Varieties Of Chinese - Wikipedia

At the end of the 2nd millennium BC, a form of Chinese was spoken in a compact area along the lower Wei River and middle Yellow River. Use of this language expanded eastwards across the North China Plain into Shandong, and then southwards into the Yangtze River valley and the hills of south China. Chinese eventually replaced many of the languages previously dominant in these areas, and forms of the language spoken in different regions began to diverge.[7] During periods of political unity there was a tendency for states to promote the use of a standard language across the territory they controlled, in order to facilitate communication between people from different regions.[8]

The first evidence of dialectal variation is found in the texts of the Spring and Autumn period (771–476 BC). Although the Zhou royal domain was no longer politically powerful, its speech still represented a model for communication across China.[7] The Fangyan (early 1st century AD) is devoted to differences in vocabulary between regions.[9] Commentaries from the Eastern Han (25–220 AD) provide significant evidence of local differences in pronunciation. The Qieyun, a rime dictionary published in 601, noted wide variations in pronunciation between regions, and was created with the goal of defining a standard system of pronunciation for reading the classics.[10] This standard is known as Middle Chinese, and is believed to be a diasystem, based on a compromise between the reading traditions of the northern and southern capitals.[11]

The North China Plain provided few barriers to migration, which resulted in relative linguistic homogeneity over a wide area. Contrastingly, the mountains and rivers of southern China contain all six of the other major Chinese dialect groups, with each in turn featuring great internal diversity, particularly in Fujian.[12][13]

Standard Chinese

edit Main article: Standard Chinese

Until the mid-20th century, most Chinese people spoke only their local language. As a practical measure, officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using a common language based on Mandarin varieties, known as Guānhuà (官話/官话 'officer speech'). While never formally defined, knowledge of this language was essential for a career in the imperial bureaucracy.[14]

In the early years of the Republic of China, Literary Chinese was replaced as the written standard by written vernacular Chinese, which was based on northern varieties. In the 1930s, a standard national language was adopted that had pronunciation based on the Beijing dialect, but vocabulary drawn from a range of Mandarin varieties, and grammar based on literature in the modern written vernacular.[15] Standard Chinese is the official spoken language of the People's Republic of China and Taiwan, and is one of the four official languages of Singapore.[16] It has become a pluricentric language, with differences in pronunciation and vocabulary between the three forms.[17][18]

Standard Chinese is much more widely studied than any other variety of Chinese, and its use is now dominant in public life on the mainland.[19] Outside of China and Taiwan, the only varieties of Chinese commonly taught in university courses are Standard Chinese and Cantonese.[20]

Comparison with Romance languages

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Local varieties from different areas of China are often mutually unintelligible, differing at least as much as different Romance languages and perhaps even as much as Indo-European languages as a whole.[21][22] As with the Romance languages descended from Latin, the ancestral language was spread by imperial expansion over substrate languages around 2000 years ago, by the Qin and Han empires in China and the Roman Empire in Europe. Medieval Latin remained the standard for scholarly and administrative writing in Western Europe for centuries, influencing local varieties much like Literary Chinese did in China. In both cases, local forms of speech diverged from both the literary standard and each other, producing dialect continua with mutually unintelligible varieties separated by long distances.[20][23]

However, a major difference between China and Western Europe is the historical reestablishment of political unity in 6th century China by the Sui dynasty, a unity that has persisted with relatively brief interludes until the present day. Meanwhile, Europe remained politically decentralized, developing into numerous independent states. Vernacular writing using the Latin alphabet supplanted Latin itself, and states eventually developed their own standard languages. In China, Literary Chinese was predominantly used in formal writing until the early 20th century. Written Chinese, read with different local pronunciations, continued to serve as a source of vocabulary for the local varieties. The new standard written vernacular Chinese, the counterpart of spoken Standard Chinese, is similarly used as a literary form by speakers of all varieties.[24][25]