Spoken Chinese

Spoken Chinese in mainland China and Taiwan

Spoken Chinese (simplified Chinese: 中国话; traditional Chinese: 華語[1]) comprises many regional variants, the largest of which are Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, and Min. These sub-groups of the Chinese spoken language are, for the most part, not mutually intelligible.

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 dialects of a single language. However, most Chinese view them as variants of a single Chinese language, which is often a prime consideration of a dialect. (See Identification of the varieties of Chinese for more details)

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Classification

Chinese people make an impressional strong distinction between written language (文, Pinyin: wén) and spoken language (语/語 yǔ). English does not necessarily have this distinction. As a result the terms Zhongwen (中文) and Hanyu (漢語) in Chinese are both translated in English as "Chinese".

Within China, it is common perception that these varieties are distinct in their spoken forms only, and that the language, when written, is common across the country. Therefore even though China is home to hundreds of relatively unique spoken languages, literate people are usually able to communicate through written language effectively.

Diversity of spoken Chinese

Main article: List of Chinese dialects

Spoken Chinese is a dialect continuum. Differences between the spoken language generally become more pronounced as distances increase. However, the degree of intelligibility varies immensely depending on region. For example, the Mandarin spoken in all three northeastern Chinese provinces is mutually intelligible, but in the small province of Zhejiang a person from one valley may be completely unable to comprehend the language from the next valley, even though both are considered dialects of Wu Chinese. This unevenness of mutual intelligibility makes classification difficult.

There is little formal study of any dialect but Standard Mandarin. Outside of China, the only two spoken languages generally presented in formal courses are Standard Mandarin and Standard Cantonese. Inside China, second language acquisition can only be achieved through immersing in the local language.

The Chinese spoken languages are generally classified into the following groups:

Mandarin is characterized by four tones, compared to eight in Cantonese, and the loss of final consonants, so that while Middle Chinese had an inventory of -p, -t, -k, -m, -n, ng, Standard Mandarin only has -n, -ng. Mandarin has adjusted to the high number of homonyms created by these losses through word compounding. The use of compounds is generally less frequent in other dialects.

There is some dispute as to whether the following languages should be classified 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. However, it is written in the Cyrillic alphabet as a result of Soviet rule.

Local classifications

Generally, when referring to a local dialect in everyday speech, the speaker will refer to the dominant city in the region as a marker of the dialect as a whole. For example, a Wu speaker would not ask a fellow Wu speaker if they speak "Wu", but would rather ask whether or not they speak the dialect from Suzhou or Hangzhou, known as Suzhouhua and Hangzhouhua, respectively, in Chinese. Generally dialects are branded according to cities, geographical regions, or provinces. This method of informal classification is commonly used in spoken language. Provinces whose dialects are more homogeneous within its boundaries, such as Shaanxi, Shanxi, Shandong, Hebei, Hunan, Jiangxi, Sichuan, etc. tend to refer to their own dialects by the name of the province (although sub-dialects exist and can be referred to locally by the name of a city). In more diverse provinces such as Fujian, dialects are informally classified by mutual intelligibility into Minnan (闽南话), Min Dong (闽东话), and Min Bei (闽北话); in Zhejiang, where there is vast variance in spoken language, dialects are generally classified by cities or counties - as such, no singular "Zhejiang dialect" exists. An area with widespread homogeneity in spoken language is the three provinces of Northeastern China, whose spoken language is collectively known as Northeastern Mandarin, or Dongbei Hua (东北话) in Chinese.

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. 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. Parents will generally speak to their children in dialect, and the relationship between dialect and Mandarin appears to be mostly stable. Local languages give a sense of identity to local cultures.

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. Generally the differences are more pronounced lexically than grammatically. 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.

Due to the variety in Chinese speech, Mandarin speakers from each area of China are very often prone to fuse or "translate" words from their local tongue into their Mandarin conversations. In addition, each area of China has its recognizable accents while speaking Mandarin. Generally, the nationalized standard form of Mandarin pronunciation is only heard on news and radio broadcasts. Even in the streets of Beijing, the flavour of Mandarin varies in pronunciation from the Mandarin heard on the media.

Political issues

Within mainland China, there has been a consistent drive towards promoting the standard language （大力推广普通话 dàlì tuīguǎng Pǔtōnghuà）; for instance, the education system is entirely Mandarin-medium from the second year onwards. 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. 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. 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. For example, Mao Zedong often emphasized his Hunan origins in speaking, rendering much of what he said incomprehensible to many Chinese. 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 Taiwan, the government had a policy of promoting Standard Mandarin over the local languages, such as Taiwanese and Hakka. This policy was implemented rigidly when Standard Mandarin was the only language of instruction in schools, while English was offered as the compulsory second language. Since late 1990s, other languages have also been offered as a second language.

Examples of variations

The Min languages are often regarded as furthest removed linguistically from Standard Mandarin, in phonology, grammar, and vocabulary. To illustrate: in Taiwanese, a variety of Hokkien, a Min language, 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.

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 zī wú shuǎngkuài.

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.

Note:

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. 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.

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. The onset may be an affricate or a consonant followed by a semivowel, but these are not generally considered consonant clusters.

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. 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. 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.

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. The tones correspond to these five characters:

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. 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. 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).

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. 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. This situation is analogous to the use of the English prefix pre-. 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 “product” 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. 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 an example, a speaker 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. 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. 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

  1. ↑ The distinction here is made because areas where Traditional Chinese is still the legal standard, notably Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau, people usually avoid calling spoken language Zhongguo Hua to avoid implicit connections with the Chinese mainland.
  2. ↑ For example, in the Republic of China, malingshu (tone?) is used to describe potato while in the mainland, the People's Republic of China, tudou (tone?) is used to describe potato.

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