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March 8, 2014 |
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Image:Y-NL400b.gif|right|thumb|300px|Spoken Chinese The Chinese spoken language(s) comprise(s) many regional variants. Although the English word dialect is often used to translate the Chinese term fangyan, the differences between the major spoken variations of Chinese language|Chinese are such that they are mutually unintelligible. See Chinese language#Is Chinese a language or a family of languages?|Is Chinese a language or a family of languages? for the debate on whether the variations of spoken Chinese should be considered "dialects" or "languages". Chinese makes a very strong distinction between written language (文 w?n) and spoken language (语語 yǔ), and Chinese tend to conceptualize the variations of Chinese as different spoken languages sharing a common written standard and literary and cultural tradition. Within Chinese, there is a collective term for the Chinese written language (中文 zhōngw?n), while there is no collective term that encompasses all of the variations of the spoken language. Terms used to describe spoken Chinese, such as 汉语 h?nyǔ or 国语 gu?yǔ refer only to one specific variation of spoken Chinese. When forced to conceptualize these variations in terms of language and dialect common in the West, most Chinese do not think of these variations as separate languages because they share a common written standard and literary and cultural tradition, and perhaps just as importantly, is the basis for a single political identity. However, the linguistic distance between different Chinese dialects is often much greater than forms of speech which in other parts of the world would unquestionably be considered distinct languages. Linguists divide the variations in spoken Chinese language into seven to ten groups. However, because two people are speaking dialects within the same category does not mean that they can necessarily completely understand each other. The converse is also true in that the two people speaking dialects in different groups can sometimes understand each other. The general situation is one of dialect continuum where one can understand perfectly people speaking the local dialect and that the intelligibility decreases as the speaker comes from more and more distant regions. This results in the common situation where A can understand B, B can understand C, but A cannot understand C. The linguistic diversity is particularly pronounced in southern variations such as Min in which two towns which are five kilometers from each other can speak completely unintelligible types of speech. By contrast, in northern China, there are areas of several hundred kilometers apart which have intelligible forms of Mandarin (linguistics)|Mandarin. In addition, the categories that speakers use to self-classify the variety they are speaking may not correspond at all to a classification based strictly on linguistic features. For example, two speakers of Cantonese from different cities (say Taishan and Hong Kong) tend to think of themselves as speaking the same dialect, whereas speaker of Wu from Hangzhou and one from Shanghai would tend to think of themselves as speaking the different dialects. Furthermore, a person speaking Sichuanese or Hunanese will think of themselves as speaking a variety of Chinese that is distinct from the national standard Putonghua, notwithstanding the fact that linguists place these forms of Chinese in the same linguistic category. The various forms of Spoken Chinese are usually classfied into the following broad groups. (See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of individual dialects.)
(The following three dialect groups are not always classified separately.)
Some varieties remain unclassified. These include:
In addition, the Dungan language (東干語/东干语) is a language descended from Chinese spoken in Kyrgyzstan, and is akin to northwestern dialects of Mandarin (linguistics)|Mandarin. However, it is written in the Cyrillic alphabet and may not be considered by all to be part of spoken Chinese. In southern China where the difference between Standard Mandarin and the local dialect is particularly pronounced, well-educated Chinese are generally fluent in Mandarin, and most people have at least a good passive knowledge of it, in addition to being native speakers of the local dialect. The choice of dialect varies based on the social situation. Standard Mandarin is usually considered more formal and is required when speaking to a person who does not understand the local dialect. The local dialect (be it nonstandard Mandarin or non-Mandarin altogether) is generally considered more intimate and is used among close family members and friends and in everyday conversation within the local area. Chinese speakers will frequently code switch between Standard Mandarin and the local dialect. Parents will generally speak to their children in dialect, and the relationship between dialect and Mandarin appears to be mostly stable. Knowing the local dialect is of considerable social benefit and most Chinese who permanently move to a new area will attempt to pick up the local dialect. Learning a new dialect is usually done informally through a process of immersion and recognizing sound shifts. Typically, a speaker of one dialect of Chinese will need about a year of immersion to understand the local dialect and about three to five years to become fluent in speaking it. Because of the variety of dialects spoken, there are usually few formal methods for learning a local dialect. Within the People's Republic of China there has been a consistent drive towards promoting the standard language; for instance, the education system is entirely Mandarin-medium from the second year onwards. However, usage of local dialect is tolerated, and in many informal situations, socially preferred. Unlike Hong Kong, where colloquial Cantonese characters are often used for formal occasions, within the PRC a character set closer to Mandarin tends to be used. At the national level, differences in dialect generally do not correspond to political divisions or categories, and this has for the most part prevented dialect from becoming the basis of identity politics. Historically, many of the people who promoted Chinese nationalism were from southern China and did not natively speak the national standard language. One example of this is Mao Zedong often emphasized his Hunan origins in speaking, rendering much of what he said incomprehensible to many Chinese. One consequence of this is China does not have a well developed traditional of spoken political rhetoric and most Chinese political works are intended primarily as written works rather than spoken works. Another factor that limits the political implications of dialect is that it is very common within an extended family for different people to know and use different dialects. In addition, while speaking similar dialect provides very strong group identity at the level of a city or county, the high degree of linguistic diversity limits the amount of group solidarity at larger levels. Finally, the linguistic diversity of southern China makes it likely that in any large group of Chinese, that Standard Mandarin will be the only form of speech that everyone understands. On the other hand, in the Republic of China on Taiwan, the government had a policy until the mid-1980s of promoting Standard Mandarin as high status and the local languages—Taiwanese language|Taiwanese and Hakka (linguistics)|Hakka—as low status, a situation which caused a great deal of resentment and has produced somewhat of a backlash in the 1990s as part of the Taiwanese localization movement. The Min (linguistics)|Min dialects are often regarded as the dialects furthest removed from Standard Mandarin, in phonology, grammar, and vocabulary. To illustrate: in Taiwanese (linguistics)|Taiwanese, a variety of Min, to express the idea that one is feeling a little ill, one might say
which, when translated cognate-by-cognate into Mandarin would be something like:
An awkward sentence, if not simply non-productive. A little more colloquially it would be:
A little better would be:
which removes the reflexive pronoun (z?jǐ), not usually needed in Mandarin. Instead, some people, particularly in the north of China, would say:
Chinese_language Category:Chinese language Category:Tonal languages he:שפות סיניות This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Chinese spoken language".
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