The Spoken Chinese Language
- The Chinese writing system
- Evolution of characters
- Chinese numerals
- Simplified characters
- Phonetic transcription of Chinese (Pinyin, Wade-Giles, Bopomofo, etc)
- Spoken Chinese: Cantonese, Dungan, Gan, Hakka, Mandarin, Shanghainese, Taiwanese, Xiang
The standardized form of spoken Chinese is based on the Beijing
dialect, a member of the Mandarin
group; Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's
Republic of China and the Republic
of China on Taiwan, as well as one of four official languages of
Singapore
(together with English,
Malay, and Tamil). Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is
one of the six official languages of the United
Nations (alongside English, Arabic,
French,
Russian,
and Spanish).
Spoken in the form of Standard
Cantonese, Chinese is one of the official languages of Hong
Kong (together with English) and of Macau
(together with Portuguese).
The traditionally recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are:
In parentheses above are the culturally dominant or representative dialects of each language or dialect group today.
Chinese linguists have recently distinguished 3 more groups from the traditional seven:
There are also many smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect, spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡话), not to be confused with Xiang (湘), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua, spoken in northern Guangdong. The Dungan language, spoken in Central Asia, is very closely related to Mandarin. However, it is not generally considered "Chinese", because it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by people outside China who are not considered Chinese in any sense.
In general, the above languages / dialect groups do not have sharp boundaries. As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear how the speeches of various parts of China should be classified. The Ethnologue lists a total of 14, but the number varies between seven and seventeen depending on the classification scheme being followed. In any case, some dialects belonging the same group may nevertheless be mutually unintelligible, while other dialects split up among several groups may in fact share many similarities due to geographical proximity.
In general, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of south China, a major city's dialect may be marginally intelligible to close neighbors. For instance, Wuzhou is about 120 miles upstream from Guangzhou, but its dialect is more like Standard Cantonese spoken in Guangzhou, than is that of Taishan, 60 miles southwest of Guangzhou and separated by several rivers from it
Semantic-phonetic compounds represent around 90% of all existing characters and consist of two parts: a semantic component or radical which hints at the meaning of the character, and a phonetic component which gives a clue to the pronunciation of the character.
Characters containing the same phonetic component may have the same sound and the same tone, the same sound but a different tone, the same initial or final sound, or a different sound and a different tone.
Phonetic components are generally a more reliable indication of pronunciation than semantic components are of meaning.
Recommended books
Books
about Chinese characters and calligraphy
Mandarin, Shanghainese,
Hokkien, Taiwanese and Cantonese
language courses, dictionaries, etc.
