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Spoken Chinese Language

Chinese makes a very strong distinction between written language (wen) and spoken language (yu), 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 (zhong wen), while there is no collective term that encompasses all of the variations of the spoken language. Terms used to describe spoken Chinese, such as han yu or guo yu 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, if one considers spoken language to be the fundamental form for classification of a language and if the standard of intelligibility is the primary distinction used to divide languages, the major varieties of Chinese would be classified as separate 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 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.

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.

Linguistic classification of spoken Chinese

  • Mandarin 北方話/北方话: This is the mother dialect of Chinese living in northern and southwestern China. It is the basis for the official spoken language of Chinese which is called 普通話/普通话 Putonghua in the People's Republic of China and 國語/国语 Guoyu in the Republic of China (Taiwan).

    One distinctive feature of Mandarin is the partial loss of tones in comparison to Middle Chinese and the other dialects. Another is the loss of consonants on the ends of syllables, so that while Middle Chinese had an inventory of "-p, -t, -k, -m, -n, ng", Mandarin only has "-n, -ng". (A few dialects, such as that of Nanjing, also have /-?/, the glottal stop.) In addition, Mandarin underwent fewer tone splits than the other dialects. As a result, many words which sound different in dialects such as Cantonese are homophones in Mandarin. Mandarin has adjusted by developing compound words in order to make up for the development of homophones. The use of compounds is less frequent in other dialects. Wu 吳語/吴语: spoken in the provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Wu includes Shanghainese. Wu dialect is notable among Chinese dialects in having kept voiced consonants, such as /b/, /d/, /g/, /z/, /v/, etc. (These may in fact be better described as voiceless consonants that create a voiced breathy element across the syllable: i.e. /p\/, /t\/, etc.) Hakka/Kejia 客家話/客家话: spoken by the Hakka people in several provinces across southern China. Despite being a southern dialect, Hakka was the result of northern immigration. The term "Hakka" itself translates as "guest families". Hakka is has kept many features of northern Middle Chinese that have been lost in the North. It also has a full complement of nasal endings, -m -n ŋ and occlusive endings -p -t -k, maintaining the four categories of tonal types, with splitting in the ping and ru tones, giving six tones. Some dialects of Hakka have seven tones, due to a splitting in the qu tone. One of the distinguishing features of Hakka phonology is that Middle Chinese voiced initials are transformed into Hakka voiceless aspirated initials.

  • Min 閩語/闽语: spoken in Fujian, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Southeast Asia. Min is the only group of Chinese dialects that cannot be directly derived from Middle Chinese. Due to its great internal disparity, Min can be divided into five groups of dialects: south Min (which includes Hokkien, Teochew (Chaozhou), and Taiwanese), east Min, Putian-Xianyou, north Min and central Min.

  • Cantonese or Yue 粵語/粤语: spoken in Guangdong province, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, all over Southeast Asia and by Overseas Chinese. Used by linguistics, "Cantonese" covers all the Yue dialects, such as Toishanese, though the term is also used to refer to just the language of Guangzhou and Hong Kong. Some dialects of Yue have intricate sets of tone compared to other Chinese dialects - with varieties having up to nine or ten tones. Yue keeps a full complement of ancient Chinese word-final consonants (p, t, k, m, n, ng)

  • Xiang 湘語/湘语: spoken in Hunan province. Xiang is usually divided into the "old" and "new" types, with the new type being significantly closer to Mandarin.

  • Gan 贛語/赣语: spoken in Jiangxi province. In the past, it was viewed as closely related to Hakka dialects, because of the way Middle Chinese voiced initials have become voiceless aspirated initials, as those in Hakka. Thus, they were called Hakka-Gan dialects. (The following three dialect groups are not always classified separately.)

  • Hui 徽語/徽语: spoken in the southern parts of Anhui province—usually classified as a sub-branch of Gan.

  • Jin 晉語/晋语: spoken in Shanxi province, as well as parts of Shaanxi, Hebei, Henan, and Inner Mongolia. It is often classified together with Mandarin.

  • Pinghua 平話/平话: spoken in parts of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. It is sometimes classified together with Cantonese.

    Sociolinguistics of spoken variations of Chinese
    In southern China where the difference between 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. Mandarin is usually considered more formal and is required when speaking to a person who does not understand the local dialect. The local dialect 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 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. Another factor that limits the political implications of dialect, is that it is very common within an extended family for different people to know 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.

    On the other hand, in the Republic of China on Taiwan, the government had a policy until the mid-1980s of promoting Mandarin as high status and the local languages—Taiwanese and 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.

    Manifestations of language differentiation

    Although, the term dialect may imply that the forms of Chinese only vary in small ways as one moves from area to area of the country, in fact the differences are in some cases quite stark. For instance, in Taiwanese, to express the idea that one is feeling a little ill, one might say

    Goá kā-kī lâng ū tān-po̍h--á bô sóng-khoài. which, when translated cognate-by-cognate into Mandarin would be something like:

    Wǒ zìjǐ rén yǒu dānbó a bù shuǎngkuài. An awkward sentence, if not simply non-productive. A little more colloquially it would be:

    Wǒ zìjǐ yǒu yīdiǎn bù shūfú. A little better would be:

    Wǒ yǒu yīdiǎn bù shūfú. which removes the reflexive pronoun (zìjǐ), not usually needed in Mandarin. Instead, some people, particularly in the north of China, would say:\

    Wǒ yǒu yīdiǎr bù shūfú.

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