 |
Serving
Students at
Santa Ana
College and
Santiago
Canyon College
CHINA
Language
|
Languages:
Standard
Chinese or Mandarin (Putonghua, based on the Beijing dialect), Yue (Cantonese),
Wu (Shanghaiese), Minbei (Fuzhou), Minnan (Hokkien-Taiwanese), Xiang, Gan,
Hakka dialects, minority languages (see Ethnic groups entry)
The official
language is Mandarin Chinese (or Putonghua), the predominant dialect; it
is spoken by more than 70 percent of the population. It is taught
in all schools and is the medium of government. Each of the 55 officially
recognized minorities speak its own dialect or language. About two-thirds
of the Han ethnic group are native speakers of Mandarin; the rest, concentrated
in southwest and southeast China, speak one of the six other major Chinese
dialects. Among the enormous number of local dialects, in the
south, large groups speak Cantonese, Fukienese, Xiamenhua, Hakka, Wu, and
Kejia. Non-Chinese languages spoken widely by ethnic minorities include
Mongolian, Tibetan, Uygur and other Turkic languages (in Xinjiang), and
Korean (in the northeast). Translation and interpreter services
are good. English is spoken by many guides and business persons.
Mandarin
speakers are able to communicate with over 20% of the world's population.
Today a standardized Mandarin known as Putonghua (literally 'the common
language'), is the official language of government and education, and everyone
in China is taught to speak it. It is essentially the same dialect
that is spoken in Taiwan. The system of writing Chinese in the western
alphabet ('romanisation') called pinyin was officially adopted by mainland
China in 1958.
Although
spoken Chinese has many dialects (some as different as a foreign language)
there is one common written language. Though a Cantonese speaker
listening to a Mandarin speaker may not understand anything that is said,
he or she could read the most complex and technical of speeches and understand
everything. For this reason, many Chinese movies have Chinese subtitles.
In total
there are over 45,000 Chinese characters; however, a vocabulary of 4,000
would be
good,
and a vocabulary of 9,000 unlikely in anyone without a university degree.
In a bid to increase literacy in China, the government has simplified many
elements of Chinese characters,
making
them far easier to memorize. Literacy in China is now at 80% of the
adult population,
compared
to say India at 50%. This is not a small achievement given
the complexity of the written form of the language, and the low base level
of literacy in 1949 at the end of the civil war.
If the
written form of the language is complex, the spoken variations are just
as staggering.
There
are eight major language groups with some 600 dialects - all sharing the
same written
form.
There are a further 136 non-Chinese languages spoken in China. All
Chinese languages use tones to distinguish different words.
Mandarin,
which is spoken in the Beijing region and in northern China generally,
has four
common
tones. Cantonese, spoken in southeastern China, has nine tones and
is quite different
from
Mandarin. A simple word such as 'ma' can have a variety of meaning
depending on which tone is used - meaning anything from mother to horse.
The closest English speakers get to varying the meaning of a word using
tones is interrogative words such as 'what?' which can
mean
anything from literally 'what' to an expression of disbelief 'What!' or
a dismissive word
which
really means 'go away'. The concept is far more complex in Chinese,
and the difference in meaning can be extreme - and tones are used for every
single word. 'Mai' can mean buy or sell depending on the tone!
For all
its complexity, the Chinese language has one saving grace - its grammar
is fairly straight
forward.
Word order for English speakers is not unusual. All verbs are regular,
and there are no tenses in the sense of English verbs changing from the
present (going) to the past (went) and
the future
(will go). There is no definite or indefinite article ('the' or 'a')
no plurals or irregular
adjectives.
In English big bigger biggest does not correspond to good better best,
but in
Chinese,
such words are always regular.
Links
for More Information
Language
Matters
.
Sources:
U.
S. Department of State
The
Bureau of Consular Affairs
Central
Intelligence Agency |
