Varieties of Chinese

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Geographic distribution of Sinitic language families

Chinese forms part of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Currently, about one-fifth of the people in the world speak some variety of Chinese as their native language. Internal diversity between the Chinese languages (or dialects, see below), with respect to grammar, vocabulary, and syntax, is comparable to that of the Romance languages. However, owing to China's sociopolitical and cultural situation, whether these variants should be known as languages or dialects is a subject of ongoing debate. Some people call Chinese a language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family and its subdivisions languages. If the definition of "dialect" includes mutual intelligibility, this confusion would resolve into a paradigm of mutually incomprehensible languages, such as Cantonese and Mandarin, broken down into groups of mutually intelligible dialects, such as Beijing and Sichuan speech as rather easily mutually intelligible dialects of Mandarin.

From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects. However, the language/dialect distinction has far-reaching implications in socio-political issues, such as the national identity of China, regional identities within China, and the very nature of the Han Chinese "nation". As a result, it has become a subject of contention.

Origins

The modern spoken varieties of Chinese originated from Old Chinese and Middle Chinese. Classical Chinese is a literary language, and not any form of current Spoken Chinese, including in previous times.

Terminology in Chinese and English

huà 話/话 (talk, speech) is the most common and colloquial word to denote the speech of a place, anything from the whole country (Zhongguohua) or one of the largest cities (Beijinghua, Shanghaihua, Guangzhouhua) to a village dialect, and can also be used for foreign languages.

yǔ 語/语 is a more formal word also originally referring primarily to spoken language, used as a suffix in a name for Chinese as a whole (hanyu) and often in more formal names for major regional standards (yueyu, 閩南語 minnanyu) as well as formal Chinese names for foreign languages. The original meaning of the word was to tell a story, as it still does in Japan's Tale of Genji; the shift in meaning from "tell a story" to "words, language" parallels the development of Latin "parabolare" into French "parler", Spanish "palabra", etc. Its use as a suffix in modern Chinese may be a borrowing from Sino-Japanese vocabulary.

wen 文 refers to writing; the distinction between speech and writing is made more sharply than in English terminology. Zhongwen is "Chinese writing" but sometimes used loosely to include Chinese speech as well. Regional varieties of Chinese are never referred to as separate "wen". In fact they are rarely written (most writing is in the standard language) and written versions of local varieties do not indicate that local pronunciation of a character is different from the standard pronunciation; local vocabulary is only visible when a local word is written with completely different characters than the corresponding word in the standard language. "Wen" is often used for foreign languages, e.g. Yingwen (English).

fāngyán 方言, literally "place speech" where 言 is an archaic word for speech, is the technical term for a local variety, used by linguists rather than in ordinary speech. This is also a modern borrowing from Sino-Japanese technical terminology.

None of the terms are exactly equivalent to English "language" or "dialect". Also, none of the terms focus on whether two speech varieties have mutual intelligibility, which linguists sometimes list as the criterion for being dialects of the same language rather than each being a language.

The English terms topolect and regiolect have been coined by linguists to avoid the shortcomings of both "dialect" and "language" to describe varieties of Chinese, but they are not in widespread use outside of linguistic scholars.

Identification in China

Self-descriptions of speakers of regional variants

Although linguists have made great progress in describing and classifying the regional varieties of Chinese over the course of the last century, their classification does not necessarily correspond to how these regional variants have traditionally been viewed and categorized. Thus, although the first-level divisions of Chinese are often referred to as "languages", they do not always correspond to linguistic divisions or cultural self-identity.

It is customary in China to refer to people's speech in terms of cities and provinces, even though these provincial boundaries have little in common with linguistic ones. For example, the various dialects within Anhui Province are often referred to as the "Anhui dialect", even though this "Anhui dialect" comprises four of the the "Chinese languages" recognized by linguists — Mandarin, Wu, Huizhou, and Gan. Likewise, what linguists consider to be dialects of the Wu are spoken throughout Zhejiang Province, Jiangsu Province, Anhui Province, and Shanghai Municipality, and are therefore often be described as "Zhejiang dialect", "Jiangsu dialect", "Anhui dialect", and "Shanghainese". By the same token, although the Sichuan dialect is considered to be distinct from the Beijing dialect, linguists consider the Sichuan dialect and the Beijing dialect to be part of the Mandarin group. If the definition of "dialect" includes mutual intelligibility, then Sichuan and Beijing speech clearly become dialects of Mandarin. Given the rift that exists between these systems of geographical and linguistic classification, sociolinguistic self-identity in China is also a complex phenomenon.

There is a tendency to regard dialects as "variations" of a single written Chinese language. This is partly because speakers of different varieties of Chinese have historically had a single written form. Before the 20th century, Classical Chinese, a logographic language that could be pronounced according to the phonology of any Chinese language, enjoyed exclusive use for writing.; thus, it was possible to regard the common written language as detached and "above" all of the spoken languages. However, the 20th century saw the replacement of Classical Chinese with "Vernacular Chinese", a written standard based on the modern Mandarin group of dialects and used by all Chinese-speakers regardless of the group to which their native dialect belongs. This development has complicated the idea that all Chinese languages, Mandarin or not, share one single written language, as this unitary written language is now based on one particular group of spoken dialects. This "Standard Written Chinese" is essentially consistent in terms of grammar and vocabulary when written by speakers of different Chinese languages, and differs only in the pronunciation of characters, which varies regionally. However, the spoken Chinese languages are generally not mutually intelligible with Standard Written Chinese even when recited with the local language's pronunciation, since the written language, being based on Mandarin, may not use the same morphology, vocabulary and syntax. Proponents of Chinese as a single language with many dialects describe grammatical/lexical deviations of the local language from the single written language as "slang" (simplified Chinese: 俚语; traditional Chinese: 俚語; pinyin: lǐyǔ; literally "vulgar language"), even if these differences persist at the acrolectic (formal) level.

At the same time, regions with a strong sense of regional cohesion have become more aware of regional groupings of dialects in recent times, and have formed self-identities connected to these linguistic categories. In some self-identified linguistic groups, such as Wu or Hakka, these groups correspond well to those devised by linguists. In other self-identified linguistic groups, such as Teochew and Taiwanese, the correspondences are not as exact.

Comparisons

Comparison with Europe

Differences in the socio-political context of Chinese and European languages gave rise to the difference in terms of linguistic perception between the two cultures. In Western Europe, Latin remained the written standard for centuries after the spoken language diverged and began shifting into distinct Romance languages, like how Old Chinese and Middle Chinese diverged. It is important to note that Latin is actually a spoken language, in addition to being a literary language too. Classical Chinese is a literary language, and not a spoken one, and it was the written standard for Chinese. However, political fragmentation gave rise to independent states roughly the size of Chinese provinces. This eventually generated a political desire to create separate cultural and literary standards to differentiate nation-states and standardize the language within a nation-state. In China, a single cultural and literary standard (Classical Chinese and later, Vernacular Chinese) continued to exist while the spoken language continued to diverge between different cities and counties, much as European languages diverged, due to the scale of the country, and the obstruction of communication by geography.

The diverse Chinese spoken forms and common written form comprise a very different linguistic situation from that in Europe. In Europe, linguistic differences sharpened as the language of each nation-state was standardized. The use of local speech became stigmatized. In China, standardization of spoken languages was weaker, and mostly due to cultural influence and the fact that Classical Chinese was the main form of writing, because it is a literary language, it could be spoken in any tongue so they continued to speak the local tongues. Although, as with Europe, dialects of regional political or cultural capitals were still prestigious and widely used as the region's lingua franca, their linguistic influence depended more on the capital's status and wealth than entirely on the political boundaries of the region.

Note:

• Mandarin→Beijing dialect;
• Wu→Shanghainese;
• Xiang→Changsha dialect;
• Gan→Nanchang dialect;
• Hakka→Meixian dialect;
• Yue→Guangzhou dialect;
• Min→Xiamen dialect

Comparison with Arab countries

The diglossia in China's provinces where dialects are spoken can be compared with that in the Arab World, where Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) or Classical Arabic is the official language, language of the education and formal media but there are various spoken dialects, which are used on a daily basis. Usage/ratio of dialect vs MSA varies from one Arab country to another but in all Arab countries MSA is used in writing and dialects are used in the verbal communication. However, Modern Standard Arabic is nobody's native language and there is no single country/area where standard Arabic is spoken socially. The usage of Arabic dialects is much higher than that of Chinese dialects; movies and popular songs are all in dialects. Modern Standard Arabic is more comparable with Classical Chinese, a written koine that differed significantly from the spoken language upon which it was originally based. The Classical Chinese that is referred to in this context is the literary language, not the ancient spoken form.

See also

• The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy
• A language is a dialect with an army and navy
• Spoken Chinese

References

• Branner, David Prager (2000). Problems in Comparative Chinese Dialectology — the Classification of Miin and Hakka. Trends in Linguistics series, no. 123. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 31-101-5831-0. 
• Groves, Julie M. (2008). "Language or Dialect – or Topolect? A Comparison of the Attitudes of Hong Kongers and Mainland Chinese towards the Status of Cantonese", Sino-Platonic Papers 179:1-103.
• Mair, Victor H. (1991). "What Is a Chinese "Dialect/Topolect"? Reflections on Some Key Sino-English Linguistic terms", Sino-Platonic Papers 29:1-31.
• Norman, Jerry (1988). Chinese. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-29653-6. 
• Ramsey, S. Robert (1987). The Languages of China. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01468-X. 

External links

• Introduction to the study of dialects
• Classification of languages and dialects