Chinese Language Origins

Categorization of the development of Chinese is subject to scholarly debate. One of the first systems was devised by the Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren; what follows is a modern revision of his system.

Old Chinese, sometimes known as 'Archaic Chinese', was the language common during the early and middle Zhou Dynasty (11th to 7th centuries B.C.), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shijing, the history of the Shujing, and portions of the Yijing (I Ching). Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qing dynasty philologists. The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters also provide hints to their Old Chinese pronunciations. Old Chinese was not wholly uninflected. It possessed a rich sound system in which aspiration or rough breathing differentiated the consonants.

Middle Chinese was the language used during the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties (7th through 10th centuries A.D.). It can be divided into an early period, to which the 切韻 'Qieyun' rhyme table (A.D. 601) relates, and a late period in the 10th, which the 廣韻 'Guangyun' rhyme table reflects. Bernhard Karlgren called this phase 'Ancient Chinese'. Linguists are confident in having a good reconstruction of how Middle Chinese sounded. The evidence for the pronunciation of Middle Chinese comes from several sources: modern dialect variations, rhyming dictionaries, and foreign transliterations. Just as Proto-Indo-European can be reconstructed from modern Indo-European languages, so can Middle Chinese be reconstructed from modern dialects. In addition, ancient Chinese philologists devoted a great amount of effort in summarizing the Chinese phonetic system through "rhyming tables", and these tables serve as a basis for the work of modern linguists. Finally, Chinese phonetic translations of foreign words also provide plenty of clues about the nature of Middle Chinese phonetics. However, all reconstruction is tentative; scholars have shown, for example, that trying to reconstruct modern Cantonese from the rhymes of modern Cantopop would give a very inaccurate picture of the language.

The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. The language tree shown here shows how the present main divisions of the Chinese language developed out of an early common language. Comparison with the map above will give some idea of the complexities that have been left out of the tree. For instance, the Min language that is centered in Fujian Province contains five subdivisions, and the so-called northern language (which is called Mandarin in the West), also contains named subdivisions, such as Yunnan hua and Sichuan hua.

Chinese language treeMost Chinese living in northern China, in Sichuan, and, actually, in a broad arc from the northeast (Manchuria) to the southwest (Yunnan), use various Mandarin dialects as their home language. (See the three regions colored yellow and brown in the map above.) The prevalence of Mandarin throughout northern China is largely the result of geography, namely the plains of north China. By contrast, the mountains and rivers of southern China have promoted linguistic diversity. The presence of Mandarin in Sichuan is largely due to a plague in the 12th century. This plague, which may have been related to the Black Death, depopulated the area, leading to later settlement from north China.

Until the mid-20th century, most Chinese living in southern China did not speak any Mandarin. However, despite the mix of officials and commoners speaking various Chinese dialects, Beijingese Mandarin became dominant at least during the officially Manchu-speaking Qing Empire. Since the 17th century, the Empire had set up Orthoepy Academies (正音書院 Zhengyin Shuyuan) in an attempt to make pronunciation conform to the Beijing standard, but these attempts had little success.

This situation changed with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC) of an elementary school education system committed to teaching Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken fluently by most people in Mainland China and in Taiwan. In Hong Kong, the language of education and formal speech remains Cantonese, but Mandarin is becoming increasingly influential.

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