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Chinese language

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Languages

   Chinese
   汉语 Hànyǔ, 中文 Zhōngwén
   Zhōngwén in written Chinese:
   "Chinese (written) language" (pinyin: zhōngwén) written in Chinese
   characters
   Spoken in: People's Republic of China ( mainland China, Hong Kong,
   Macao), Republic of China (Taiwan and other islands), Malaysia,
   Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Burma, Cambodia, Singapore, also parts of
   Japan, North Korea, South Korea, Philippines & other Chinese
   communities around the world
   Region: (majorities): Eastern Asia & parts of Southern Asia
   (minorities): Chinese communities in Western Asia, the Americas,
   Africa, Europe and Pacific
   Total speakers: more than 1.3 billion
   Ranking: 1, if considered a single language (Mandarin, Wu and Cantonese
   are most common sub-types)
   Language family: Sino-Tibetan
    Chinese
   Writing system: Chinese characters
   Official status
   Official language of: PRC, ROC, Singapore, United Nations
   Regulated by: In the PRC: various agencies(in Chinese)
   In the ROC: Mandarin Promotion Council
   In Singapore: Promote Mandarin Council/ Speak Mandarin Campaign
   Language codes
   ISO 639-1: zh
   ISO 639-2: chi (B)  zho (T)
   ISO/FDIS 639-3: variously:
   cdo —  Min Dong
   cjy —  Jinyu
   cmn —  Mandarin
   cpx —  Pu Xian
   czh —  Huizhou
   czo —  Min Zhong
   dng —  Dungan
   gan —  Gan
   hak —  Hakka
   hsn —  Xiang
   mnp —  Min Bei
   nan —  Min Nan
   wuu —  Wu
   yue —  Yue
   Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA
   chart for English for an English-​based pronunciation key.

   Chinese (汉语/漢語, Pinyin: Hànyǔ; 华语/華語, Huáyǔ; or 中文, Zhōngwén) is a
   language (or language family) that forms part of the Sino-Tibetan
   family of languages. About one-fifth of the people in the world speak
   some form of Chinese as their native language.

   In general, all varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. However,
   Chinese is also distinguished for a high level of internal diversity.
   Regional variation between different variants/dialects is comparable to
   the Romance language family; many variants of spoken Chinese are
   different enough to be mutually incomprehensible. It could be argued
   that there are more native "Romance" (Italian, French, Spanish,
   Portuguese, etc.) speakers than "Chinese" speakers. There are between
   six and twelve main regional groups of Chinese (depending on
   classification scheme), of which the most populous by far is Mandarin
   (c. 800 million), followed by Wu (c. 90 million), and Cantonese (c. 80
   million). The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "languages"
   or "dialects" is a controversial issue. If Chinese is classified as a
   single language rather than a group of languages, it is the most widely
   spoken language in the world.

   The standardized form of spoken Chinese is based on the Beijing
   dialect, a member of the Mandarin group; it is described in the article
   " Standard Mandarin." Standard Mandarin is the official language of the
   People's Republic of China and the Republic of China or 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).

Spoken Chinese

   The map below depicts the subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect
   groups") within Chinese. The traditionally recognized seven main
   groups, in order of population size are:
     * Mandarin 普通话,国语,北方话/北方話 or 官話/官话, (c. 800 million)，

   汉语 Hanyu Chinese is divided into two groups: 文言 Wenyan Classical
   Chinese languages and 白话 Baihua Modern Chinese languages.

   Mandarin Chinese Guanhua 官话 was the main language used at the Imperial
   Court and Mandarin Chinese Putonghua 普通话 is the main language in China.
   Both Guanhua and Putonghua are called Mandarin Chinese in the West but
   they are indeed different languages.

   China has had only two official languages in its entire history. 满语
   Manyu, the Manchu language, was the first official language of China,
   from 1644 till 1912. 普通话 Putonghua has been the official language of
   China since 1958. Before 1958, no form of Chinese was ever the official
   language of China.

   The linguist names 上古汉语 Shanggu Hanyu Old Chinese and 中古汉语 Zhonggu
   Hanyu Middle Chinese are used by linguists who are researching the
   field linguist Bernhard Karlgren had started.

   In China the Chinese did not make such a division, but divided Hanyu
   into Wenyan and Baihua.

   Wenyan is sometimes called 古代汉语 Gudai Hanyu Classical Chinese and
   Baihua is sometimes called 现代汉语 Xiandai Hanyu Modern Chinese.
     * Wu 吳/吴 , which includes Shanghainese, (c. 90 million)，
     * Cantonese 粵/粤, (c. 80 million)，
     * Min 閩/闽, which includes Taiwanese, (c. 50 million),
     * Xiang 湘, (c. 35 million),
     * Hakka 客家 or 客, (c. 35 million)，
     * Gan 贛/赣, (c. 20 million)

   Chinese linguists have recently distinguished 3 more groups from the
   traditional seven:
     * Jin 晉/晋 from Mandarin
     * Hui 徽 from Wu
     * Ping 平話/平话 partly from Cantonese

   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. See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive
   listing of individual dialects within these large, broad groupings.
   The varieties of spoken Chinese in China (CLICK double rectangle image
   to the right for a larger map.)
   Enlarge
   The varieties of spoken Chinese in China (CLICK double rectangle image
   to the right for a larger map.)

   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 to 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 neighbours. 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 (Ramsey, 1987).

Standard Mandarin and diglossia

   Standard Mandarin is the official standard language used by the
   People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, and Singapore. It is
   based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as
   spoken in Beijing. The governments intend for speakers of all Chinese
   speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. It is
   therefore used in government, in the media, and in instruction in
   schools.

   The situation in China is a complex and interesting case of diglossia:
   it is common for speakers of Chinese to be able to speak several
   varieties of the language, typically Standard Mandarin, the local
   dialect, and occasionally a regional lingua franca, such as Cantonese.
   Such polyglots frequently code switch between Standard Mandarin and the
   local dialect(s), depending on the situation. A person living in
   Taiwan, for example, may commonly mix pronunciations, phrases, and
   words from Standard Mandarin and Taiwanese, and this mixture is
   considered socially appropriate under many circumstances. Similarly, in
   Hong Kong, it is not unusual for people to speak Cantonese and English,
   and sometimes Mandarin.

Language or language family?

   The diversity of Chinese variants is comparable to the Romance
   languages, and greater than the North Germanic 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. Just as the Roman empire was composed of
   different ethnic groups, there were once different Chinese and
   non-Chinese nations before they were united by conquest into the
   Chinese empire. The Chinese dialects today contain remnants of
   languages spoken in those former nations.

   From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are
   simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is
   irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional
   speeches scientifically. 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" or "race." As a result, it
   has become a subject of contention.

   On one hand, there is the tendency to regard dialects as equal
   variations of a single Chinese language. This is partly because all
   speakers of different varieties of Chinese use one formal standard
   written language, although this written language in modern times is
   itself based on one variety of spoken Chinese. On the other hand, some
   regions with strong senses of regional cohesiveness have become more
   aware of regional groupings of dialects.

   The idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and
   self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. The
   idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that China consists of
   several different nations, challenge the notion of a single Han Chinese
   "race," and legitimize secessionist movements. Furthermore, for some,
   suggesting that Chinese is more correctly described as multiple
   languages implies that the notion of a single Chinese language and a
   single Chinese state or nationality is artificial.

   However, the links between ethnicity, politics, and language can be
   complex. Many Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese speakers consider their own
   varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese race as one
   entity. They do not regard these two positions as contradictory, but
   consider the Han Chinese an entity of great internal diversity.
   Moreover, the government of the People's Republic of China officially
   states that China is a multinational state, and that the term "Chinese"
   refers to a broader concept Zhonghua Minzu that incorporates groups
   that do not natively speak Chinese, such as Tibetans, Uyghurs, and
   Mongols. (Groups that do speak Chinese are properly called Han Chinese,
   and are regarded as one component of a multiethnic whole.) Similarly,
   on Taiwan, some supporters of Chinese reunification promote the local
   language, while some supporters of Taiwan independence have little
   interest in the topic. Additionally, the Taiwanese identity
   incorporates Taiwanese aborigines, who are not considered Han Chinese
   because they speak Austronesian languages, predate Han Chinese
   settlement, and are culturally and genetically linked to other
   Austronesian-speaking peoples such as Polynesians.

Written Chinese

   The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is
   complex. It is compounded by the fact that spoken variations evolved
   for centuries, since at least the late Hàn Dynasty, while written
   Chinese changed much less.

   Until the 20th century, most formal Chinese writing was done in
   Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese (文言 wényán), which was very
   different from any spoken variety of Chinese, much as Classical Latin
   differs from modern Romance languages. Since the May Fourth Movement of
   1919, the formal standard for written Chinese was changed to Vernacular
   Chinese (白話/白话 báihuà), which, while not completely identical to the
   grammar and vocabulary of dialects of Mandarin, was based mostly on
   them. The term standard written Chinese now refers to Vernacular
   Chinese.

   Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus,
   although the number "one" is yi in Mandarin, yat in Cantonese and tsit
   in Hokkien (form of Min), they derive from a common ancient Chinese
   word and still share an identical character ("一"). Nevertheless, the
   orthographies of Chinese dialect groups are not completely identical,
   and their vocabularies have diverged. In addition, while literary
   vocabulary is mostly used by all dialects, colloquial vocabularies are
   often different. Colloquial non-standard written Chinese usually
   involves "dialectal characters" which may not be understood in other
   dialects or characters that are considered archaic in standard written
   Chinese.

   Cantonese is unique among non-Mandarin regional languages in having a
   written colloquial standard, used in Hong Kong and by non- Standard
   Mandarin speaking Cantonese speakers overseas, with a large number of
   unofficial characters for words particular to this variety of Chinese.
   By contrast, the other regional languages do not have such widely-used
   alternative written standards. Written colloquial Cantonese has become
   quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging, although for
   formal written communications Cantonese speakers still normally use
   standard written Chinese.

   Also, in Hunan, some women wrote their local language in Nü Shu, a
   syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language,
   considered a dialect of Mandarin, is also nowadays written in Cyrillic,
   and was formerly written in the Arabic alphabet, although the Dungan
   people live outside China.

Chinese characters

   The Chinese written language employs Chinese characters (漢字/汉字 pinyin:
   hànzì), which are logograms: each symbol represents a semanteme or
   morpheme (a meaningful unit of language), as well as one syllable; the
   written language can thus be termed a morphemo-syllabic script.

   They are not just pictographs (pictures of their meanings), but are
   highly stylized and carry much abstract meaning. Only some characters
   are derived from pictographs. In 100 AD, the famed scholar Xǚ Shèn in
   the Hàn Dynasty classified characters into 6 categories, only 4% as
   pictographs, and 82% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic
   element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that arguably
   once indicated the pronunciation.

   All modern characters are or are based on the standard script (楷书/楷書
   kǎishū) (see styles, below). There are currently two standards for
   Chinese characters. One is the traditional system, still used in Hong
   Kong, Taiwan, and Macau. The other is the simplified system adopted
   during the 1950s Chinese Cultural Revolution in Mainland China. The
   simplified system requires fewer strokes to write certain components
   and has fewer synonymous characters. Singapore, which has a large
   Chinese community, is the first and only foreign country to recognize
   and officially adopt the simplified characters.
   Various styles of Chinese calligraphy.
   Enlarge
   Various styles of Chinese calligraphy.

   Various written styles are used in Chinese calligraphy, including seal
   script (篆书/篆書 zhuànshū), cursive script (草书/草書 cǎoshū), clerical script
   (隶书/隸書 lìshū) and standard script (楷书/楷書 kǎishū, aka regular script).
   Calligraphers can write in traditional and simplified characters, but
   they tend to use traditional characters for traditional art.

   As with Latin script, a wide variety of fonts exist for printed Chinese
   characters, a great number of which are often based on the styles of
   single calligraphers or schools of calligraphy.

   There is no concrete record of the origin of Chinese characters. Legend
   suggests that Cāng Jié, a bureaucrat of the legendary emperor Huángdì
   of China about 2600 BC, invented Chinese characters. A few symbols
   exist on pottery shards from the Neolithic period in China, but whether
   or not they constitute writing or are ancestral to the Chinese writing
   system is a topic of much controversy among scholars. Archaeological
   evidence, mainly the oracle bones found in the 19- 20th centuries, at
   present only dates Chinese characters to the Shāng dynasty,
   specifically to the 14th to 11th centuries BC, although this fully
   mature script implies an earlier period of development.

   The vast majority of oracle bone inscriptions were found in the ruins
   of Yīn of the late Shāng Dynasty, although a few Zhōu dynasty-related
   ones were also found. The forms of the characters in the inscriptions
   changed slightly over the 200 to 300 years, and scholars date the
   inscriptions of the Shāng to the ruler by the content, particularly
   from the name of the diviners who inscribed the shell or bone
   artifacts.

   Contemporaneous with the late Shāng and the Western Zhōu periods are a
   number of bronze inscriptions. Over the last century, a great many
   ancient bronze artifacts have been unearthed in China which contain
   dedicational texts of the Zhōu aristocrats where the characters show
   similarities and innovations compared to the oracle bone inscriptions.
   In the period between the oracle bones and the bamboo books of the
   Warring States period, inscriptions on bronzes are the most important
   record of the written script. Note however that since this spans such a
   broad period of time, it is hardly meaningful to speak of bronzeware
   script or bronze script as a single entity.

History

   Most linguists classify all of the variations of Chinese as part of the
   Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original
   language, called Proto-Sino-Tibetan, analogous to Proto-Indo-European,
   from which the Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman languages descended. The
   relations between Chinese and other Sino-Tibetan languages are an area
   of active research, as is the attempt to reconstruct
   Proto-Sino-Tibetan. The main difficulty in this effort is that, while
   there is very good documentation that allows us to reconstruct the
   ancient sounds of Chinese, there is no written documentation of the
   division between proto-Sino-Tibetan and Chinese. In addition, many of
   the languages that would allow us to reconstruct Proto-Sino-Tibetan are
   very poorly documented or understood.

   Categorization of the development of Chinese is a subject of scholarly
   debate. One of the first systems was devised by the Swedish linguist
   Bernhard Karlgren in the early 1900s. The system was much revised, but
   always heavily relying on Karlgren's insights and methods.

   Old Chinese ( T:上古漢語 S:上古汉语 P:Shànggǔ Hànyǔ), sometimes known as
   "Archaic Chinese," was the language common during the early and middle
   Zhōu Dynasty ( 1122 BC - 256 BC), texts of which include inscriptions
   on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shījīng, the history of the
   Shūjīng, and portions of the Yìjīng (I Ching). The phonetic elements
   found in the majority of Chinese characters also provide hints to their
   Old Chinese pronunciations. The pronunciation of the borrowed Chinese
   characters in Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean also provide valuable
   insights. Old Chinese was not wholly uninflected. It possessed a rich
   sound system in which aspiration or rough breathing differentiated the
   consonants, but probably was still without tones. Work on
   reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qīng dynasty philologists.

   Middle Chinese ( T:中古漢語 S:中古汉语 P:Zhōnggǔ Hànyǔ) was the language used
   during the Suí, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (7th through 10th centuries
   AD). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the 切韻 "
   Qièyùn" rhyme table ( 601 AD), and a late period in the 10th century,
   reflected by the 廣韻 " Guǎngyùn" rhyme table. Linguists are confident of
   having reconstructed how Middle Chinese sounded. The evidence for the
   pronunciation of Middle Chinese comes from several sources: modern
   dialect variations, rhyming dictionaries, foreign transliterations,
   "rhyming tables" constructed by ancient Chinese philologists to
   summarize the phonetic system, and Chinese phonetic translations of
   foreign words. However, all reconstructions are tentative; for example,
   scholars have shown that trying to reconstruct modern Cantonese from
   the rhymes of modern Cantopop would give a very inaccurate picture of
   the language.

   The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical
   times to the present has been complex. Most northern Chinese people, in
   Sìchuān and in a broad arc from the northeast (Manchuria) to the
   southwest ( Yúnnán), use various Mandarin dialects as their home
   language. The prevalence of Mandarin throughout northern China is
   largely due to north China's plains. By contrast, the mountains and
   rivers of southern China promoted linguistic diversity. The presence of
   Mandarin in Sìchuān is largely due to a plague in the 12th century.
   This plague, which may have been related to the Black Death,
   depopulated the area, leading to later settlement from north China.

   Until the mid-20th century, most southern Chinese only spoke their
   native local variety of Chinese. However, despite the mix of officials
   and commoners speaking various Chinese dialects, Nanjing Mandarin
   became dominant at least during the officially Manchu-speaking Qīng
   Empire. Since the 17th century, the Empire had set up orthoepy
   academies ( T:正音書院 S:正音书院 P:Zhèngyīn Shūyuàn) to make pronunciation
   conform to the Qīng capital Běijīng's standard, but had little success.
   During the Qīng's last 50 years in the late 19th century, the Běijīng
   Mandarin finally replaced Nánjīng Mandarin in the imperial court. For
   the general population, although variations of Mandarin were already
   widely spoken in China then, a single standard of Mandarin did not
   exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to
   use their various regionalects for every aspect of life. The new
   Běijīng Mandarin court standard was thus fairly limited.

   This situation changed with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC,
   but not in Hong Kong) of an elementary school education system
   committed to teaching Standard Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now
   spoken by virtually all people in mainland China and on Táiwān. At the
   time of the widespread introduction of Standard Mandarin in mainland
   China and Táiwān, Hong Kong was a British colony and Standard Mandarin
   was never used. In Hong Kong, the language of education, formal speech,
   and daily life remains the local Cantonese, but Mandarin is becoming
   increasingly influential.

Influence on other languages

   Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great
   influence on unrelated languages such as Korean, Vietnamese, and
   Japanese. Korean and Japanese both have writing systems employing
   Chinese characters (Hanzi), which are called Hanja and Kanji,
   respectively.

   The Vietnamese term for Chinese writing is Hán tự. It was the only
   available method for writing Vietnamese until the 14th century, used
   almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese elites. From the 14th
   to the late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chữ nôm, a
   modified Chinese script incorporating sounds and syllables for native
   Vietnamese speakers. This is now completely replaced by a modified
   Latin script that incorporates a system of diacritical marks to
   indicate tones, as well as modified consonants. The Vietnamese language
   exhibits multiple elements similar to Cantonese in regard to the
   specific intonations and sharp consonant endings. There is also a
   slight influence from Mandarin, including the sharper vowels and "kh"
   sound missing from other Asiatic languages.

   In South Korea, the Hangul alphabet is generally used, but Hanja is
   used as a sort of boldface. (In North Korea, Hanja has been
   discontinued.) Since the modernization of Japan in the late 19th
   century, there has been debate about abandoning the use of Chinese
   characters, but the practical benefits of a radically new script have
   so far not been considered sufficient.

   In Guangxi the Zhuang also had used derived Chinese characters or
   Zhuang logograms to write songs, even though Zhuang is not a Chinese
   dialect. Since the 1950s, Zhuang is written in a modified Latin
   alphabet.

   Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very
   large number of loanwords from Chinese. 50% or more of Korean
   vocabulary is of Chinese origin and the influence on Japanese and
   Vietnamese has been considerable. 10% of Philippine language
   vocabularies are of Chinese origin. Chinese also shares a great many
   grammatical features with these and neighboring languages, notably the
   lack of gender and the use of classifiers. The Japanese, Korean, and
   Vietnamese languages seem to retain sounds of Classical Chinese that
   are otherwise only found in southern China.

Phonology

   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:
     * 媽/妈(mā) "mother" — high level
     * 麻(má) "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.
          +

Romanization

   Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin
   alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese
   languages; this is due to the complex history of interaction between
   China and the West, and to the Chinese languages' lack of phonetic
   transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been
   written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries of the
   16th century, but may have been written down by Western travelers or
   missionaries of earlier periods.

   At present, the most common romanization system for Standard Mandarin
   is Hanyu Pinyin 漢語拼音/汉语拼音, also known simply as Pinyin. Pinyin is the
   official Mandarin romanization system for the People's Republic of
   China, and the official one used in Singapore (see also Chinese
   language romanisation in Singapore). Pinyin is also very commonly used
   when teaching Mandarin in schools and universities of North America and
   Europe.

   Perhaps the second-most common system of romanization for Mandarin is
   Wade-Giles. This system was probably the most common system of
   romanization for Mandarin before Hanyu Pinyin was developed. Wade-Giles
   is often found in academic use in the U.S., and until recently was
   widely used in Taiwan (Taipei city now officially uses Hanyu Pinyin and
   the rest of the island officially uses Tōngyòng Pinyin 通用拼音/通用拼音).

   Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison:

   CAPTION: Mandarin Romanization Comparison

   Characters Wade-Giles Hanyu Pinyin Notes
   中国/中國 Chung^1-kuo² Zhōngguó "China"
   北京 Pei³-ching^1 Běijīng Capital of the People's Republic of China
   台北 T'ai²-pei³ Táiběi Capital of the Republic of China
   毛泽东/毛澤東 Mao² Tse²-tung^1 Máo Zédōng Former Communist Chinese leader
   蒋介石/蔣介石 Chiang³ Chieh^4-shih² Jiǎng Jièshí Former Nationalist Chinese
   leader
   孔子 K'ung³ Tsu³ Kǒng Zǐ "Confucius"

   Regardless of system, tone transcription is often left out, either due
   to difficulties of typesetting or propriety for audience. Wade-Giles'
   extensive use of easily-forgotten apostrophes adds to the confusion.
   Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than
   they will be with Běijīng, and with Taipei than with T'ai²-pei³.

   Regardless of romanization, the words are pronounced the same. Learning
   a system of romanization requires occasional deviations from the
   learner's own language, so, for example, Hanyu Pinyin uses "q" for very
   different values than an English speaker would probably be used to; the
   sound represented is similar to the English "ch," but pronounced
   further forward (an aspirated alveolo-palatal fricative, /tɕʰ/). This
   is a cause of confusion but is unavoidable, as Mandarin (and any
   language transcribed) will have phonemes different from those of the
   learner's own. On the other hand, this can be beneficial, since
   learners can immediately be made aware of the fact that they will have
   to learn a new pronunciation. With languages that use similar
   orthography, the temptation to pronounce words just as in one's mother
   tongue can lead to great misunderstanding.

   There are many other systems of romanization for Mandarin, as well as
   systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages.

Other transcriptions

   Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other
   writing systems over the centuries. The phagspa script, for example,
   has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciation of pre-modern
   forms of Chinese.

   Zhuyin 注音, (also know as bopomofo) is still widely used in Taiwan's
   elementary schools. A comparison table of Zhuyin to Pinyin exists in
   the Zhuyin article. Syllables based on Pinyin and Zhuyin can also be
   compared by looking at the following articles:
     * Pinyin table
     * Zhuyin table

   There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The
   most widespread is the Palladius system.

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. 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."

   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.

Loanwords

   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.
   Words borrowed from along the Silk Road in ancient times include 葡萄
   "grape," 石榴 "pomegranate" and 狮子/獅子 "lion." Some words were borrowed
   from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩萨/菩薩 "bodhisattva."
   Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 哥哥 "older
   brother" and 胡同 " hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the
   Silk Road, such as 葡萄 "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin), generally have
   Iranian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from
   Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of North India. Words
   borrowed from the nomadic peoples of the northern regions generally
   have Altaic etymologies, but from exactly which Altaic source is not
   always entirely clear.

   Foreign words continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription
   according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese
   characters with similar pronunciations; characters in this case are
   usually taken strictly for their phonetic values. For example, "Israel"
   becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè). The Chinese characters used here
   literally mean "using-colour-rank," or "ranking using colour," but the
   sense is automatically ignored because it is understood that the
   characters are used for their phonetic values only. Characters which
   are used nearly exclusively in the transcription of foreign words are
   present in Chinese; many of these characters date back to Middle
   Chinese when they were used to translate Sanskrit phonemes. For
   example, 斯 sī and 尔/爾 ěr, which are Classical Chinese words for "thus"
   and "you," are never used in their original senses (except in a limited
   number of idiomatic expressions) and more often used to transcribe the
   sounds /s/ and /l/ in foreign words. Nevertheless, this method tends to
   yield somewhat strange results, and is therefore overwhelmingly used to
   transcribe foreign names only. A rather small number of direct phonetic
   borrowings have survived as common words, including 沙發 shāfā "sofa,"
   马达/馬達 mǎdá "motor," 幽默 yōumò "humour," 逻辑/邏輯 luójí "logic," 时髦/時髦
   shímáo "smart, fashionable," 麦克风/麥克風 màikèfēng "microphone," and 歇斯底里
   xiēsīdǐlǐ "hysterics." The bulk of these words were originally coined
   in the Shanghainese dialect during the early 20th century and were
   later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin are
   quite off from the English. For example, 沙发/沙發 and 马达/馬達 in
   Shanghainese actually sound like English "sofa" and "motor."

   Today, it is much more common to use existing Chinese morphemes to coin
   new words in order to represent imported concepts, such as technical
   expressions. Any Latin or Greek etymologies are dropped, making them
   more comprehensible for Chinese but introducing more difficulties in
   understanding foreign texts. For example, the word telephone was loaned
   phonetically as 德律风/德律風 ( Shanghainese: télífon [təlɪfoŋ], Standard
   Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but
   later the Japanese 电话/電話 (diànhuà "electric speech"), built out of
   native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include
   电视/電視 (diànshì "electric vision") for television, 电脑/電腦 (diànnǎo
   "electric brain") for computer; 手机/手機 (shǒujī "hand machine") for
   cellphone, and 蓝牙/藍牙 (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. Occasionally
   half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such
   as 汉堡包/漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes
   translations are designed so that they sound like the original while
   incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as 拖拉机/拖拉機 (tuōlājī, "tractor,"
   literally "dragging-pulling machine"). This is often done for
   commercial purposes, for example 奔腾/奔騰 (bēnténg "running leaping") for
   Pentium and 赛百味/賽百味 (Sàibǎiwèi "better-than hundred tastes") for Subway
   restaurants.

   Another important source came from a related writing system, kanji,
   which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language. The
   Japanese used kanji to translate many European words in the late 19th
   century and early 20th century. These words are called wasei-kango in
   Japanese (和製漢語 literally Japanese-made Chinese), and many of these
   Japanese words were then loaned into Chinese. Examples include diànhuà
   (電話, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社会, shakai, "society"), kēxué (科學,
   kagaku, "science"), zhéxué (哲學, tetsugaku, "philosophy"), chōuxiàng
   (抽象, chūshō, "abstract"), zhǔyì (主義, shugi, "-ism" or "ideology") and
   làngmàn (浪漫, roman or rōman, French "roman"). 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, these
   include jīngjì (經濟, keizai) which in the original Chinese meant "the
   workings of the state" but in Japanese was narrowed to "economy," this
   narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. As a result,
   these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words:
   indeed, there is dispute over some of these terms as to whether the
   Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this to-and-fro
   process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese continue to share
   many terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar
   corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European
   languages.

Grammar

   In general, all spoken varieties of Chinese are isolating languages, in
   that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather
   than morphology (changes in the form of the word through inflection).
   Because they are isolating languages, they make heavy use of
   grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood.

   Chinese features Subject Verb Object word order, and like many other
   languages in East Asia, makes frequent use of the topic-comment
   construction to form sentences. Even though Chinese has no grammatical
   gender, it has an extensive system of measure words, another trait
   shared with neighbouring (but not related) languages like Japanese and
   Korean. See Chinese measure words for an extensive coverage of this
   subject.

   Other notable grammatical features common to all the spoken varieties
   of Chinese include the use of serial verb construction, pronoun
   dropping (and the related subject dropping), and the use of aspect
   rather than tense.

   Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they
   do possess various differences. See Chinese grammar for the grammar of
   Standard Mandarin (the standardized Chinese spoken language), and the
   articles on other varieties of Chinese for their respective grammars.

Learning Chinese

   Learning Mandarin Chinese is increasingly becoming popular in the
   Western world. While about ten years back in the West, it was hard to
   find anyone learning the world's most spoken language, now many schools
   are teaching Chinese.

Number of learners

   In 1991 there were 2,000 people taking China's official Chinese
   Proficiency Test (comparable to English's Cambridge Certificate), while
   in 2005 117,660 candidates took it. China's Ministry of Education
   estimates the worldwide learners to be 30 million people counted in
   universities, community colleges, training courses and taking tuitions.
   l

Methods of learning

   The existence of Hanyu Pinyin and the fact that it has become the
   standard for foreign learners has made it vastly easier for non-Chinese
   to begin to learn the language.
     * The first step in many Chinese classes is to teach students how to
       use Pinyin (how to read and pronounce it).
     * Listening to a native speaker pronouncing Chinese will help a lot.
       Later, it will not take too much effort, since pronunciation is
       always regular.
     * Characters are generally the most difficult aspect facing new
       learners, taking most of their time.
     * In compensation, Chinese grammar is considerably easier than that
       of many other languages.

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