Sinitic Languages

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Sinitic languages, collectively referred to as Chinese, are spoken by over 1.3 billion people worldwide. The vast majority of Sinitic language speakers (nearly 1.3 billion) are found in the People's Republic of China and Taiwan, but approximately 60 million speakers are located in Southeast Asia, North America, Europe, and elsewhere. Although Sinitic languages are commonly known as "Chinese dialects," many linguists prefer to use the term "languages" because Chinese "dialects" are often not mutually comprehensible. The Sinitic languages have frequently been compared to the Romance languages in terms of their diversity.

The Sinitic languages are usually classified as belonging to the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. However, some scholars have proposed that Chinese is genetically related to other language families such as Tai, Hmong-Mien, and Austronesian. Although Chinese clearly shares some vocabulary with neighboring languages, it is not clear whether the earliest strata of this vocabulary are inherited (which would be evidence for genetic relationship) or borrowed.

Chinese is first attested in inscriptions from around the fourteenth century BCE onward during the Shang dynasty (1766–1045 BCE). Shang-dynasty Chinese developed into Old Chinese, the language of the Zhou dynasty (1045–256 BCE) and of the poetic anthology Shijng (Book of Odes; c. sixth century BCE). The next major stage of Chinese was Middle Chinese, the language of the Sui (581–618 CE) and Tang (618–907 CE) dynasties recorded in Lu Fayan's Qieyun rhyme dictionary (601 CE). These early stages of Chinese exerted considerable influence on neighboring languages. Middle Chinese in particular was a source of many loanwords in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. The Min languages apparently split off from the rest of Chinese sometime prior to the Middle Chinese period. All other Sinitic languages with the exception of Min are frequently regarded as descendants of Middle Chinese, though the actual situation may be more complex. The last major premodern stage of Chinese is Old Mandarin, the language recorded in Zhou Deqing's Zhongyuan yinyun rhyme dictionary (1324 CE). With the exception of fragmentary evidence, non-Mandarin Sinitic languages have only been attested in written form during the last few centuries, largely due to the efforts of missionaries and linguists.

The Sinitic languages can be divided into three large geographical groups. The first and most important of these is the Mandarin or northern group of dialects spoken natively by the majority of Chinese (885 million first-language speakers north of the Chang (Yangtze) river, in southwestern China, and in Taiwan). The official languages of the People's Republic of China and Taiwan are based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. Standard Mandarin is widely spoken as a second language in both countries.

The conservative Jin dialects (45 million speakers in Shanxi and Shaanxi and Henan Provinces) were once considered to be northwestern varieties of Mandarin but are now often classified separately.

The central languages are transitional between the northern and southern groups. Wu dialects (77 million speakers in Zhejiang Province and in Jiangsu Province south of the Chang River) such as Shanghaiese are notable for their extensive tone sandhi (changing the tone of a syllable depending on context). The Xiang (36 million speakers mostly in Hunan province) dialects are heavily influenced by Mandarin. The relatively little known Gan (20 million speakers mostly in Jiangxi Province) dialects were once classified together with Kejia but Gan-Kejia unity has fallen into disfavor among linguists.

The southern languages are often conservative due to their relative isolation from the influence of northern standard languages throughout Chinese history. Yue or Cantonese (66 million speakers mostly in Guangdong and Guangxi Provinces and in Hong Kong) is the best known of these languages. Kejia (34 million speakers) dialects are spoken by the Kejia, or Hakka, a Chinese group of probable northern origin that settled in several southern provinces including Guangdong. The Min dialects (59 million speakers mostly in Fujian, eastern Guangdong, and Taiwan) are highly conservative and heterogenous. The most famous Min dialect is Taiwanese, the native language of 14 million Taiwanese. Taiwanese and other southern Min dialects, like Wu dialects, have complex tone sandhi.

Southern Sinitic languages are widely spoken outside the People's Republic of China and Taiwan. Most of these speakers are in Southeast Asia, though Sinitic speakers can be found almost anywhere in the world. The most important overseas Chinese languages are Cantonese (19 million abroad), Min (particularly the Fujian (Hokkien) and Chaozhou (Teochew) dialects; 5 million abroad), and Hakka (5 million abroad).

Some linguists consider the Bai language (900,000 speakers in Yunnan Province) to be a Sinitic language while others classify it as Tibeto-Burman. Its genetic classification remains controversial though it clearly shares much vocabulary with Chinese.

Chinese characters (hanzi) have been in continuous use since around the fourteenth century BCE. Hanzi are popularly believed to be an "ideographic" writing system comprised of pictures representing ideas. However, hanzi actually constitute a "morphosyllabic," rather than an ideographic, writing system. The majority of hanzi consist of "phonetics" indicating sounds and "radicals" hinting at meanings. Each hanzi represents a morpheme (a minimal unit of meaning: i.e., a root or affix) that is one syllable long. A Chinese word may consist of one or more morphemes and must be written with hanzi designating those specific morphemes.

Some Sinitic languages, such as Yue, have hanzi for words not in the standard language. Chinese is almost always written with hanzi; marginal exceptions utilize pinyin (a system of transliteration into the Roman alphabet) and indigenous Zhuyin zimu ("phonetic letters") alphabets. Official People's Republic of China data claim a literacy rate of 93 percent, though other estimates put it much lower. The literacy rate is Taiwan is approximately 92 percent.

The following description primarily applies to standard Mandarin, though other Sinitic languages share these traits as well.

Most Chinese morphemes are one syllable long and all syllables are pronounced with a distinctive pitch ("tone"). Syllables that differ only tonally may have completely different meanings. Standard Mandarin has four tones: ma means "mother" with a high level tone, "hemp" with a high rising tone, "horse" with a low rising tone, and "scold" with a high falling tone. Other Sinitic languages have many more tones, e.g., Cantonese has nine tones. New words are formed via the reduplication of syllables, the addition of suffixes (or, less frequently, prefixes), and the compounding of morphemes.

Unlike most European languages, Chinese has no articles (i.e., equivalents of "the" or "a, an"), no grammatical gender (though a gender distinction in the third person pronoun is made in the written standard language), and no noun declensions or verb conjugations. Number (singular/plural) is only obligatory for pronouns and optional for nouns referring to people. Counted nouns are accompanied by "classifiers": e.g., the classifier ge ("piece") in Mandarin yi ge ren ("one piece person"). Suffixes mark verbs (which include predicate adjectives) for aspect (completion or noncompletion of a situation or action) rather than tense (past, present, or future). "Coverbs" function like prepositions but can be negated like verbs.

The basic word order patterns are topic-comment, subject-verb-object (though Mandarin also has subject-object-verb structures), and modifier-modified. Case is marked by word order and coverbs.

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Chen, Ping. (1999) Modern Chinese: History and Sociolinguistics. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

DeFrancis, John. (1984) The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press.

Grimes, Barbara F., ed. (2000) Ethnologue. Retrieved 14 January 2002, from: http://www.sil.org/ethnologue.

Norman, Jerry. (1988) Chinese. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Ramsey, S. Robert. (1987) The Languages of China. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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