China has a variety of languages. The official language of modern China is putonghua, which is the standard language based on the Beijing dialect. It is also known as Mandarin. It is now taught in most schools and is the media language. People speak regional dialects in everyday situations. The majority of people speak languages and dialects from the Sino-Tibetan Family's Chinese branch. The Chinese are all pitched.
The northern Chinese variety, also called Mandarin, is spoken as a first language by more than three-quarters of the population over a vast area stretching east and west across northern China from coastal areas of Shandong to Sichuan in the interior, south to the Yangzi River and north to Dongbei. They are mostly mutually intelligible, given slight tone, pronunciation, idiom and vocabulary adjustments.
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Most linguists divide Mandarin into four subgroups: Northern Mandarin, which is spoken in the northeast, the Shandong Peninsula, and the large area around Beijing; Northwest Mandarin from the loess plateau; Mandarin Southwest Sichuan and surrounding areas; and Eastern or Lower Yangzi Mandarin, which is symbolized by the dialect around Nanjing. South of the Yangzi, the Chinese language is more diverse and not mutually intelligible with each other or with regional forms of Mandarin.
The latter include the Wu dialect, spoken in the area around Shanghai; the Gan dialect in Jiangxi; the Xiang dialect in Hunan; the Yue dialect in Guangdong and Guangxi; the Min Fujian dialect and the southern coast of China; and Hakka, which has a discontinuous distribution from southeast China to Sichuan (Ramsey 1987, 87ff).
Although their spoken language differs, literate people have the same writing system. Ideographs in Chinese convey meaning rather than fixed pronunciation. Each of the thousands of standard ideographs consists of one or more configurations known as radicals. There are 214 radicals; most ideographs use two or three combinations, which signify sound, meaning, or a combination of both to the reader. Min and Yue's writings include some unique ideographs that are unknown elsewhere.
The most frequently used ideographs have been simplified since the 1950s. The new forms are commonly used in newspapers and other publications, including school texts. As a result, young people need help with reading material published before the 1950s. A standard romanization system, known as pinyin, was also introduced in the 1950s.
Except for the Hui and She, the first languages of minority communities belong to a language family other than Chinese. In everyday life, they may also speak the Chinese dialect and have some familiarity with neighbouring minority languages. In northern China, almost all minority languages belong to the Altai Family, which includes Mongolian, Turkic, and Tungus. Through migration and historical contacts, the languages of some of these groups became rich in loanwords from Chinese and Tibetan as well as from Persian, Indian, Semitic, and Slavic.
Most of China's 5,314,000 Mongolian speakers are in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Other groups live further northeast or in Qinghai, Gansu, and even Yunnan. Apart from Mongolian (Khalkha dialect), there are at least five other languages in the Mongolian Altai Branch. It is associated with small minority groups: Daur (Dagur), Dongxiang (Santa), Bonan (Bao'an), Monguor, and Yugur. The latter group is culturally related to the Turkic-speaking Uigur minority.
The Mongolian script, which is still used today, was borrowed from the Uigurs in the twelfth century. It has twenty-four basic alphabetic symbols, which take on variant forms depending on the position of the symbols in words. Despite some problems with it, the script is more suited to monosyllabic and inflectional languages than Chinese ideographs. Mongolian is very different from Chinese, although there is some borrowing of vocabulary: it has no tone, and its grammatical structure is more similar to Korean or Japanese than Chinese.
Most Turkic speakers, the Altai West Branch, are located in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and the western republics of the former Soviet Union. They include Kazaks, Uigurs, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, and Tatars. During the Republican period (1911-1949), all Turkic speakers in China were referred to as "Tatars", but there were actually fewer than 5,000 Chinese Tatars; they lived in Xinjiang, near the Soviet border.
More than one million Kazak speakers in China, along the Mongolian and former Soviet borders, speak a language closely related to Tatar. The Kyrgyz, found in western Xinjiang, have 142,000 speakers and are closely related to Tatars and Kazaks. China also has a small population of 14,000 Uzbek speakers, but most of these Turkic speakers live in Uzbekistan. The Uigurs, who number more than 7 million, are the dominant Turkic-speaking group in China.
Their language is relatively unified because of the complex commercial relationships across the region and the long history of alphabetic writing systems. A rich literature of poetry and writings on Buddhist and Nestorian teachings exists in the old Uigur script, which may be of Semitic origin. An Arabic script replaced it in the thirteenth century when Uighurs converted to Islam.
The eastern branch of the Altaic is the Tungus language. The largest of this group was the Manchus. Most of the 9 million Manchus were highly Sinicized; most were either unilingual in Chinese or used Chinese as their first language. But in recent years, there has been a Manchu ethnic revival and a revival of the language in both spoken and written form. Much literature in Manchu uses a modified version of the Mongolian script; most are translations of Chinese writings. Some small groups (Ewenki, Oroquen, Hezhen) are Tungus speakers.
Minority languages in the south and southwest were previously grouped with Chinese in the Sino-Tibetan Language Family, and linguists no longer agree that this is true. Many of the spoken languages in the region are of proto-Tai origin, and these are now placed separately in their own families. In the People's Republic of China, this family is known as Zhuang-Dong, which is divided into three branches. Everything is a tone language.
The largest branch is Zhuang-Dai. Zhuang is spoken in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, which covers the western two-thirds of Guangxi Province, and by related populations in the adjacent regions of Guizhou and Yunnan. Potentially, it has over 15.5 million speakers. However, as was the case with the Manchus, Zhuang had been assimilated into Chinese culture over the centuries.
Almost all can speak the local Chinese dialect in their area, and many ethnic Zhuang can only speak it until recently. Since the early 1950s, the Zhuang ethnicity has strengthened with encouragement from the state. The language has been revived and is more commonly used in everyday life, a process facilitated by the introduction of the standard pinyin writing system for the main northern Zhuang dialect and the use of the language in publications, radio broadcasts, and film dubbing.
It is recognized as one of the main official languages of China. Neighboring Bouyei, even more Sinicized than Zhuang, was encouraged to use what the state recognized as their language, although some linguists felt it should be classed as a variant of the northern Zhuang dialect (Ramsey 1987, 243).
Dai is the Dai language in southwest Yunnan. They are culturally and linguistically similar to the Thais of northern Thailand, although divided by dialect variation internally and across national borders. Their writing system uses a variant of the Thai script, and until recently, literacy was limited to males, all of whom were expected to spend several years studying at local Buddhist monasteries. There are at least one million Dai speakers.
The second branch, called Kam-Sui, is less well known and is the northernmost and easternmost extension of the Tai language, found in the area where Hunan, Guizhou, and Guangxi intersect. Kam (also known as Dong in Chinese) has approximately 2.5 million speakers. It is distinguished by having the most complex tone system of any language in China, with fifteen tones: other Tai languages and some southern Chinese languages, such as Hokkien and Cantonese, have eight, while Mandarin has only four.
The Sui language is associated with small groups in the area, such as the Mulam and Maonan. Most of these people are bilingual in Chinese or Zhuang. The third branch is Li, which is spoken by groups in Hainan. Although it is treated as a single language by the state, it is actually a grouping of at least five distinct Tai languages,
Another large segment of China's southern and southwestern minorities are speakers of languages belonging to the Miao-Yao Family. These were also previously classified with Chinese, perhaps because they are tone languages and show both ancient and modern borrowings from Chinese. Still, linguists now see them as more Southeast Asian, closer to Tai. Yao, an ethnic category, includes some Miao or Kam speakers.
It is estimated that no more than 44 percent of China's 2 million ethnic Yao speak the Mien language, as the native language is called in China and Southeast Asia. Mien shares features with Miao and Cantonese, and Hakka. The Miao language is found among the 7 million Miao in China and the Hmong people of Southeast Asia.
The Miao languages are classified into three broad groups, each containing many "dialects" that roughly coincide with striking cultural differences and geographic distributions across Guizhou and Yunnan and north into Sichuan. Across and within the three big groups, they usually don't understand each other. Syntaxically, Miao is also more similar to Tai than Chinese but contains many ancient and recent borrowed words from Chinese and loan translations of Chinese idioms.
The Mon-Khmer languages, another separate family, are found along the southwestern border of Yunnan among peoples such as Benglong, Blang, and Wa (Va). They are a segment of a much larger population in Myanmar (Burma). Chinese much less influence these languages.
The remainder of southwestern Chinese is classified as Tibeto-Burman. The majority is a tone language. The PRC recognizes sixteen languages in this family, divided among four branches. The most famous foreign scholar is the Tibetan Branch (also known as Bodish), which includes Moinba and Jiarong speakers of the Qiang minority nationality and about 4.5 million ethnic Tibetans.
Overall, the Yi Branch (also known as Loloish) is the largest branch, which shows more affinity with Burmese than with Tibetans. It includes some dialects or languages spoken by the 6.5 million ethnic Yi, who are spread over the mountainous regions of Sichuan, northern Yunnan, and western Guizhou. In addition, it includes closely related languages of several other minority countries. These are Lisu, Lahu, Jino, Hani, and Naxi, all located in Yunnan. Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos also have Lisu, Lahu, and Hani (Akha). Except for the Naxi, they were hill and mountain people.
Both the Tibetan language and the Yi Branch produced the original writing systems still in use. The Tibetan script, based on the Indian model, appeared sometime in the seventh century. The Yi syllable script may be a thousand years old, but it is closely related to religion and divination and is flexible enough to be used in other writings. Naxi designed a pictographic script, very different from the Chinese ideograph, as well as a syllabic script influenced by Tibetan and Yi scripts. However, literacy is limited to a relatively small group.
On the territory of China, there are two smaller Tibeto-Burman branches. The Jingpo branch is more commonly found in Myanmar among the people known as the Kachin. It is of interest to linguists because of its association with Burmese, Tibetan, and Loloish. Dulong (Drung) belongs to this branch. Lastly, there is Qiang, a category that has two "dialects" that are incomprehensible to each other.
Several spoken languages in China have not been conclusively classified: Gelao, which appears to be distantly related to Tai; Tujia, Nu and Achang, sometimes stationed in Tibeto-Burman; and Bai, which remains in trouble. Chinese linguists group it with Loloish, while some others argue that it is an ancient branch of the Sinitic (Ramsey 1987, 288-291).