frawley, W. J. International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Vol. 1. (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Strazny, P. Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Vol. 1. New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2005.
Armstrong, J. M., Armstrong W. R. and Mulliner, K. Chinese Populations in Contemporary Southeast Asian Societies: Identities, Interdependence and International Influence. Curzon: Richmond, Surrey, 2001.