Chinese language

This article is about the Chinese language, which includes many varieties. For the standardized form, seeStandard Chinese.For other languages in China, seeLanguages of China.For different varieties, seeSinitic languages.

Chinese(simplified Chinese:Hán ngữ;traditional Chinese:Hán ngữ;pinyin:Hànyǔ;lit.'Hanlanguage' orTrung văn;Zhōngwén;'Chinese writing') is a group oflanguagesspoken natively by the ethnicHan Chinesemajority andmany minority ethnic groupsinChina.Approximately 1.35 billion people, or 17% of the global population, speak avariety of Chineseas theirfirst language.

Chinese
Hànyǔwritten intraditional(top) andsimplified(middle) forms,Zhōngwén(bottom)
Native to	TheSinophoneworld: China Taiwan Malaysia Indonesia Singapore
Native speakers	1.35 billion (2017–2022)
Language family	Sino-Tibetan Sinitic Chinese
Early forms	Proto-Sino-Tibetan Old Chinese Eastern Han Chinese Middle Chinese
Standard forms	Standard Chinese Standard Cantonese
Varieties	Mandarin Jin Wu Gan Xiang Min Hakka Yue Ping Huizhou
Writing system	Chinese characters Bopomofo Pinyin Xiao'erjing Dungan Chinese Braille ʼPhags-pa
Official status
Official language in	China Taiwan Singapore
Recognised minority language in	Malaysia
Regulated by	China:State Language Commission Taiwan:National Languages Committee,Hakka Affairs Council Malaysia:Chinese Language Standardisation Council Singapore:Ministry of Education,Promote Mandarin Council
Language codes
ISO 639-1	zh
ISO 639-2	chi(B) zho(T)
ISO 639-3	zho
Glottolog	sini1245
Map of the Chinese-speaking world Majority Chinese-speaking Significant Chinese-speaking population Status as an official or educational language

Chinese language
Simplified Chinese	Hán ngữ
Traditional Chinese	Hán ngữ
Literal meaning	Hanlanguage
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Hànyǔ Bopomofo ㄏㄢˋㄩˇ Gwoyeu Romatzyh Hannyeu Wade–Giles Han4-yu3 Tongyong Pinyin Hàn-yǔ Yale Romanization Hàn-yǔ IPA [xân.ỳ] Wu Romanization Hoe3nyiu2 Hakka Romanization Hon Ngi Yue: Cantonese Yale Romanization Hon yúh Jyutping Hon3 jyu5 Canton Romanization Hon3yü5 IPA Cantonese pronunciation:[hɔ̄ːn.jy̬ː] Southern Min HokkienPOJ Hàn-gí Hàn-gú Eastern Min FuzhouBUC Háng-ngṳ̄
Alternative Chinese name
Chinese	Trung văn
Literal meaning	Chinesewriting
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Zhōngwén Bopomofo ㄓㄨㄥㄨㄣˊ Gwoyeu Romatzyh Jongwen Wade–Giles Chung1-wen2 Tongyong Pinyin Jhong-wún Yale Romanization Jūng-wén IPA [ʈʂʊ́ŋ.wə̌n] Wu Romanization Tson1ven1 Hakka Romanization Chung-Vun Yue: Cantonese Yale Romanization Jūng mán Jyutping Zung1 man4*2 Canton Romanization Zung1men4*2 IPA [tsɔŋ˥ mɐn˩] [tsɔŋ˥ mɐn˧˥] Southern Min HokkienPOJ Tiong-bûn Eastern Min FuzhouBUC Dṳng-ùng
Second alternative Chinese name
Simplified Chinese	Hán văn
Traditional Chinese	Hán văn
Literal meaning	Han writing
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Hànwén Bopomofo ㄏㄢˋㄨㄣˊ Gwoyeu Romatzyh Hannwen Wade–Giles Han4-wen2 Tongyong Pinyin Hàn-wún IPA [xân.wə̌n]

Ying, a speaker of Henan Chinese

Chinese languages form theSinitic branchof theSino-Tibetan languagefamily. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to bedialectsof a single language. However, their lack ofmutual intelligibilitymeans they are sometimes considered to be separate languages in afamily.Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments fromMiddle Chinese,of which the most spoken by far isMandarinwith 66%, or around 800 million speakers, followed byMin(75 million, e.g.Southern Min),Wu(74 million, e.g.Shanghainese), andYue(68 million, e.g.Cantonese).These branches are unintelligible to each other, and many of their subgroups are unintelligible with the other varieties within the same branch (e.g. Southern Min). There are, however, transitional areas where varieties from different branches share enough features for some limited intelligibility, includingNew XiangwithSouthwestern Mandarin,Xuanzhou Wu ChinesewithLower Yangtze Mandarin,JinwithCentral Plains Mandarinand certain divergent dialects ofHakkawithGan.All varieties of Chinese aretonalat least to some degree, and are largelyanalytic.

The earliest attestedwritten Chineseconsists of theoracle bone inscriptionscreated during theShang dynastyc. 1250 BCE.The phonetic categories ofOld Chinesecan be reconstructed from the rhymes of ancient poetry. During theNorthern and Southern period,Middle Chinese went through severalsound changesand split into several varieties following prolonged geographic and political separation. TheQieyun,arime dictionary,recorded a compromise between the pronunciations of different regions. The royal courts of the Ming and earlyQing dynastiesoperated using akoiné languageknown asGuanhua,based on theNanjing dialectof Mandarin.

Standard Chineseis an official language of both thePeople's Republic of Chinaand theRepublic of China(Taiwan), one of the fourofficial languages of Singapore,and one of the sixofficial languages of the United Nations.Standard Chinese is based on theBeijing dialectof Mandarin and was first officially adopted in the 1930s. The language is written primarily using alogographyofChinese characters,largely shared by readers who may otherwise speak mutually unintelligible varieties. Since the 1950s, the use ofsimplified charactershas been promoted by the government of the People's Republic of China, with Singapore officially adopting them in 1976.Traditional charactersare used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and among Chinese-speakingcommunities overseas.

Classification

Linguists classify all varieties of Chinese as part of theSino-Tibetan language family,together withBurmese,Tibetanand many other languages spoken in theHimalayasand theSoutheast Asian Massif.Although the relationship was first proposed in the early 19th century and is now broadly accepted, reconstruction of Sino-Tibetan is much less developed than that of families such asIndo-EuropeanorAustroasiatic.Difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack ofinflectionin many of them, and the effects of language contact. In addition, many of the smaller languages are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to reach and are often also sensitive border zones.Without a secure reconstruction of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, the higher-level structure of the family remains unclear.A top-level branching into Chinese andTibeto-Burman languagesis often assumed, but has not been convincingly demonstrated.

History

Main article:History of the Chinese language

The first written records appeared over 3,000 years ago during theShang dynasty.As the language evolved over this period, the various local varieties became mutually unintelligible. In reaction, central governments have repeatedly sought to promulgate a unified standard.

Old and Middle Chinese

Main articles:Old ChineseandMiddle Chinese

Further information:Reconstruction of Old Chinese

The earliest examples of Old Chinese are divinatory inscriptions onoracle bonesdated toc. 1250 BCE,during theLate Shang.The next attested stage came frominscriptions on bronze artifactsdating to theWestern Zhouperiod (1046–771 BCE), theClassic of Poetryand portions of theBook of DocumentsandI Ching.Scholars have attempted to reconstruct thephonology of Old Chineseby comparing later varieties of Chinese with the rhyming practice of theClassic of Poetryand the phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters.Although many of the finer details remain unclear, most scholars agree that Old Chinese differs from Middle Chinese in lacking retroflex and palatal obstruents but having initialconsonant clustersof some sort, and in having voiceless nasals and liquids.Most recent reconstructions also describe an atonal language with consonant clusters at the end of the syllable, developing intotonedistinctions in Middle Chinese.Severalderivational affixeshave also been identified, but the language lacksinflection,and indicated grammatical relationships using word order andgrammatical particles.

Middle Chinese was the language used duringNorthern and Southern dynastiesand theSui,Tang,andSongdynasties (6th–10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by theQieyunrime dictionary (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected byrhyme tablessuch as theYunjingconstructed by ancient Chinese philologists as a guide to theQieyunsystem.These works define phonological categories but with little hint of what sounds they represent.Linguists have identified these sounds by comparing the categories with pronunciations in modernvarieties of Chinese,borrowed Chinese wordsin Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean, and transcription evidence.The resulting system is very complex, with a large number of consonants and vowels, but they are probably not all distinguished in any single dialect. Most linguists now believe it represents adiasystemencompassing 6th-century northern and southern standards for reading the classics.

Classical and vernacular written forms

Main articles:Classical ChineseandWritten vernacular Chinese

The complex relationship between spoken and written Chinese is an example ofdiglossia:as spoken, Chinese varieties have evolved at different rates, while the written language used throughout China changed comparatively little, crystallizing into a prestige form known asClassical or Literary Chinese.Literature written distinctly in the Classical form began to emerge during theSpring and Autumn period.Its use in writing remained nearly universal until the late 19th century, culminating with the widespread adoption ofwritten vernacular Chinesewith theMay Fourth Movementbeginning in 1919.

Rise of northern dialects

After the fall of theNorthern Songdynasty and subsequent reign of the JurchenJinand MongolYuandynasties in northern China, a common speech (now calledOld Mandarin) developed based on the dialects of theNorth China Plainaround the capital. The 1324Zhongyuan Yinyunwas a dictionary that codified the rhyming conventions of newsanquverse form in this language. Together with the slightly laterMenggu Ziyun,this dictionary describes a language with many of the features characteristic of modern Mandarin dialects.

Up to the early 20th century, most Chinese people only spoke their local variety. Thus, as a practical measure, officials of theMingandQingdynasties carried out the administration of the empire using acommon language based on Mandarin varieties,known asQuan thoại;Quan thoại;Guānhuà;'language of officials'. For most of this period, this language was a koiné based on dialects spoken in theNanjingarea, though not identical to any single dialect. By the middle of the 19th century, the Beijing dialect had become dominant and was essential for any business with the imperial court.

In the 1930s, astandard national language(Quốc ngữ;Quốc ngữ;Guóyǔ), was adopted. After much dispute between proponents of northern and southern dialects and an abortive attempt at an artificial pronunciation, theNational Language Unification Commissionfinally settled on the Beijing dialect in 1932. The People's Republic founded in 1949 retained this standard but renamed itPhổ thông thoại;Phổ thông thoại;pǔtōnghuà;'common speech'.The national language is now used in education, the media, and formal situations in both mainland China and Taiwan.

InHong KongandMacau,Cantonese is the dominant spoken language due to cultural influence from Guangdong immigrants and colonial-era policies, and is used in education, media, formal speech, and everyday life—though Mandarin is increasingly taught in schools due to the mainland's growing influence.

Influence

See also:Adoption of Chinese literary cultureandSino-Xenic vocabularies

TheTripitaka Koreana,a Korean collection of theChinese Buddhist canon

Historically, the Chinese language has spread to its neighbors through a variety of means. Northern Vietnam was incorporated into theHan dynasty(202 BCE – 220 CE) in 111 BCE, marking the beginning of aperiod of Chinese controlthat ran almost continuously for a millennium. TheFour Commanderies of Hanwere established in northern Korea in the 1st century BCE but disintegrated in the following centuries.Chinese Buddhismspread over East Asia between the 2nd and 5th centuries CE, and with it the study of scriptures and literature in Literary Chinese.Later, strong central governments modeled on Chinese institutions were established in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, with Literary Chinese serving as the language of administration and scholarship, a position it would retain until the late 19th century in Korea and (to a lesser extent) Japan, and the early 20th century in Vietnam.Scholars from different lands could communicate, albeit only in writing, using Literary Chinese.

Although they used Chinese solely for written communication, each country had its own tradition of reading texts aloud using what are known asSino-Xenic pronunciations.Chinese words with these pronunciations were also extensively imported into theKorean,JapaneseandVietnameselanguages, and today comprise over half of their vocabularies.This massive influx led to changes in the phonological structure of the languages, contributing to the development ofmoraicstructure in Japaneseand the disruption ofvowel harmonyin Korean.

Borrowed Chinese morphemes have been used extensively in all these languages to coin compound words for new concepts, in a similar way to the use ofLatinandAncient Greekroots in European languages.Many new compounds, or new meanings for old phrases, were created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to name Western concepts and artifacts. These coinages, written in shared Chinese characters, have then been borrowed freely between languages. They have even been accepted into Chinese, a language usually resistant to loanwords, because their foreign origin was hidden by their written form. Often different compounds for the same concept were in circulation for some time before a winner emerged, and sometimes the final choice differed between countries.The proportion of vocabulary of Chinese origin thus tends to be greater in technical, abstract, or formal language. For example, in Japan,Sino-Japanese wordsaccount for about 35% of the words in entertainment magazines, over half the words in newspapers, and 60% of the words in science magazines.

Vietnam, Korea, and Japan each developed writing systems for their own languages, initially based onChinese characters,but later replaced with thehangulalphabet for Korean and supplemented withkanasyllabaries for Japanese, while Vietnamese continued to be written with the complexchữ Nômscript. However, these were limited to popular literature until the late 19th century. Today Japanese is written with a composite script using both Chinese characters calledkanji,and kana. Korean is written exclusively with hangul in North Korea, although knowledge of the supplementary Chinese characters calledhanjais still required, and hanja are increasingly rarely used in South Korea. As a result of its historical colonization by France, Vietnamese now uses the Latin-basedVietnamese alphabet.

English words of Chinese originincludeteafromHokkienTrà(tê),dim sumfrom CantoneseĐiểm tâm(dim2 sam1), andkumquatfrom CantoneseKim quất(gam1 gwat1).

Varieties

Main article:Varieties of Chinese

75km
50miles

Guangzhou

Wuzhou

Taishan

  

The sinologistJerry Normanhas estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese.These varieties form adialect continuum,in which differences in speech generally become more pronounced as distances increase, though the rate of change varies immensely. Generally, mountainous South China exhibits more linguistic diversity than theNorth China Plain.Until the late 20th century, Chinese emigrants to Southeast Asia and North America came from southeast coastal areas, where Min, Hakka, and Yue dialects were spoken. Specifically, most Chinese immigrants to North America until the mid-20th century spokeTaishanese,a variety of Yue from a small coastal area aroundTaishan, Guangdong.

In parts of South China, the dialect of a major city may be only marginally intelligible to its neighbors. For example,Wuzhouand Taishan are located approximately 260 km (160 mi) and 190 km (120 mi) away fromGuangzhourespectively, but the Yue variety spoken in Wuzhou is more similar to the Guangzhou dialect than is Taishanese. Wuzhou is located directly upstream from Guangzhou on thePearl River,whereas Taishan is to Guangzhou's southwest, with the two cities separated by several river valleys.In parts ofFujian,the speech of some neighbouring counties or villages is mutually unintelligible.

Grouping

Range of dialect groups inChina properand Taiwan according to theLanguage Atlas of China

Local varieties of Chinese are conventionally classified into seven dialect groups, largely based on the different evolution ofMiddle Chinesevoiced initials:

• Mandarin,includingStandard Chinese,theBeijing dialect,Sichuanese,and also theDungan languagespoken inCentral Asia
• Wu,includingShanghainese,Suzhounese,andWenzhounese
• Gan
• Xiang
• Min,includingFuzhounese,Hainanese,HokkienandTeochew
• Hakka
• Yue,including Cantonese andTaishanese

Proportions of first-language speakers

Mandarin(65.7%)

Min(6.2%)

Wu(6.1%)

Yue(5.6%)

Jin(5.2%)

Gan(3.9%)

Hakka(3.5%)

Xiang(3.0%)

Huizhou(0.3%)

Pinghua,others (0.6%)

The classification ofLi Rong,which is used in theLanguage Atlas of China(1987), distinguishes three further groups:

• Jin,previously included in Mandarin.
• Huizhou,previously included in Wu.
• Pinghua,previously included in Yue.

Some varieties remain unclassified, including theDanzhou dialectonHainan,Waxianghuaspoken in westernHunan,andShaozhou Tuhuaspoken in northernGuangdong.

Standard Chinese

Main article:Standard Chinese

See also:List of countries and territories where Chinese is an official language

Standard Chinese is thestandard languageof China (where it is calledPhổ thông thoại;pǔtōnghuà) and Taiwan, and one of the four official languages of Singapore (where it is called eitherHoa ngữ;Hoa ngữ;HuáyǔorHán ngữ;Hán ngữ;Hànyǔ). Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. The governments of both China and Taiwan intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore, it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools.

Diglossiais common among Chinese speakers. For example, a Shanghai resident may speak both Standard Chinese andShanghainese;if they grew up elsewhere, they are also likely fluent in the dialect of their home region. In addition to Standard Chinese, a majority ofTaiwanese peoplealso speakTaiwanese Hokkien(also calledĐài ngữ;'Taiwanese'),Hakka,or anAustronesian language.A speaker in Taiwan may mix pronunciations and vocabulary from Standard Chinese and otherlanguages of Taiwanin everyday speech.In part due to traditional cultural ties withGuangdong,Cantonese is used as an everyday language inHong KongandMacau.

Nomenclature

The designation of various Chinese branches remains controversial. Some linguists and most ordinary Chinese people consider all the spoken varieties as one single language, as speakers share a common national identity and a common written form.Others instead argue that it is inappropriate to refer to major branches of Chinese such as Mandarin, Wu, and so on as "dialects" because the mutual unintelligibility between them is too great.However, calling major Chinese branches "languages" would also be wrong under the same criterion, since a branch such as Wu, itself contains many mutually unintelligible varieties, and could not be properly called a single language.

There are also viewpoints pointing out that linguists often ignore mutual intelligibility when varieties share intelligibility with a central variety (i.e. prestige variety, such as Standard Mandarin), as the issue requires some careful handling when mutual intelligibility is inconsistent with language identity.

The Chinese government's official Chinese designation for the major branches of Chinese isPhương ngôn;fāngyán;'regional speech', whereas the more closely related varieties within these are calledĐịa điểm phương ngôn;Địa điểm phương ngôn;dìdiǎn fāngyán;'local speech'.

Because of the difficulties involved in determining the difference between language and dialect, other terms have been proposed. These includetopolect,lect,vernacular,regional,andvariety.

Phonology

Further information:Standard Chinese phonology,Historical Chinese phonology,andVarieties of Chinese § Phonology

A man speaking Mandarin with a Malaysian accent

Syllables in the Chinese languages have some unique characteristics. They are tightly related to themorphologyand also to the characters of the writing system, andphonologicallythey are structured according to fixed rules.

The structure of each syllable consists of anucleusthat has avowel(which can be amonophthong,diphthong,or even atriphthongin certain varieties), preceded by anonset(a singleconsonant,or consonant +glide;a zero onset is also possible), and followed (optionally) by acodaconsonant; a syllable also carries atone.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.

In Mandarin much more than in other spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda (assuming that a final glide is not analyzed as a coda), but syllables that do have codas are restricted to nasals/m/,/n/,/ŋ/,the retroflex approximant/ɻ/,and voiceless stops/p/,/t/,/k/,or/ʔ/.Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Standard Chinese, are limited to only/n/,/ŋ/,and/ɻ/.

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 polysyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. The total number of syllables in some varieties is therefore only about a thousand, including tonal variation, which is only about an eighth as many as English.

Tones

All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones to distinguish words.A few dialects of north China may have as few as three tones, while some dialects in south China have up to 6 or 12 tones, depending on how one counts. One exception from this is Shanghainese which has reduced the set of tones to a two-tonedpitch accentsystem much like modern Japanese.

A very common example used to illustrate the use of tones in Chinese is the application of the four tones of Standard Chinese, along with the neutral tone, to the syllablema.The tones are exemplified by the following five Chinese words:

The syllablemawith each of the primary tones in Standard Chinese

Examples of Standard Chinese tones

Tone	Character	Gloss	Pinyin	Chao tone	Pitch contour
1	Mụ;Mụ	'mother'	mā	˥	high, level
2	Ma	'hemp'	má	˧˥	high, rising
3	Mã;Mã	'horse'	mǎ	˨˩˦	low falling, then rising
4	Mạ;Mạ	'scold'	mà	˥˩	high falling
Neutral	Mạ;Mạ	INTR.PTC	ma	varies	varies

In contrast, Standard Cantonese has six tones. Historically, finals that end in astop consonantwere considered to be "checked tones"and thus counted separately for a total of nine tones. However, they are considered to be duplicates in modern linguistics and are no longer counted as such:

Examples of Standard Cantonese tones

Tone	Character	Gloss	Jyutping	Yale	Chao tone	Pitch contour
1	Thi;Thi	'poem'	si1	sī	˥	high, level high, falling
2	Sử	'history'	si2	sí	˧˥	high, rising
3	Thí	'assassinate'	si3	si	˧	mid, level
4	Thời;Thời	'time'	si4	sìh	˨˩	low, falling
5	Thị	'market'	si5	síh	˨˧	low, rising
6	Thị	'yes'	si6	sih	˨	low, level

Grammar

Main article:Chinese grammar

See also:Chinese classifiers

Chinese is often described as a 'monosyllabic' language. However, this is only partially correct. It is largely accurate when describing Old and Middle Chinese; in Classical Chinese, around 90% of words consist of a single character that corresponds one-to-one with amorpheme,the smallest unit of meaning in a language. In modern varieties, it usually remains the case that morphemes are monosyllabic—in contrast, English has many multi-syllable morphemes, bothbound and free,such as 'seven', 'elephant', 'para-' and '-able'. Some of the more conservative modern varieties, usually found in the south, have largely monosyllabicwords,especially with basic vocabulary. However, most nouns, adjectives, and verbs in modern Mandarin are disyllabic. A significant cause of this isphonetic erosion:sound changes over time have steadily reduced the number of possible syllables in the language's inventory. In modern Mandarin, there are only around 1,200 possible syllables, including the tonal distinctions, compared with about 5,000 in Vietnamese (still a largely monosyllabic language), and over 8,000 in English.

Most modern varieties tend to form new words through polysyllabiccompounds.In some cases, monosyllabic words have become disyllabic formed from different characters without the use of compounding, as inQuật lung;kūlongfromKhổng;kǒng;this is especially common in Jin varieties. This phonological collapse has led to a corresponding increase in the number ofhomophones.As an example, the smallLangenscheidt Pocket Chinese Dictionarylists six words that are commonly pronounced asshíin Standard Chinese:

Character	Gloss	MC	Cantonese
Thập	'ten'	dzyip	sap6
Thật;Thật	'actual'	zyit	sat6
Thức;Thức	'recognize'	dzyek	sik1
Thạch	'stone'	dzyi	sek6
Thời;Thời	'time'	dzyi	si4
Thực	'food'	zyik	sik6

In modern spoken Mandarin, however, tremendous ambiguity would result if all of these words could be used as-is. The 20th centuryYuen Ren ChaopoemLion-Eating Poet in the Stone Denexploits this, consisting of 92 characters all pronouncedshi.As such, most of these words have been replaced in speech, if not in writing, with less ambiguous disyllabic compounds. Only the first one,Thập,normally appears in monosyllabic form in spoken Mandarin; the rest are normally used in the polysyllabic forms of

Word	Pinyin	Gloss
Thật tế;Thật tế	shíjì	'actual-connection'
Nhận thức;Nhận thức	rènshi	'recognize-know'
Thạch đầu;Thạch đầu	shítou	'stone-head'
Thời gian;Thời gian	shíjiān	'time-interval'
Thực vật	shíwù	'foodstuff'

respectively. In each, the homophone was disambiguated by the addition of another morpheme, typically either a near-synonym or some sort of generic word (e.g. 'head', 'thing'), the purpose of which is to indicate which of the possible meanings of the other, homophonic syllable is specifically meant.

However, when one of the above words forms part of a compound, the disambiguating syllable is generally dropped and the resulting word is still disyllabic. For example,Thạch;shíalone, and notThạch đầu;Thạch đầu;shítou,appears in compounds as meaning 'stone' such asThạch cao;shígāo;'plaster',Thạch hôi;shíhuī;'lime',Thạch quật;shíkū;'grotto',Thạch anh;'quartz', andThạch du;shíyóu;'petroleum'. Although many single-syllable morphemes (Tự;zì) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllable compounds known asTừ;Từ;cí,which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinesecícan consist of more than one character–morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.

Examples of Chinese words of more than two syllables includeHán bảo bao;Hán bảo bao;hànbǎobāo;'hamburger',Thủ môn viên;Thủ môn viên;shǒuményuán;'goalkeeper', andĐiện tử bưu kiện;Điện tử bưu kiện;diànzǐyóujiàn;'e-mail'.

All varieties of modern Chinese areanalytic languages:they depend onsyntax(word order and sentence structure), rather thaninflectional morphology(changes in the form of a word), to indicate a word's function within a sentence.In other words, Chinese has very fewgrammatical inflections—it possesses notenses,novoices,nogrammatical number,and only a fewarticles.They make heavy use ofgrammatical particlesto indicateaspectandmood.In Mandarin, this involves the use of particles such asLiễu;le;'PFV',Hoàn;Hoàn;hái;'still', andDĩ kinh;Dĩ kinh;yǐjīng;'already'.

Chinese has asubject–verb–object word order,and like many other languages of East Asia, makes frequent use of thetopic–commentconstruction to form sentences. Chinese also has an extensive system ofclassifiersandmeasure words,another trait shared with neighboring languages such as Japanese and Korean. Other notable grammatical features common to all the spoken varieties of Chinese include the use ofserial verb construction,pronoun dropping,and the relatedsubject dropping.Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess differences.

Vocabulary

The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 50,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are in use and only about 3,000 are frequently used in Chinese media and newspapers.However, Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words. Because most Chinese words are made up of two or more characters, there are many more Chinese words than characters. A more accurate equivalent for a Chinese character is the morpheme, as characters represent the smallest grammatical units with individual meanings in the Chinese language.

Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and lexicalized phrases vary greatly. TheHanyu Da Zidian,a compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including oracle bone versions. TheZhonghua Zihai(1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. TheCC-CEDICTproject (2010) contains 97,404 contemporary entries including idioms, technology terms, and names of political figures, businesses, and products. The 2009 version of the Webster's Digital Chinese Dictionary (WDCD),based on CC-CEDICT, contains over 84,000 entries.

The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumeHanyu Da Cidian,records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revisedCihai,a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases, and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific, and technical terms.

The 2016 edition ofXiandai Hanyu Cidian,an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 13,000 head characters and defines 70,000 words.

Loanwords

Like many other languages, Chinese has absorbed a sizable number ofloanwordsfrom other cultures. Most Chinese words are formed out of native Chinese morphemes, including words describing imported objects and ideas. However, direct phonetic borrowing of foreign words has gone on since ancient times.

Some early Indo-European loanwords in Chinese have been proposed, notably 'honey' (Mật;mì), 'lion' (Sư;Sư;shī), and perhaps 'horse' (Mã;Mã;mǎ), 'pig' (Trư;Trư;zhū), 'dog' (Khuyển;quǎn), and 'goose' (Nga;Nga;é). Ancient words borrowed from along theSilk Roadduring the Old Chinese period include 'grape' (Bồ đào;pútáo), 'pomegranate' (Thạch lựu;shíliú), and 'lion' (Sư tử;Sư tử;shīzi). Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 'Buddha' (Phật;Fó) and 'bodhisattva' (Bồ tát;Bồ tát;Púsà). Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 'hutong' (Hồ đồng). Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 'grape' (Bồ đào), generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived fromSanskritorPali,the liturgical languages of northern India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of theGobi,Mongolian or northeast regions generally haveAltaicetymologies, such asTỳ bà(pípá), the Chinese lute, or 'cheese or yogurt' (Lạc;lào), but from exactly which source is not always clear.

Modern borrowings

See also:Translation of neologisms into ChineseandTranscription into Chinese characters

Modern neologisms are primarily translated into Chinese in one of three ways: free translation (calques), phonetic translation (by sound), ora combination of the two.Today, it is much more common to use existing Chinese morphemes to coin new words to represent imported concepts, such as technical expressions andinternational scientific vocabulary,wherein the Latin and Greek components are usually converted one-for-one into the corresponding Chinese characters. The word 'telephone' was initially loaned phonetically asĐức luật phong;Đức luật phong(délǜfēng;Shanghainesetélífon[təlɪfoŋ])—this word was widely used in Shanghai during the 1920s, but the laterĐiện thoại;Điện thoại(diànhuà;'electric speech'), built out of native Chinese morphemes became prevalent. Other examples include

Điện thị;Điện thị(diànshì;'electric vision')	'television'
Điện não;Điện não(diànnǎo;'electric brain')	'computer'
Thủ cơ;Thủ cơ(shǒujī;'hand machine')	'mobile phone'
Lam nha;Lam nha(lányá;'blue tooth')	'Bluetooth'
Võng chí;Võng chí(wǎngzhì;'internet logbook')	'blog'

Occasionally, compromises between the transliteration and translation approaches become accepted, such asHán bảo bao;Hán bảo bao(hànbǎobāo;'hamburger') fromHán bảo;'Hamburg' +Bao('bun'). Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes (phono-semantic matching), such asMã lợi áo;Mã lợi áo(Mǎlì'ào) for the video game character 'Mario'. This is often done for commercial purposes, for exampleBôn đằng;Bôn đằng(bēnténg;'dashing-leaping') for 'Pentium' andTái bách vị;Tái bách vị(Sàibǎiwèi;'better-than hundred tastes') for 'Subway'.

Foreign words, mainlyproper nouns,continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, 'Israel' becomesDĩ sắc liệt(Yǐsèliè), and 'Paris' becomesBa lê(Bālí). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, includingSa phát;Sa phát(shāfā;'sofa'),Mã đạt;Mã đạt(mǎdá;'motor'),U mặc(yōumò;'humor'),La tập;La tập(luóji, luójí;'logic'),Thời mao;Thời mao(shímáo;'smart (fashionable)'), andHiết tư để lí(xiēsīdǐlǐ;'hysterics'). The bulk of these words were originally coined in Shanghai during the early 20th century and later loaned from there into Mandarin, hence their Mandarin pronunciations occasionally being quite divergent from the English. For example, in ShanghaineseSa phát;Sa phát(sofa) andMã đạt;Mã đạt('motor') sound more like their English counterparts. Cantonese differs from Mandarin with some transliterations, such asSơ hóa(so1 faa3,2;'sofa') andMa đả(mo1 daa2;'motor').

Western foreign words representing Western concepts have influenced Chinese since the 20th century through transcription. From French,Ba lôi(bālěi) andHương tân;Hương tân(xiāngbīn) were borrowed for 'ballet' and 'champagne' respectively;Già phê(kāfēi) was borrowed from Italiancaffè'coffee'. The influence of English is particularly pronounced: from the early 20th century, many English words were borrowed into Shanghainese, such asCao nhĩ phu;Cao nhĩ phu(gāo'ěrfū;'golf') and the aforementionedSa phát;Sa phát(shāfā;'sofa'). Later, Americansoft powergave rise toĐịch tư khoa(dísīkē;'disco'),Khả nhạc;Khả nhạc(kělè;'cola'), andmínǐ('miniskirt'). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English, such asTạp thông(kaa1 tung1;'cartoon'),Cơ lão(gei1 lou2;'gay people'),Đích sĩ(dik1 si6,2;'taxi'), andBa sĩ(baa1 si6,2;'bus'). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, for example,Phấn ti;Phấn ti(fěnsī;'fans'),Hắc khách(hēikè;'hacker'), andBác khách(bókè;'blog'). In Taiwan, some of these transliterations are different, such asHãi khách(hàikè;'hacker') andBộ lạc cách(bùluògé;'interconnected tribes') for 'blog'.

Another result of English influence on Chinese is the appearance of so-calledTự mẫu từ;Tự mẫu từ(zìmǔcí;'lettered words') spelled with letters from the English alphabet. These have appeared in colloquial usage, as well as in magazines and newspapers, and on websites and television:

Tam G thủ cơ'third generation of cell phones'	←	Tam(sān;'three')	+	G;'generation'	+	Thủ cơ;shǒujī('cell phone')
IT giới'IT circles'	←	IT	+	Giới(jiè;'industry')
CIF giới'Cost, Insurance, Freight'	←	CIF	+	Giới;jià;'price'
e gia đình'e-home'	←	e;'electronic'	+	Gia đình;jiātíng;'home'
W thời đại'wireless era'	←	W;'wireless'	+	Thời đại;shídài;'era'
TV tộc'TV-watchers'	←	TV;'television'	+	Tộc;TV zú;'clan'

Since the 20th century, another source of words has been kanji: Japan re-molded European concepts and inventions intoHòa chế hán ngữ,wasei-kango,'Japanese-made Chinese', and many of these words have been re-loaned into modern Chinese. Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example,Kinh tế;Kinh tế;jīngjì;Kinh tế,keizaiin Japanese, which in the original Chinese meant 'the workings of the state', narrowed to 'economy' in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then re-imported into Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this loaning, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese share a corpus of linguistic terms describing modern terminology, paralleling the similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin and shared among European languages.

Writing system

Main articles:Written Chinese,Mainland Chinese Braille,andTaiwanese Braille

"Preface to the Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavilion"byWang Xizhi,written insemi-cursive style

The Chineseorthographycenters onChinese characters,which are written within imaginary square blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns, despite alternative arrangement with rows of characters from left to right within a row and from top to bottom across rows (like English and other Western writing systems) having become more popular since the 20th century.Chinese characters denotemorphemesindependent of phonetic variation in different languages. Thus the characterNhất('one') is pronounced asyīin Standard Chinese,yat1in Cantonese anditin Hokkien, a form of Min.

Most modern written Chinese is in the form ofwritten vernacular Chinese,based on spoken Standard Chinese, regardless of dialectical background. Written vernacular Chinese largely replaced Literary Chinese in the early 20th century as the country's standard written language.However, vocabularies from different Chinese-speaking areas have diverged, and the divergence can be observed in written Chinese.

Due to the divergence of variants, some unique morphemes are not found in Standard Chinese. Characters rarely used in Standard Chinese have also been created or inherited from archaic literary standards to represent these unique morphemes. For example, characters likeMãoandHệare actively used in Cantonese and Hakka, while being archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. The most prominent example of a non-Standard Chinese orthography isWritten Cantonese,which is used in tabloids and on the internet among Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong and elsewhere.

Chinese had no uniform system of phonetic transcription until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in earlyrime booksand dictionaries. Early Indian translators, working inSanskritandPali,were the first to attempt to describe the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted in some Latin character transcription/writing systems, based on various variants of Chinese languages. Some of these Latin character-based systems are still being used to write various Chinese variants in the modern era.

InHunan,women in certain areas write their local Chinese language variant inNüshu,asyllabaryderived from Chinese characters. TheDungan language,considered by many a dialect of Mandarin, is nowadays written inCyrillicand was previously written in theArabic script.TheDungan peopleare primarily Muslim and live mainly in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia; manyHui people,living mainly in China, also speak the language.

Chinese characters

Main article:Chinese characters

See also:Chinese character classification

Vĩnhis often used to illustrate the eight basic types of strokes of Chinese characters

Each Chinese character represents a monosyllabic Chinese word or morpheme. In 100 CE, the famed Han dynasty scholarXu Shenclassified characters into six categories:pictographs,simpleideographs,compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds, and derivative characters. Only 4% were categorized as pictographs, including many of the simplest characters, such asNhân(rén;'human'),Nhật(rì;'Sun'),Sơn(shān;'mountain'), andThủy(shuǐ;'water'). Between 80% and 90% were classified as phonetic compounds such asTrùng(chōng;'pour'), combining a phonetic componentTrung(zhōng) with a semantic component of theradicalThủy,a reduced form ofThủy;'water'. Almost all characters created since have been made using this format. The 18th-centuryKangxi Dictionaryclassified characters under a now-common set of 214 radicals.

Modern characters are styled after theregular script.Various other written styles are also used inChinese calligraphy,includingseal script,cursive scriptandclerical script.Calligraphy artists can write in Traditional and Simplified characters, but they tend to use Traditional characters for traditional art.

There are currently two systems for Chinese characters.Traditional characters,used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau, and many overseas Chinese-speaking communities, largely take their form from received character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty and standardized during the Ming.Simplified characters,introduced by the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditionalglyphsto fewer strokes, especially by adopting common cursiveshorthandvariants and merging characters with similar pronunciations to the one with the least strokes, among other methods. Singapore, which has a large Chinese community, was the second nation to officially adopt simplified characters—first bycreating its own simplified characters,then by adopting entirely the PRC simplified characters. It has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia.

The Internet provides practice reading each of these systems, and most Chinese readers are capable of, if not necessarily comfortable with, reading the alternative system through experience and guesswork.

A well-educated Chinese reader today recognizes approximately 4,000 to 6,000 characters; approximately 3,000 characters are required to read amainland newspaper.The PRC defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. School children typically learn around 2,000 characters whereas scholars may memorize up to 10,000.A large unabridged dictionary like theKangxidictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; fewer than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.

Romanization

Main article:Romanization of Chinese

Quốc ngữ;Quốc ngữ;Guóyǔ;'National language' written in traditional and simplified forms, followed by various romanizations

Romanizationis the process of transcribing a language into theLatin script.There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese varieties, due to the lack of a native phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by WesternChristian missionariesin the 16th century.

Today the most common romanization for Standard Chinese isHanyu Pinyin,introduced in 1956 by the PRC, and later adopted by Singapore and Taiwan. Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across the Americas, Australia, and Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones of new words. In school books that teach Chinese, the pinyin romanization is often shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.

The second-most common romanization system, theWade–Giles,was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels–it is largely ananglicization,it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade–Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and was widely used in Taiwan until 2009.

When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade–Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade–Giles's extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar withBeijingthan they will be withBěijīng(pinyin), and withTaipeithanT'ai²-pei³(Wade–Giles). This simplification presents syllables as homophones which are not, and therefore exaggerates the number of homophones almost by a factor of four.

For comparison:

Comparison of Mandarin romanizations

Characters	Wade–Giles	Pinyin	Meaning
Trung quốc;Trung quốc	Chung1-kuo2	Zhōngguó	China
Đài loan;Đài loan	T'ai2-wan1	Táiwān	Taiwan
Bắc kinh	Pei3-ching1	Běijīng	Beijing
Đài bắc;Đài bắc	T'ai2-pei3	Táiběi	Taipei
Tôn văn	Sun1-wên2	Sūn Wén	Sun Yat-sen
Mao trạch đông;Mao trạch đông	Mao2Tse2-tung1	Máo Zédōng	Mao Zedong
Tưởng giới thạch;Tưởng giới thạch	Chiang3Chieh4-shih2	Jiǎng Jièshí	Chiang Kai-shek
Khổng tử	K'ung3Tsu3	Kǒngzǐ	Confucius

Other systems includeGwoyeu Romatzyh,the FrenchEFEO,theYale system(invented for use by US troops during World War II), as well as distinct systems for the phonetic requirements of Cantonese, Min Nan, Hakka, and other varieties.

Other phonetic transcriptions

Chinese varieties have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The'Phags-pa script,for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of premodern forms of Chinese.Bopomofo(orzhuyin) is asemi-syllabarythat is still widely used in Taiwan to aid standard pronunciation. There are also at least two systems ofcyrillizationfor Chinese. The most widespread is thePalladius system.

As a foreign language

Main article:Chinese as a foreign language

Yang Lingfu, former curator of theNational Museum of China,giving Chinese language instruction at theCivil Affairs Staging Areain 1945

With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Standard Chinese instruction has been gaining popularity in schools throughout East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Western world.

Besides Mandarin, Cantonese is the only other Chinese language that is widely taught as a foreign language, largely due to the economic and cultural influence of Hong Kong and its widespread usage among significant Overseas Chinese communities.

In 1991, there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test, calledHanyu Shuiping Kaoshi(HSK), comparable to the EnglishCambridge Certificate,but by 2005 the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660and in 2010 to 750,000.

See also

• Chengyu
• Chinese computational linguistics
• Chinese exclamative particles
• Chinese honorifics
• Chinese language law
• Chinese numerals
• Chinese punctuation
• Chinese word-segmented writing
• Classical Chinese grammar
• Han unification
• Languages of China
• North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
• Protection of the Varieties of Chinese

References

Sources

• Bailey, Charles James Nice (1973).Variation and linguistic theory.Arlington, Va: Center for Applied Linguistics.ISBN978-0-87281-032-7.
• Baxter, William H.(1992).A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology.Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.ISBN978-3-11-012324-1.
• Campbell, Lyle (2008),"[Untitled review ofEthnologue,15th edition] ",Language,vol. 84, no. 3, pp. 636–641,doi:10.1353/lan.0.0054,S2CID143663395
• Chappell, Hilary (2008)."Variation in the grammaticalization of complementizers from verba dicendi in Sinitic languages".Linguistic Typology.12(1): 45–98.doi:10.1515/LITY.2008.032.hdl:11858/00-001M-0000-0013-1A8D-4.ISSN1430-0532.S2CID201097561.
• Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, ed. (2012).Zhōngguó yǔyán dìtú jí (dì 2 bǎn): Hànyǔ fāngyán juǎnTrung quốc ngữ ngôn địa đồ tập ( đệ 2 bản ): Hán ngữ phương ngôn quyển[Language Atlas of China: Chinese dialects] (2nd ed.). Beijing: The Commercial Press.ISBN978-7-100-07054-6.
• Coblin, W. South(2000)."A Brief History of Mandarin".Journal of the American Oriental Society.120(4): 537–552.doi:10.2307/606615.JSTOR606615.
• DeFrancis, John(1984).The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy.University of Hawaiʻi Press.ISBN978-0-8248-1068-9.
• Groves, Julie May (2010)."Language or dialect, topolect or regiolect? A comparative study of language attitudes towards the status of Cantonese in Hong Kong".Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development.31(6): 531–551.doi:10.1080/01434632.2010.509507.ISSN0143-4632.S2CID144374994.
• Handel, Zev (2008)."What is Sino-Tibetan? Snapshot of a Field and a Language Family in Flux".Language and Linguistics Compass.2(3): 422–441.doi:10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00061.x.ISSN1749-818X.
• Haugen, Einar(1966)."Dialect, Language, Nation".American Anthropologist.68(4): 922–935.doi:10.1525/aa.1966.68.4.02a00040.ISSN0002-7294.JSTOR670407.
• Huang Hua ( hoàng hoa ) (2014).Bạch thoại vi hà tại ngũ tứ thời kỳ “Hoạt” khởi lai liễu?(PDF)(in Chinese). Chinese University of Hong Kong.Archived(PDF)from the original on 10 October 2022.
• Hudson, R. A. (1996).Sociolinguistics(2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.ISBN978-0-521-56514-1.
• Hymes, Dell (1971). "Sociolinguistics and the ethnography of speaking". In Ardener, Edwin (ed.).Social Anthropology and Language.Routledge. pp. 47–92.ISBN978-1-136-53941-1.
• Kane, Daniel (2006).The Chinese language: its history and current usage.North Clarendon, VT: Tuttle.ISBN978-0-8048-3853-5.
• Klöter, Henning (2004)."Language Policy in the KMT and DPP eras".China Perspectives.56(6). Centre d'études français sur la Chine Contemporaine.doi:10.4000/chinaperspectives.442.ISSN1996-4617.Retrieved30 May2015.
• Kornicki, P.F.(2011). "A transnational approach to East Asian book history". In Chakravorty, Swapan; Gupta, Abhijit (eds.).New Word Order: Transnational Themes in Book History.Worldview Publications. pp. 65–79.ISBN978-81-920651-1-3.
• Kuo, Yun-Hsuan (2005).New dialect formation: the case of Taiwanese Mandarin(Doctor of Philosophy). University of Essex.Retrieved26 June2015.
• Kurpaska, Maria (2010).Chinese language(s): a look through the prism of the Great dictionary of modern Chinese dialects.Trends in linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.ISBN978-3-11-021914-2.
• Lewis, M. Paul; Simons, Gary F.; Fennig, Charles D., eds. (2015),Ethnologue: Languages of the World(Eighteenth ed.), Dallas, Texas: SIL International
• Li, Siok-Hong (1 March 2010)."Đài, hoa ngữ tiếp xúc sở dẫn khởi đích đài ngữ ngữ âm đích biến hóa xu thế".Đài ngữ nghiên cứu.2(1): 56–71.Retrieved11 July2021.
• Liang, Sihua (2015).Language attitudes and identities in multilingual China: a linguistic ethnography.Cham: Springer.ISBN978-3-319-12619-7.
• Mair, Victor H.(1991)."What Is a Chinese" Dialect/Topolect "? Reflections on Some Key Sino-English Linguistic terms"(PDF).Sino-Platonic Papers.29.University of Pennsylvania: 1–31. Archived fromthe original(PDF)on 10 May 2018.Retrieved17 November2023.
• Matthews, Stephen;Yip, Virginia(1994).Cantonese: A Comprehensive Grammar.Routledge.ISBN978-0-415-08945-6.
• Miller, Roy Andrew(1967).The Japanese Language.University of Chicago Press.ISBN978-0-226-52717-8.
• Miyake, Marc Hideo(2004).Old Japanese: A Phonetic Reconstruction.Routledge–Curzon.ISBN978-0-415-30575-4.
• Norman, Jerry(1988).Chinese.Cambridge language surveys. Cambridge University Press.ISBN978-0-521-29653-3.
• Norman, Jerry (2003). "The Chinese dialects: phonology". In Thurgood, Graham; LaPolla, Randy J. (eds.).The Sino-Tibetan languages.Routledge. pp. 72–83.ISBN978-0-7007-1129-1.
• Pulleyblank, Edwin G.(1984).Middle Chinese: A study in Historical Phonology.Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.ISBN978-0-7748-0192-8.
• Ramsey, S. Robert (1987).The Languages of China.Princeton University Press.ISBN978-0-691-01468-5.
• Romaine, Suzanne (1994).Language in Society: an Introduction to Sociolinguistics.Oxford University Press.ISBN978-0-19-875133-5.
• Sagart, Laurent;Jacques, Guillaume;Lai, Yunfan; Ryder, Robin J.; Thouzeau, Valentin; Greenhill, Simon J.; List, Johann-Mattis (21 May 2019)."Dated language phylogenies shed light on the ancestry of Sino-Tibetan".Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.116(21): 10317–10322.Bibcode:2019PNAS..11610317S.doi:10.1073/pnas.1817972116.ISSN0027-8424.PMC6534992.PMID31061123.
• Schüssler, Axel (2007).ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese.ABC Chinese dictionary series. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press.ISBN978-0-8248-2975-9.
• Shibatani, Masayoshi (1990).The Languages of Japan.Cambridge language surveys. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.ISBN978-0-521-36918-3.
• Sohn, Ho-Min (2001).The Korean Language.Cambridge University Press.ISBN978-0-521-36943-5.
• Sohn, Ho-Min; Lee, Peter H. (2003). "Language, forms, prosody, and themes". In Lee, Peter H. (ed.).A History of Korean Literature.Cambridge University Press. pp. 15–51.ISBN978-0-521-82858-1.
• Thomason, Sarah Grey (1988). "Languages of the World". In Paulston, Christina Bratt (ed.).International Handbook of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education(1st ed.). New York: Greenwood Press. pp. 17–45.ISBN978-0-313-24484-1.
• Tsu-lin, Mei(1970)."Tones and Prosody in Middle Chinese and The Origin of The Rising Tone".Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies.30:86–110.doi:10.2307/2718766.JSTOR2718766.
• Van Herk, Gerard (2012).What is sociolinguistics?.Linguistics in the world (1st ed.). Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.ISBN978-1-4051-9319-1.
• Wakefield, John C., ed. (2019).Cantonese as a Second Language: Issues, Experiences, and Suggestions for Teaching and Learning.Routledge Studies in Applied Linguistics. Manhattan, New York: Routledge. p. 45.ISBN9781032093161.
• Wardaugh, Ronald; Fuller, Janet (2014).An Introduction to Sociolinguistics.John Wiley & Sons.ISBN978-1-118-73229-8.
• Wilkinson, Endymion Porter(2000).Chinese History: A Manual.Harvard-Yenching Institute monograph series. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.ISBN978-0-674-00249-4.
• Wurm, Stephen Adolphe; Li, Rong; Baumann, Theo; Lee, Mei W. (1987).Language Atlas of China.Longman.ISBN978-962-359-085-3.
• Zhang, Bennan; Yang, Robin R. (2004). "Putonghuaeducation and language policy in postcolonial Hong Kong ". In Zhou, Minglang (ed.).Language policy in the People's Republic of China: theory and practice since 1949.Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 143–161.ISBN978-1-4020-8038-8.
• Zimmermann, Basile (2010)."Redesigning Culture: Chinese Characters in Alphabet-Encoded Networks".Design and Culture.2(1): 27–43.doi:10.2752/175470710X12593419555126.ISSN1754-7075.S2CID53981784.
  • "Origin of Sino-Tibetan language family revealed by new research".ScienceDaily(Press release). 6 May 2019.

Further reading

• Arablouei, Ramtin; Rund Abdelfatah (26 May 2022)."The Characters That Built China".Throughline.NPR.Retrieved27 August2023.On the history of the standardization of Mandarin as the Chinese primary national dialect.
• Hannas, William C. (1997),Asia's Orthographic Dilemma,University of Hawaii Press,ISBN978-0-8248-1892-0.
• Huang, Cheng-Teh James; Li, Yen-Hui Audrey; Li, Yafei (2009),The Syntax of Chinese,Cambridge Syntax Guides, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,doi:10.1017/CBO9781139166935,ISBN978-0-521-59958-0,S2CID209828119.
• Qiu, Xigui(2000),Chinese Writing,translated by Gilbert Louis Mattos andJerry Norman,Society for the Study of Early China and Institute of East Asian Studies,University of California,Berkeley,ISBN978-1-55729-071-7.
• R. L. G. (6 June 2013)."Why So Little Chinese in English?".Johnson(blog): Language Borrowing (topic).The Economist.Archivedfrom the original on 20 June 2013.Retrieved27 August2023.
• Tsu, Jing (2022).Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern.New York: Riverhead Books.ISBN9780735214729.OCLC1246726702.

External links

• Classical Chinese texts– Chinese Text Project
• Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinksat the Ohio State University with hundreds of links to Chinese related web pages.Archived20 July 2011 at theWayback Machine.