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Varieties of Chinese

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Spoken Chinese

Spoken Chinese (or Chinese dialects) comprises many regional variants. Although the English word dialect is often used to translate the Chinese term fangyan (Chinese: 方言; lit. 'regional speech'), the differences between the major spoken variations of Chinese are such that they are generally mutually unintelligible. Whether these variants should be identified as dialects or languages is a contentious issue. (See Identification of the varieties of Chinese for more details)

Classification

Chinese people make an impressional strong distinction between written language (文, Pinyin: wén) and spoken language (语/語 yǔ). They tend to conceptualize the variations of Chinese as different spoken languages.

Groups of Spoken Chinese

The various forms of Spoken Chinese are usually classified into the following broad groups. (See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of individual dialects.)

  • Guan (Mandarin) 官话/官話 (also 北方話/北方话): (c. 850 million) This is the group of dialects spoken in northern and southwestern China, not to be confused with Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu, often also called "Mandarin" or simply "Chinese", which is based on the Beijing dialect and is the official spoken language of the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China (Taiwan) and Singapore. Putonghua / Guoyu is also widely spoken in Malaysia and by the overseas Chinese community in other parts of the world.
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. 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. The use of compounds is generally less frequent in other dialects.
  • Wu 吴语/吳語: (c. 87 million) spoken in the provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Wu includes the Shanghai dialect, sometimes interpreted as representative of all Wu dialects. The Wu dialect is notable among Chinese dialects in having kept voiced initials, such as /b/, /d/, /g/, /z/, /v/, /dʑ/, /ʑ/ etc.
  • Min 闽语/閩語: (c. 68 million) spoken in Fujian, Taiwan, parts of Southeast Asia particularly in Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore, and amongst Overseas Chinese who trace their roots to Fujian and Taiwan. The entire dialect family is often referred to as Hokkien in Southeast Asia, although the variant spoken there is predominantly based on the Amoy dialect, itself a member of the Min Nan variant. Min is the only group of Chinese dialects that cannot be directly derived from Middle Chinese. Due to its great internal disparity, Min can be divided into seven groups: Min Nan (which includes Hokkien, Teochew (Chaozhou), and Taiwanese), Min Dong, Min Bei, Min Zhong, Pu Xian, Qiong Wen, and Shao Jiang.
  • Yue (Cantonese) 粤语/粵語: (c. 66 million) spoken in Guangdong, Guangxi, Hong Kong, Macau, parts of Southeast Asia and by Overseas Chinese with an ancestry tracing back to the Guangdong region. Used by linguistics, "Cantonese" covers all the Yue dialects, such as Toishanese, though the term is also used to refer to just the Standard Cantonese of Guangzhou and Hong Kong. Some dialects of Yue have intricate sets of tone compared to other Chinese dialects—with varieties having up to nine or ten tones. Yue keeps a full complement of Middle Chinese word-final consonants (p, t, k, m, n, ng).
  • Xiang 湘语/湘語:(c. 36 million) spoken in Hunan. Xiang is usually divided into the "old" and "new" types, with the new type being significantly closer to Mandarin.
  • Kèjīa (Hakka) 客家话/客家話: (c. 30 million) spoken by the Hakka people in several provinces across southern China, in Taiwan, and in parts of Southeast Asia such as Malaysia and Singapore. The term "Hakka" itself translates as "guest families", and many Hakka people consider themselves to be descended from Song-era refugees from North China, although genetic and linguistic evidence suggests that the Hakka originated right around where they are today. Hakka has kept many features of northern Middle Chinese that have been lost in the North. It also has a full complement of nasal endings, -m -n -ŋ and occlusive endings -p -t -k, maintaining the four categories of tonal types, with splitting in the ping and ru tones, giving six tones. Some dialects of Hakka have seven tones, due to splitting in the qu tone. One of the distinguishing features of Hakka phonology is that Middle Chinese voiced initials are transformed into Hakka voiceless aspirated initials.
  • Gan 赣语/贛語: (c. 21 million) spoken in Jiangxi. In the past, it was viewed as closely related to Hakka dialects, because of the way Middle Chinese voiced initials have become voiceless aspirated initials, as in Hakka, and were hence called by the umbrella term "Hakka-Gan dialects". This grouping has, however, now become obsolete.

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

  • Hui 徽语/徽語: spoken in the southern parts of Anhui—usually classified as a sub-branch of Gan.
  • Jin 晋语/晉語: spoken in Shanxi, as well as parts of Shaanxi, Hebei, Henan, and Inner Mongolia. It is often classed with Mandarin.
  • Pinghua 平话/平話: spoken in parts of the Guangxi. It is sometimes classed with Cantonese.

Some varieties remain unclassified. These include:

  • Danzhou dialect 儋州话/儋州話: spoken in Danzhou, Hainan.
  • Xianghua 乡话/鄉話: spoken in a small strip of land in western Hunan, this is a group of dialects that have not been conclusively classified.
  • Shaozhou Tuhua 韶州土话/韶州土話: spoken at the border regions of Guangdong, Hunan, and Guangxi, this is an area of great linguistic diversity, and has not yet been conclusively described or classified.

In addition, the Dungan language (东干语/東干語) is a language spoken in Kyrgyzstan descended from Chinese, and is akin to northwestern dialects of Mandarin, therefore it is linguistically a Mandarin dialect. However, it is written in the Cyrillic alphabet as a result of Soviet rule, and may not be considered by all to be 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.

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; 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 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.

Examples of variations

The Min dialects are often regarded as being furthest removed linguistically from Standard Mandarin, in phonology, grammar, and vocabulary. 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.

我家己人有單薄仔無爽快

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

Wǒ jīajǐ [no cognate] yǒu dànbó [no cognate] 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.

Some people, particularly in the north of China, would say:

Wǒ yǒu yīdiĕr bù shūfu.

我有一點兒不舒服

Phonology

This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.
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 vowel is not 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: Template:Ruby notice

  • 媽/妈(mā) “mother” — high level
  • 麻([má] Error: {{Lang}}: Latn text/non-Latn script subtag mismatch (help)) “hemp” — high rising
  • 馬/马(mǎ) “horse” — low falling-rising
  • 罵/骂(mà) “scold” — high falling
  • 嗎/吗(ma) question particle — neutral
Listen to the tones
This is a recording of the four main tones. Fifth, or neutral, tone is not included.
Problems playing this 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. 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, 這兩個字是甚麼意思?

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 “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. 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. 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

  • DeFrancis, John. 1990. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0-8248-1068-6
  • Hannas, William. C. 1997. Asia's Orthographic Dilemma. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0-8248-1892-X (paperback); ISBN 0-8248-1842-3 (hardcover)
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