Buddhism in China

A Chinese Buddhist depiction of Śākyamuni Buddha, at a
 temple in London.

Chinese Buddhism (simplified Chinese: 汉传佛教; traditional Chinese: 漢傳佛敎; pinyin: Hànchuán Fójiào) refers collectively to the various schools of Buddhism that have flourished in China since ancient times, as opposed to the schools that have flourished in areas like Tibet. Buddhism has played an enormous role in shaping the mindset of the Chinese people, affecting their aesthetics, politics, literature, philosophy and medicine.

At the peak of the Tang Dynasty's vitality, Chinese Buddhism produced numerous spiritual masters.

Early History of Buddhism in China

Arrival of Buddhism from India

Earliest Historical Arrivals

Traditional Buddhist ceremony in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, China.

An early chronicle records the first Buddhist mission in 217 B.C. when Li Fang and seventeen others arrived at Hsi-an. Recent research indicates that Buddhism had already been established in China during the reign of the first emperor, Qin Shihuang. The emperor is said to have suppressed Buddhism and Buddhist temples in the same way other philosophical schools were suppressed. Han Wei, a noted researcher from the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology, found evidence for this in Records of the Grand Historian, along with corresponding historical, linguistic, and archaeological evidence. According to this study, Buddhism was already popular in the interior regions of China by the time its suppression began in 213 BCE. Silk Road Archaeologist Wang Jianxin has stated that Han's research sounds "reasonable".

According to some European historians, Mauryan emperor Aśoka the Great sent the royal monk Massim Sthavira to Nepal, Bhutan, and China to spread Buddhism around 265 BCE. However, it has not been widely confirmed that these missionaries arrived in China or that they were responsible for establishing the teachings of Buddhism there.

White Horse Temple, traditionally held to be at the origin of Chinese Buddhism.

Traditional Accounts

A number of popular accounts in historical Chinese literature have led to the popularity of certain legends regarding the introduction of Buddhism into China. According to the most popular account, Emperor Ming (58–75 CE) precipitated the first introduction of Buddhist teachings into China. After dreaming of a golden man with a shining halo, he questioned his advisors about the dream. One advisor told him about the existence of a man called the Buddha in regions to the west. The emperor then sent an envoy to Tianzhu (Southern India) to inquire about the teachings of the Buddha. Buddhist scriptures were said to have been returned to China on the backs of white horses, after which White Horse Temple was named. Two Indian monks also returned with them, named Dharmarakṣa and Kaśyapa Mātaṅga, together with sutras containing 600,000 Sanskrit words.

An 8th century Chinese mural in Dunhuang portrays Emperor Han Wudi (156–87 BCE) worshiping statues of a golden man; "golden men brought in 120 BCE by a great Han general in his campaigns against the nomads". This depiction of the campaigns comes from traditional accounts in the Shiji and the Book of Han.

The First Translations

The first documented translation of Buddhist scriptures into Chinese occurs in 148 CE with the arrival of the Parthian prince-turned-monk An Shigao (Ch. 安世高). He worked to establish Buddhist temples in Loyang and organized the translation of Buddhist scriptures into Chinese, testifying to the beginning of a wave of Central Asian Buddhist proselytism that was to last several centuries. An Shigao translated Buddhist texts on basic doctrines, meditation, and abhidharma. An Xuan (Ch. 安玄), a Parthian layman who worked alongside An Shigao, also translated an early Mahāyāna Buddhist text on the bodhisattva path.

Mahāyāna Buddhism was first widely propagated in China by the Kushan monk Lokakṣema (Ch. 支婁迦讖, active ca. 164–186 CE), who came from the ancient Buddhist kingdom of Gandhāra. Lokakṣema translated important Mahāyāna sūtras such as the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra, as well as rare, early Mahāyāna sūtras on topics such as samādhi, and meditation on the buddha Akṣobhya. These translations from Lokakṣema continue to give insight into the early period of Mahāyāna Buddhism.

Chinese Buddhism Matures

Blue-eyed Central Asian and East-Asian Buddhist monks, Bezeklik, Eastern Tarim Basin, China, 9th–10th century.

The Tripiṭaka Koreana, an edition of the Chinese Buddhist canon carved and preserved in over 81,000 wood printing blocks.

Early Translation Methods

Initially, Buddhism in China faced a number of difficulties in becoming established. The concept of monasticism and the aversion to social affairs seemed to contradict the long-established norms and standards established in Chinese society. Some even declared that Buddhism was harmful to the authority of the state, that Buddhist monasteries contributed nothing to the economic prosperity of China, that Buddhism was barbaric and undeserving of Chinese cultural traditions. However, Buddhism was often associated with Taoism in its ascetic meditative tradition, and for this reason a concept-matching system was used by some early Indian translators, to adapt native Buddhist ideas onto Taoist ideas and terminology.

Buddhism appealed to Chinese intellectuals and elites and the development of gentry Buddhism was sought as an alternative to Confucianism and Daoism, since Buddhism's emphasis on morality and ritual appealed to Confucianists and the desire to cultivate inner wisdom appealed to Daoists. Gentry Buddhism was a medium of introduction for the beginning of Buddhism in China, it gained imperial and courtly support. By the early fifth century Buddhism was established in south China. During this time, Indian monks continued to travel along the Silk Road to teach Buddhism, and translation work was primarily done by foreign monks rather than Chinese.

The Arrival of Kumārajīva

When the famous monk Kumārajīva was captured as booty during the Chinese conquest of the Buddhist kingdom of Kucha, he was imprisoned for many years. When he was released, he immediately took a high place in Chinese Buddhism and was appraised as a great master from the West. He was especially valued by Emperor Yao Xing of the state of Later Qin, who gave him an honorific title and treated him like a god. Kumārajīva revolutionized Chinese Buddhism with his high quality translations, which are still praised for their flowing smoothness, clarity of meaning, subtlety, and literary skill. Due to the efforts of Kumārajīva, Buddhism in China became not only recognized for its practice methods, but also as high philosophy and religion. The arrival of Kumārajīva also set a standard for Chinese translations of Buddhist texts, effectively doing away with previous concept-matching systems.

The translations of Kumārajīva have often remained more popular than those of other translators. Among the most well-known are his translations of the Diamond Sutra, the Amitabha Sutra, the Lotus Sutra, the Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra, the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, and the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra.

A Completed Sūtra Piṭaka

Around the time of Kumārajīva, the four major Sanskrit āgamas were also translated into Chinese. Each of the āgamas was translated independently by a different Indian monk. These āgamas comprise the only other complete surviving Sūtra Piṭaka, which is generally comparable to the Pali Sutta Pitaka of Theravada Buddhism. The teachings of the Sūtra Piṭaka are usually considered to be the earliest teachings of Buddhism and the core texts of the Early Buddhist Schools.

Early Chinese Buddhist Traditions

Due to the wide proliferation of Buddhist texts available in Chinese and the large number of foreign monks who came to teach Buddhism in China, various new and independent traditions emerged. Among the most influential of these was the practice of Pure Land Buddhism established by Hui Yuan, which focused on Amitābha Buddha and his western pure land. Another major early tradition was the Tiantai school, founded by Zhiyi, which is based upon the primacy of the Lotus Sutra, along with supplementary sūtras and commentaries. Zhiyi wrote several works that become important and widely read meditation manuals in China.

A traditional Chinese Chán Buddhist master in Taiwan, sitting in meditation.

Chinese Buddhism Flourishes

Chán: Pointing Directly to the Mind

In the fifth century, the Chán (Zen) teachings began in China, traditionally attributed to the Indian monk Bodhidharma, who has since become a somewhat legendary figure. The school heavily utilized the principles found in the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra, a sūtra utilizing the teachings of Yogācāra and those of Tathāgatagarbha, and which teaches the One Vehicle (Skt. Ekayāna) to buddhahood. In the early years, the teachings of Chán were therefore referred to as the "One Vehicle School." The earliest masters of the Chán school were called "Laṅkāvatāra Masters", for their mastery of practice according to the principles of the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra.

The principle teachings of Chán were later often known for the use of the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras, and the teaching methods used in them. Nan Huaijin identifies the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra and the Diamond Sūtra (Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra) as the principle texts of the Chán school, and summarizes the principles succinctly: "The Zen teaching was a separate transmission outside the scriptural teachings that did not posit any written texts as sacred. Zen pointed directly to the human mind to enable people to see their real nature and become buddhas."

The ruins of Nalanda University in India where Xuanzang studied.

Statue of Xuanzang at the Great Wild Goose Pagoda in Xi'an.

Xuanzang's Journey to the West

During the early Tang dynasty, between 629 and 645, the monk Xuanzang journeyed to India and visited over one hundred kingdoms, and wrote extensive and detailed reports of his findings, which have subsequently become important for the study of India during this period. During his travels he visited holy sites, learned the lore of his faith, and studied with many famous Buddhist masters, especially at the famous center of Buddhist learning at Nālanda University. When he returned, he brought with him some 657 Sanskrit texts. Xuanzang also returned with relics, statues, and Buddhist paraphernalia loaded onto twenty-two horses. With the emperor's support, he set up a large translation bureau in Chang'an (present-day Xi'an), drawing students and collaborators from all over East Asia. He is credited with the translation of some 1,330 fascicles of scriptures into Chinese. His strongest personal interest in Buddhism was in the field of Yogācāra, or "Consciousness-only".

The force of his own study, translation and commentary of the texts of these traditions initiated the development of the Faxiang school in East Asia. Although the school itself did not thrive for a long time, its theories regarding perception, consciousness, karma, rebirth, etc. found their way into the doctrines of other more successful schools. Xuanzang's closest and most eminent student was Kuiji who became recognized as the first patriarch of the Faxiang school. Xuanzang's logic, as described by Kuiji, was often misunderstood by scholars of Chinese Buddhism because they lack the necessary background in Indian logic. Another important disciple was the Korean monk Woncheuk.

Xuanzang's translations were especially important for the transmission of Indian texts related to the Yogācāra school. He translated central Yogācāra texts such as the Saṃdhinirmocana Sūtra and the Yogācārabhūmi Śāstra, as well as important texts such as the Mahāprajñāpāramitā Sūtra and the Bhaiṣajyaguruvaidūryaprabharāja Sūtra (Medicine Buddha Sūtra). He is credited with writing or compiling the Cheng Weishi Lun (Vijñaptimātratāsiddhi Śāstra) as a commentary on these texts. His translation of the Heart Sūtra became and remains the standard in all East Asian Buddhist sects. The proliferation of these sūtras expanded the Chinese Buddhist canon significantly with high quality translations of some of the most important Indian Buddhist texts.

Bodhisattva Leading the Way, color on silk, China, c. 875, British Museum.

Caves, Art, and Technology

The popularization of Buddhism in this period is evident in the many scripture-filled caves and structures surviving from this period. The Mogao Caves near Dunhuang in Gansu province, the Longmen Grottoes near Luoyang in Henan and the Yungang Grottoes near Datong in Shanxi are the most renowned examples from the Northern, Sui and Tang Dynasties. The Leshan Giant Buddha, carved out of a hillside in the 8th century during the Tang Dynasty and looking down on the confluence of three rivers, is still the largest stone Buddha statue in the world.

Making duplications of Buddhist texts was considered to bring meritorious karma. Printing from individually carved wooden blocks and from clay or metal movable type proved much more efficient than hand copying and eventually eclipsed it. The Diamond Sūtra (Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra) of 868 CE, a Buddhist scripture discovered in 1907 inside the Mogao Caves, is the first dated example of block printing.

Arrival of Esoteric Buddhism

The Garbhadhātu maṇḍala used in Śubhakarasiṃha's teachings from the Mahāvairocana Tantra. Vairocana is located in the center.

Arrivals of several prestigious monks in the early 5th century also contributed to the propagation of the religion and were welcomed by rulers of the Sixteen Kingdoms and Northern Dynasties. Fo Tu Cheng was entrusted by the tyrant Shi Hu of Later Chao. Kumarajiva was invited by Lü Guang, the founder of Later Liang, and later by Yao Xing, second ruler of Later Qin. Biographies of these monks, among others, were the subject of the Memoirs of Eminent Monks.

The direct experiential impact of contact with practicing monks should not be underestimated. Confucianism had no equivalent to holy men – the archetypical best and brightest was a wise government minister, not a saint. In this way Buddhism grew to become a major religion in China. By the beginning of the 6th century, Buddhism had grown in popularity to rival Taoism. We know they were successful because the monks were soon accused of falling into extravagance and their lands and their properties were confiscated by Emperor Wu of the Northern Zhou dynasty and Wuzong of the Tang Dynasty (see below).

The Kaiyuan's Three Great Enlightened Masters, Śubhakarasiṃha, Vajrabodhi, and Amoghavajra, established Esoteric Buddhism in China from AD 716 to 720 during the reign of emperor Tang Xuanzong (or Hsuan-Tsung).

They came to Daxing Shansi, Great Propagating Goodness Temple, which was the predecessor of Temple of the Great Enlightener Mahavairocana. Daxing Shansi was established in the ancient capital Chang'an, today's Xi'an, and became one of the four great centers of scripture translation supported by the imperial court. They had translated many Buddhist scriptures, sutra and tantra, from Sanskrit to Chinese. They had also assimilated the prevailing teachings of China, Taoism and Confucianism, with Buddhism, and had further evolved the practice of The Esoteric School.

They brought to the Chinese a mysterious, dynamic, and magical teaching, which included mantra formulae and rituals to protect a person or an empire, to affect a person’s fate after death, and, particularly popular, to bring rain in times of drought. It is not surprising, then, that all three masters were well received by the emperor Tang Xuanzong, and their teachings were quickly taken up at the Tang court and among the elite. Mantrayana altars were installed in temples in the capital, and by the time of emperor Tang Taizong (Tai-Tsung, r. 762-779) its influence among the upper classes outstripped that of Taoism. Relations between Amoghavajra and Taizong were especially good. In life the emperor favored Amoghavajra with titles and gifts, and when the master died in 774, he honored his memory with a stupa, or funeral monument.

Tang state repression of 845

There were several components that lead to opposition of Buddhism. One factor is the foreign origins of Buddhism, unlike Taoism and Confucianism. Han Yu wrote, "Buddha was a man of the barbarians who did not speak the language of China and wore clothes of a different fashion. His sayings did not concern the ways of our ancient kings, nor did his manner of dress conform to their laws. He understood neither the duties that bind sovereign and subject, nor the affections of father and son."

Other components included the Buddhists' withdrawal from society, since the Chinese believed that Chinese people should be involved with family life. Wealth, tax-exemption status and power of the Buddhist temples and monasteries also annoyed many critics.

As mentioned earlier, persecution came during the reign of Emperor Wuzong in the Tang Dynasty. Wuzong was said to hate the sight of Buddhist monks, whom he thought were tax-evaders. In 845, he ordered the destruction of 4,600 Buddhist monasteries and 40,000 temples. About 250,000 Buddhist monks and nuns had to give up their monastery lives. Wuzong cited that Buddhism was an alien religion, which is the reason he also persecuted the Christians in China. Ancient Chinese Buddhism never fully recovered from the persecution.

Buddhism after forfeiture of 845

Chinese gold painting of Cundī. Hanging scroll, gold ink and colors on paper. Ming Dynasty.

Song dynasty

Buddhist ideology began to merge with Confucianism and Taoism, due in part to the use of existing Chinese philosophical terms in the translation of Buddhist scriptures. Various Confucian scholars of the Song dynasty, including Zhu Xi (wg: Chu Hsi), sought to redefine Confucianism as Neo-Confucianism.

Yuan Dynasty

During the Yuan Dynasty, the Mongol emperors made Esoteric Buddhism an official religion of China, and Tibetan lamas were given patronage at the court. A common perception was that this patronage of lamas caused corrupt forms of tantra to become widespread. When the Mongol Yuan Dynasty was overthrown and the Ming Dynasty was established, the Tibetan lamas were expelled from the court, and this form of Buddhism was denounced as not being an orthodox path.

Ming dynasty

"By the Ming period (1368–1644) the preeminence of Chan had been so firmly established that almost the entire Buddhist clergy were affiliated with either its Linji or Caodong lineages, both of which claimed descent from Bodhidharma."

Qing dynasty

The official religion of the Qing court was the Gelukpa School of Tibetan Buddhism. Early in the Taiping rebellion, the Taiping rebels targeted Buddhism. In the Battle of Nanjing (1853), the Taiping army butchered thousands of monks in Nanjing. But from the middle of the Taiping rebellion, Taiping leaders took a more moderate approach, demanding that monks should have licences.

Lay practitioners in Chinese Buddhism

Nan Huai-Chin (南怀瑾), an influential lay Buddhist teacher in modern China and Taiwan.

In Chinese Buddhism, lay practitioners have traditionally played an important role, and lay practice of Buddhism has had similar tendencies to those of monastic Buddhism in China. Many historical biographies of lay Buddhists are available, which give a clear picture of their practices and role in Chinese Buddhism. In addition to these numerous biographies, there are accounts from Jesuit missionaries such as Matteo Ricci which provide extensive and revealing accounts to the degree Buddhism penetrated elite and popular culture in China.Traditional practices such as meditation, mantra recitation, mindfulness of Amitābha Buddha, asceticism, and vegetarianism were all integrated into the belief systems of ordinary people. It is known from accounts in the Ming Dynasty that lay practitioners often engaged in practices from both the Pure Land and Chán traditions, as well as the study of the Buddhist sūtras. The Heart Sūtra and the Diamond Sūtra were the most popular, followed by the Lotus Sūtra and the Avataṃsaka Sūtra. Laypeople were also commonly devoted to the practice of mantras, and the Mahā Karuṇā Dhāraṇī and the Cundī Dhāraṇī were very popular. Robert Gimello has also observed that in Chinese Buddhist communities, the esoteric practices of Cundī enjoyed popularity among both the populace and the elite.Mahāyāna figures such as Avalokiteśvara Bodhisattva, Kṣitigarbha Bodhisattva, Amitābha Buddha, and the Medicine Buddha, were all widely known and revered. Beliefs in karma and rebirth were held at all levels of Chinese society, and pilgrimages to well-known monasteries and the four holy mountains of China were undertaken by monastics and lay practitioners alike.

Modern developments in Chinese Buddhism

A modern Buddhist ceremony held in Guanghua Temple in Beijing.

The 108-metre-high statue is the world's tallest of Guanyin Statue of Hainan was enshrined on April 24, 2005 with the participation of 108 eminent monks from various Buddhist groups in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao and Mainland China, and tens of thousands of pilgrims. The delegation also included monks from the Theravada and Tibetan Buddhist traditions. China belongs to those countries that own most of the world's highest Buddhist statues.

In April 2006 China organized the World Buddhist Forum and in March 2007 the government banned mining on Buddhist sacred mountains. In May of the same year, in Changzhou, world's tallest pagoda was built and opened. In March 2008 the Taiwan-based Tzu Chi Foundation was approved to open a branch in mainland China.

Theravada Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism exist mainly among ethnic minorities in the southwest and the north.

Festivals

These are the holy days that Chinese Buddhists celebrate by visiting temples to make offerings of prayers, incense, fruits, flowers and donations. On such days they observe the moral precepts very strictly as well as a full day’s vegetarian diet, a practice originally from China. The dates given are based on the Chinese Lunar system so that 1.1 means the First day of the First lunar moon and so on.

8.12 — Enlightenment Day of Śākyamuni Buddha

1.1 — Birthday of Maitreya Buddha

9.1 — Birthday of Śakra, Lord of the Devas

8.2 — Renunciation Day of Śākyamuni Buddha

15.2 — Mahāparinirvāṇa Day of Śākyamuni Buddha

19.2 — Birthday of Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara (Guan Yin)

21.2 — Birthday of Bodhisattva Samantabhadra

4.4 — Birthday of Bodhisattva Mañjuśrī

8.4 — Birthday of Śākyamuni Buddha

15.4 — Vesak Day

3.6 — Birthday of Skanda (Wei Tuo)

10.6 — Birthday of Padmasambhava (Guru Rinpoche)

19.6 — Enlightenment Day of Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara

13.7 — Birthday of Bodhisattva Mahāsthāmaprāpta

15.7 — Ghost Festival

30.7 — Birthday of Bodhisattva Kṣitigarbha

22.8 — Birthday of Dīpaṃkara Buddha (an ancient buddha)

19.9 — Renunciation Day of Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara

30.9 — Birthday of Bhaiṣajyaguru Buddha (Medicine Buddha)

5.10 — Anniversary of the death of Bodhidharma

17.11 — Birthday of Amitābha Buddha

(source:wikipedia)

Chinese (language)

Culture of China Chinese 汉语／漢語, 华语／華語 or 中文 Hànyǔ (Chinese) written inChinese characters Spoken in People's Republic of China(PRC, commonly known as China), Republic of China(ROC, commonly known as Taiwan), Singapore,Malaysia, the Philippines, the United States of America,Australia, Indonesia,Mauritius, Peru, Canada, and other regions with Chinese communities Region (majorities): Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore (minorities): Southeast Asia, and other regions with Chinese communities Total speakers approx 1.3 billion Ranking Chinese, all: 1 Mandarin: 1 Wu: 12 Cantonese: 18 Min: 22 Hakka: 33 Gan: 42 Language family Sino-Tibetan Sinitic Chinese Standard forms Mandarin Dialects Mandarin Jin Huizhou Wu Hunanese Jiangxinese Hakka Yue (including Cantonese-Taishanese) Pinghua Shaojiang Northern Min Eastern Min (including Fuchow) Central Min Pu Xian Southern Min (including Amoy, Taiwanese) Teochew (including Swatow,Chaozhou,Jieyang,part of Shanwei/Meizhou) Writing system Chinese characters, zhuyin fuhao, pinyin,Xiao'erjing Official status Official language in  United Nations  People's Republic of China  Hong Kong  Macau  Republic of China (Taiwan)  Singapore (official, but not national language) Recognised minority language in  Mauritius  United States (minority and auxiliary) Regulated by In the PRC: National Language Regulating Committee In the ROC: National Languages Committee In Singapore: Promote Mandarin Council/Speak Mandarin Campaign Language codes ISO 639-1 zh ISO 639-2 chi (B)  zho (T) Map of the Sinophone world . Information:   Countries identified Chinese as a primary, administrative, or native language   Countries with more than 5,000,000 Chinese speakers w/ or w/o recognition   Countries with more than 1,000,000 Chinese speakers w/ or w/o recognition   Countries with more than 500,000 Chinese speakers w/ or w/o recognition   Countries with more than 100,000 Chinese speakers w/ or w/o recognition   Major Chinese speaking settlements Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Chinese language (Spoken) Traditional Chinese 漢語 Simplified Chinese 汉语

Sino-Tibetan language family

The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China and Taiwan

Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) (汉语/漢語 Hànyǔ; 华语/華語 Huáyǔ; 中文 Zhōngwén) is a language family consisting of languages which are mostly mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over one billion people, speaks some variety of Chinese as their native language. Internal divisions of Chinese are usually perceived by their native speakers as dialects of a single Chinese language, rather than separate languages, although this identification is considered inappropriate by some linguists and Sinologists.

Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between seven and thirteen main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (50 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility.

Standard Mandarin (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu) is a standardized form of spoken Chinese, based on the Beijing dialect, which is part of a larger group of North-Eastern and South-Western dialects, often taken as a separate language. The Mandarin Chinese language is referred to as 官话/官話 Guānhuà or 北方话/北方話 Běifānghuà in Chinese. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC, also known as Taiwan), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Of the other varieties, Standard Cantonese is common and influential in Guangdong Province and Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Min Nan, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (known as Hokkien in Singapore and Malaysia).

 Spoken Chinese

Chinese dialects

A map below depicts the linguistic subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within China itself. The traditionally recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are:

Name Abbreviation Pinyin Local Romanization Simp. Trad. Total

Speakers

Mandarin

Notes: includes Standard Mandarin Guan; 官 Guānhuà Pinyin: Guānhuà 官话 官話 c. 1.365 billion

Běifānghuà Pinyin: Běifānghuà 北方话 北方話

Wu

Notes: includes Shanghainese Wu; 吴/吳 Wúyǔ Long-short: Ng nyiu or Ghu nyiu 吴语 吳語 c. 90 million

Yue

Notes: includes Cantonese & Taishanese Yue; 粤/粵 Yuèyǔ Jyutping: Jyut6 jyu5;

Yale: Yuht yúh 粤语 粵語 c. 80 million

Min

Notes: includes Hokkien, Taiwanese & Teochew Min; 闽/閩 Mǐnyǔ POJ: Bân gú;

BUC: Mìng ngṳ̄ 闽语 閩語 c. 50 million

Xiang Xiang; 湘 Xiāngyǔ Romanization: Shiāen'ỳ 湘语 湘語 c. 35 million

Hakka Kejia; 客家 Kèjiāhuà Hakka Pinyin: Hak-kâ-fa or Hak-kâ-va 客家话 客家話 c. 35 million

Kèhuà Hakka Pinyin: Hak-fa or Hak-va 客话 客話

Gan Gan; 贛 Gànyǔ Romanization: Gon ua 赣语 贛語 c. 31 million

Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists:

Name Abbreviation Pinyin Local Romanization Simp. Trad. Total

Speakers

Jin

Notes: from Mandarin Jin; 晋/晉 Jìnyǔ None 晋语 晉語 45 million

Huizhou

Notes: from Wu Hui; 徽 Huīzhōuhuà None 徽州话 徽州話 ~3.2 million

Pinghua

Notes: from Yue Ping; 平 Guǎngxī Pínghuà None 广西平话 廣西平話 ~5 million

There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (儋州话/儋州話), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡话/鄉話), not to be confused with Xiang (湘), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (韶州土话/韶州土話), spoken in northern Guangdong. The Dungan language, spoken in Central Asia, is very closely related to Mandarin. However, it is politically not generally considered "Chinese" since it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by Dungan people outside China who are not considered ethnic Chinese.

In general, the above language-dialect groups do not have sharp boundaries, though Mandarin is the predominant Sinitic language in the North and the Southwest, and the rest are mostly spoken in Central or Southeastern China. Frequently, as in the case of the Guangdong province, native speakers of major variants overlapped. As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear how the speeches of various parts of China should be classified. The Ethnologue lists a total of 14, but the number varies between seven and seventeen depending on the classification scheme followed. For instance, the Min variety is often divided into Northern Min (Minbei, Fuchow) and Southern Min (Minnan, Amoy-Swatow); linguists have not determined whether their mutual intelligibility is small enough to sort them as separate languages.

In general, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may only be marginally intelligible to close neighbours. For instance, Wuzhou is about 120 miles upstream from Guangzhou, but its dialect is more like Standard Cantonese spoken in Guangzhou, than is that of Taishan, 60 miles southwest of Guangzhou and separated by several rivers from it (Ramsey, 1987).

Standard Mandarin and diglossia

Standard Mandarin

Putonghua / Guoyu, often called "Mandarin", is the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China (Taiwan), and Singapore (where it is called "Huayu"). It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The government intends for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools.

In mainland China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature: it is common for a Chinese to be able to speak two or even three varieties of the Sinitic languages (or “dialects”) together with Standard Mandarin. For example, in addition to putonghua a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese and, if they did not grow up there, his or her local dialect as well. A native of Guangzhou may speak Standard Cantonese and putonghua, a resident of Taiwan, both Taiwanese and putonghua/guoyu. A person living in Taiwan may commonly mix pronunciations, phrases, and words from Standard Mandarin and Taiwanese, and this mixture is considered normal under many circumstances. In Hong Kong, Standard Mandarin is beginning to take its place beside English and Standard Cantonese, the other official languages.

Linguistics

 Varieties of Chinese

Linguists often view Chinese as a language family, though owing to China's socio-political and cultural situation, and the fact that all spoken varieties use one common written system, it is customary to refer to these generally mutually unintelligible variants as "the Chinese language". The diversity of Sinitic variants is comparable to the Romance languages.

From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches technically. However, the idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and cultural self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. Most Chinese and Chinese linguists refer to Chinese as a single language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family.

Chinese itself has a term for its unified writing system, Zhongwen (中文), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (汉语/漢語, "spoken language[s] of the Han Chinese")—this term could be translated to either "language" or "languages" since Chinese possesses no grammatical numbers. In the Chinese language, there is much less ability to maintain a uniform speech-and-writing continuum, as indicated by a necessity to employ two separate character morphemes 语/語 yu and 文 wen. The character morphemes, logographs convey semantics via graphic, and not due to a phonology, form. Ethnic Chinese often consider these spoken variations as one single language for reasons of nationality and as they inherit one common cultural and linguistic heritage in Classical Chinese. Han native speakers of Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese, for instance, may consider their own linguistic varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese as one—albeit internally very diverse—ethnicity. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmented and disunified than it actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. Additionally, in Taiwan, it is closely associated with Taiwanese independence, where some supporters of Taiwanese independence promote the local Taiwanese Minnan-based spoken language.

Within the People's Republic of China and Singapore, it is common for the government to refer to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) beside Standard Mandarin as fangyan (“regional tongues”, often translated as "dialects"). Modern-day Chinese speakers of all kinds communicate using one formal standard written language, although this modern written standard is modeled after Mandarin, generally the modern Beijing dialect.

Language and nationality

The term sinophone, coined in analogy to anglophone and francophone, refers to those who speak the Chinese language natively, or prefer it as a medium of communication. The term is derived from Sinae, the Latin word for ancient China.

Writing

 Written Chinese

The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is rather complex. Its spoken variations evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period, although written records have been discovered as far back as the 14th to 11th centuries BCE Shang dynasty oracle bones using the oracle bone scripts.

The Chinese orthography centers on Chinese characters, hanzi, which are written within imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus the number "one", yi in Mandarin, jat in Cantonese and chi̍t in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("一"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as 冇 and 係 for Cantonese and Hakka, which are considered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese.

Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere. Use of it is considered highly informal, and does not extend to many formal occasions.

Also, in Hunan, some women write their local language in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by some a dialect of Mandarin, is also nowadays written in Cyrillic, and was formerly written in the Arabic alphabet, although the Dungan people live outside China.

Chinese character

Chinese characters evolved over time from earlier forms of hieroglyphs. The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic radicals. Only the simplest characters, such as ren 人 (human), ri 日 (sun), shan 山 (mountain), shui 水 (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar Xú Shèn in the Hàn Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80–90% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that indicates the pronunciation. There are about 214 radicals recognized in the Kangxi Dictionary.

Modern characters are styled after the regular script (楷书／楷書 kǎishū) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (篆书／篆書 zhuànshū), cursive script (草书／草書 cǎoshū) and clerical script (隶书／隸書 lìshū). Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but tend to use traditional characters for traditional art.

"Preface to the Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavilion" by Wang Xizhi, written in semi-cursive style

There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia) outside mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty. The Simplified Chinese character system, developed by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common caoshu shorthand variants.

Singapore, which has a large Chinese community, is the first—and at present the only—foreign nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. The Internet provides the platform to practice reading the alternative system, be it traditional or simplified.

A well-educated Chinese reader today recognizes approximately 6,000-7,000 characters; approximately 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. A large unabridged dictionary, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; fewer than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.'

History

 History of the Chinese language

Most linguists classify all varieties of modern spoken Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, termed Proto-Sino-Tibetan, from which the Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman languages descended. The relation between Chinese and other Sino-Tibetan languages is an area of active research, as is the attempt to reconstruct Proto-Sino-Tibetan. The main difficulty in this effort is that, while there is enough documentation to allow one to reconstruct the ancient Chinese sounds, there is no written documentation that records the division between Proto-Sino-Tibetan and ancient Chinese. In addition, many of the older languages that would allow us to reconstruct Proto-Sino-Tibetan are very poorly understood and many of the techniques developed for analysis of the descent of the (fusional) Indo-European languages from PIE do not apply to Chinese, an isolating language because of "morphological paucity" especially after Old Chinese.

Categorization of the development of Chinese is a subject of scholarly debate. One of the first systems was devised by the Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren in the early 1900s; most present systems rely heavily on Karlgren's insights and methods.

Old Chinese, sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese", was the language common during the early and middle Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCE–256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shījīng, the history of the Shūjīng, and portions of the Yìjīng (I Ching). The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters provide hints to their Old Chinese pronunciations. The pronunciation of the borrowed Chinese characters in Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean also provide valuable insights. Old Chinese was not wholly uninflected. It possessed a rich sound system in which aspiration or rough breathing differentiated the consonants, but probably was still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qīng dynasty philologists. Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably 蜜 mì "honey", 獅 shī "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mǎ "horse", 犬 quǎn "dog", and 鵝 é "goose". The source says the reconstructions of old Chinese are tentative, and not definitive so no conclusions should be drawn. The reconstruction of Old Chinese can not be perfect so this hypothesis may be called into question. The source also notes that southern dialects of Chinese have more monosyllabic words than the Mandarin Chinese dialects.

Middle Chinese was the language used during Southern and Northern Dynasties and the Suí, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the "Qiēyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the "Guǎngyùn" rime book. Linguists are more confident of having reconstructed how Middle Chinese sounded. The evidence for the pronunciation of Middle Chinese comes from several sources: modern dialect variations, rhyming dictionaries, foreign transliterations, "rhyming tables" constructed by ancient Chinese philologists to summarize the phonetic system, and Chinese phonetic translations of foreign words. However, all reconstructions are tentative; some scholars have argued that trying to reconstruct, say, modern Cantonese from modern Cantopop rhymes would give a fairly inaccurate picture of the present-day spoken language.

The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. Most Chinese people, in Sìchuān and in a broad arc from the north-east (Manchuria) to the south-west (Yunnan), use various Mandarin dialects as their home language. The prevalence of Mandarin throughout northern China is largely due to north China's plains. By contrast, the mountains and rivers of middle and southern China promoted linguistic diversity.

Until the mid-20th century, most southern Chinese only spoke their native local variety of Chinese. As Nanjing was the capital during the early Ming Dynasty, Nanjing Mandarin became dominant at least until the later years of the Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies (正音书院／正音書院; Zhèngyīn Shūyuàn) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited.

This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching Standard Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all young and middle-aged citizens of mainland China and on Taiwan. Standard Cantonese, not Mandarin, was used in Hong Kong during the time of its British colonial period (owing to its large Cantonese native and migrant populace) and remains today its official language of education, formal speech, and daily life, but Mandarin is becoming increasingly influential after the 1997 handover.

Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in the 19th century.

Influences

Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on unrelated languages such as Korean and Japanese. Korean and Japanese both have writing systems employing Chinese characters (Hanzi), which are called Hanja and Kanji, respectively.

The Vietnamese term for Chinese writing is Hán tự. It was the only available method for writing Vietnamese until the 14th century, used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese élites. From the 14th to the late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chữ nôm, a modified Chinese script incorporating sounds and syllables for native Vietnamese speakers. Chữ nôm was completely replaced by a modified Latin script created by the Jesuit missionary priest Alexander de Rhodes, which incorporates a system of diacritical marks to indicate tones, as well as modified consonants. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Việt (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese.

In South Korea, the Hangul alphabet is generally used, but Hanja is used as a sort of boldface. In North Korea, Hanja has been discontinued. Since the modernization of Japan in the late 19th century, there has been debate about abandoning the use of Chinese characters, but the practical benefits of a radically new script have so far not been considered sufficient.

Derived Chinese characters or Zhuang logograms are used to write Zhuang songs, even though Zhuang is not a Chinese dialect. Since the 1950s, the Zhuang language has been written in a modified Latin alphabet.

Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of loanwords from Chinese. Fifty percent or more of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin, likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary.

Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of 茶 (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 茄汁 (koe-tsiap),tomato juice,(tomato 西红柿 in Cantonese is 番茄), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 金橘 (kam kuat).

Phonology

This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters.

Main article: Chinese spoken language

The phonological structure of each syllable consists of a nucleus consisting of a vowel (which can be a monophthong, diphthong, or even a triphthong in certain varieties) with an optional onset or coda consonant as well as a tone. There are some instances where a vowel is not used as a nucleus. An example of this is in Cantonese, where the nasal sonorant consonants /m/ and /ŋ/ can stand alone as their own syllable.

Across all the spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda, but syllables that do have codas are restricted to /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, /p/, /t/, /k/, or /ʔ/. Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Mandarin, are limited to only two, namely /n/ and /ŋ/. Consonant clusters do not generally occur in either the onset or coda. The onset may be an affricate or a consonant followed by a semivowel, but these are not generally considered consonant clusters.

The number of sounds in the different spoken dialects varies, but in general there has been a tendency to a reduction in sounds from Middle Chinese. The Mandarin dialects in particular have experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds and so have far more multisyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. The total number of syllables in some varieties is therefore only about a thousand, including tonal variation, which is only about an eighth as many as English.

All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones. A few dialects of north China may have as few as three tones, while some dialects in south China have up to 6 or 10 tones, depending on how one counts. One exception from this is Shanghainese which has reduced the set of tones to a two-toned pitch accent system much like modern Japanese.

A very common example used to illustrate the use of tones in Chinese are four tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable "ma." The tones correspond to these five characters:

This article contains Ruby annotation. Without proper rendering support, you may see transcriptions in parentheses after the character instead of ruby glosses.

妈／媽

mā

"mother"—high level

麻

má

"linen" or "numb"—high rising

马／馬

mǎ

"horse"—low falling-rising

骂／罵

mà

"scold"—high falling

吗／嗎

ma

"question particle"—neutral

Listen to the tones

This is a recording of the four main tones. Fifth, or neutral, tone is not included.

Problems listening to this file? See media help.

Phonetic transcriptions

The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. Early Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted in some rudimentary Latin transcription systems, based on the Nanjing Mandarin dialect.

Romanization

See also: Chinese language romanisation in Singapore and Romanization of Mandarin Chinese

Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages due to the lack of a native phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century.

Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin, often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore and Taiwan. Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across America, Australia and Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones of new words. The Pinyin romanization is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.

The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan.

When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade-Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade-Giles' extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng (pinyin), and with Taipei than T'ai²-pei³ (Wade-Giles).

Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison:

Mandarin Romanization Comparison

Characters Wade-Giles Hanyu Pinyin Notes

中国／中國 Chung1-kuo² Zhōngguó "China"

北京 Pei³-ching1 Běijīng Capital of the People's Republic of China

台北 T'ai²-pei³ Táiběi Capital of Taiwan

毛泽东／毛澤東 Mao² Tse²-tung1 Máo Zédōng Former Communist Chinese leader

蒋介石／蔣介石 Chiang³ Chieh4-shih² Jiǎng Jièshí Former Nationalist Chinese leader (better known to English speakers as Chiang Kai-shek, with Cantonese pronunciation)

孔子 K'ung³ Tsu³ Kǒng Zǐ "Confucius"

Other systems of romanization for Chinese include Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the French EFEO, the Yale (invented during WWII for U.S. troops), as well as separate systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages or dialects.

Other phonetic transcriptions

Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The 'Phags-pa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of pre-modern forms of Chinese.

Zhuyin (also called bopomofo), a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools to aid standard pronunciation. Although bopomofo characters are reminiscent of katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system. A comparison table of zhuyin to pinyin exists in the zhuyin article. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles:

Pinyin table

Zhuyin table

There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system.

Grammar and morphology

Chinese grammar

 Chinese classifiers

Modern Chinese has often been erroneously classed as a "monosyllabic" language. While most of the morphemes are single syllables, in northern varieties like Mandarin the nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely di-syllabic. There has been a pronounced tendency to create disyllabic words when compared to Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is a highly isolating language, with each morpheme generally (about 90% of the time) corresponding to a single syllable and a single character; most modern varieties of Chinese, however, have the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character compounds. In some cases, monosyllabic words have become disyllabic without compounding, as in 窟窿 kulong from 孔 kong; this is especially common in Jin.

Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest blocks of the language. While many of these single-syllable morphemes (字, zì) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cí (词／詞), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí (“word”) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.

For example:

Yun 雲—“cloud” (traditional)

Yun 云—“cloud” (simplified)

Han-bao-bao/Hanbao 漢堡包／漢堡—“hamburger” (traditional)

Han-bao-bao/Hanbao 汉堡包／汉堡—"hamburger" (simplified)

Wo 我—“I, me”

Ren 人—“people”

Di-qiu 地球—“earth (globosity)”

Shan-dian 閃電—“lightning” (traditional)

Shan-dian 闪电—"lightning" (simplifed)

Meng 夢—“dream” (traditional)

Meng 梦—"dream" (simplified)

All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology—i.e., changes in form of a word—to indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has very few grammatical inflections—it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (他 as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century.

They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le 了 (perfective), hai 还／還 (still), yijing 已经／已經 (already), etc.

Chinese features Subject Verb Object word order, and like many other languages in East Asia, makes frequent use of the topic-comment construction to form sentences. Chinese also has an extensive system of classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean.

Other notable grammatical features common to all the spoken varieties of Chinese include the use of serial verb construction, pronoun dropping and the related subject dropping.

Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess differences.

Tones and homophones

Official modern Mandarin has only 400 spoken monosyllables but over 10,000 written characters, so there are many homophones only distinguishable by the four tones. Even this is often not enough unless the context and exact phrase or cí is identified.

The mono-syllable jī, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: 鸡／雞 chicken, 机／機 machine, 基 basic, 击／擊 (to) hit, 饥／饑 hunger, and 积／積 product. In speech, the glyphing of a monosyllable to its meaning must be determined by context or by relation to other morphemes (e.g. "some" as in the opposite of "none"). Native speakers may state which words or phrases their names are found in, for convenience of writing: 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyīng, Jiālíng Jiāng de jiā, Yīngguó de yīng "My name is Jiāyīng, the Jia for Jialing River and the ying for the short form in Chinese of UK."

Southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Hakka preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese and have more tones. The previous examples of jī, have more distinct pronunciations in Cantonese (romanized using jyutping): gai1, gei1, gei1, gik1, gei1, and jik1 respectively. For this reason, southern varieties tend to need to employ fewer multi-syllabic words.

Vocabulary

The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are characters.

Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, a compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including bone oracle versions. The Zhonghua Zihai (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The CC-CEDICT project (2010) contains 97,404 contemporary entries including idioms, technology terms and names of political figures, businesses and products. The 2009 version of the Webster's Digital Chinese Dictionary (WDCD)[12], based on CC-CEDICT, contains over 84,000 entries.

The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumed Hanyu Da Cidian, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms.

The latest 2007 5th edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian 现代汉语词典／現代漢語詞典, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 65,000 entries and defines 11,000 head characters.

Loanwords

See also: Translation of neologisms into Chinese and Transcription into Chinese characters

Like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizable number of loanwords from other cultures. Most Chinese words are formed out of native Chinese morphemes, including words describing imported objects and ideas. However, direct phonetic borrowing of foreign words has gone on since ancient times.

Words borrowed from along the Silk Road since Old Chinese include 葡萄 "grape", 石榴 "pomegranate" and 狮子／獅子 "lion". Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩萨／菩薩 "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 胡同 "hutong". Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄 "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of North India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as 琵琶 "pípa", the Chinese lute, or 酪 "cheese" or "yoghurt", but from exactly which Altaic source is not always entirely clear.

Modern borrowings and loanwords

Modern neologisms are translated into Chinese primarily in three ways: free translation (calque, by meaning), phonetic translation (by sound) and a combination of the above two (partially transcriptive with a careful selection of meaning-encoding characters). Today, it is much more common to use existing Chinese morphemes to coin new words in order to represent imported concepts, such as technical expressions and international scientific vocabulary, owing to the structural differences from Western languages. Any Latin or Greek etymologies are dropped and converted into the corresponding meaning-carrying Chinese characters (e.g. anti- typically becomes "反", literally opposite), making them more comprehensible for Chinese but introducing more difficulties in understanding foreign texts. For example, the word telephone was loaned phonetically as 德律风／德律風 (Shanghainese: télífon [təlɪfoŋ], Standard Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later 电话／電話 (diànhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include 电视／電視 (diànshì "electric vision") for television, 电脑／電腦 (diànnǎo "electric brain") for computer; 手机／手機 (shǒujī "hand machine") for cellphone, and 蓝牙／藍芽 (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. 網誌 (wǎng zhì "internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 汉堡包／漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo, "Hamburg bun") for "hamburger". Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as 拖拉机／拖拉機 (tuōlājī, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马利奥／馬利奧 for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾／奔騰 (bēnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and 赛百味／賽百味 (Sàibǎiwèi "better-than hundred tastes") for Subway restaurants.

Foreign words, mainly proper nouns (names of people, places), continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, "Israel" becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè), "Paris" becomes 巴黎 (pinyin: bālí). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including 沙发／沙發 shāfā "sofa", 马达／馬達 mǎdá "motor", 幽默 yōumò "humor", 逻辑／邏輯 luójí "logic", 时髦／時髦 shímáo "smart, fashionable" and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ "hysterics". The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghainese dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. For example, 沙发／沙發 and 马达／馬達 in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor".

Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transcription. From French came 芭蕾 (bāléi "ballet"), 香槟 (xiāngbīn, "champagne"), via Italian 咖啡 (kāfēi "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed, such as the above-mentioned 沙发／沙發 (shāfā "sofa"), 幽默 (yōumò "humour"), and 高尔夫／高爾夫 (gāoěrfū "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪斯科 (dísīkè "disco"), 可乐／可樂 (kělè "cola") and 迷你 (mínǐ "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon 卡通 (cartoon), 基佬 (gay people), 的士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, e.g. 粉丝／粉絲 (fěnsī "fans"), 黑客 (hēikè "hacker", literally "black guest"), 部落格 (bùluōgé "blog", literally "interconnected tribes") in Taiwanese Mandarin.

Another result of the English influence on Chinese is the appearance in Modern Chinese texts of so-called 字母词 zìmǔcí ("lettered words") spelled with letters from foreign alphabets. This has appeared in magazines, newspapers, on web sites and on TV: 三G手机 "3rd generation cell phones" (三 sān "three" + G "generation" + 手机 shǒujī "mobile phones"), IT界 "IT environment", HSK (hànyǔ shuǐpíng kǎoshì, 汉语水平考试), GB (guóbiāo, 国标), CIF价 (Cost, Insurance, Freight + 价 jià "price"); e家庭 "electronic home" (家庭 jiātīng "home"); W时代 "wireless generation" (时代 shídài "generation"); 的士call, TV族, 后РС时代 "post-PC era" (后 hòu "after/post" + PC "personal computer" + 时代 shídài "epoch"), etc.

Since the 20th century, another source has been Japan. Using existing kanji, which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language, the Japanese re-moulded European concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, jīngjì (经济／經濟, keizai), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was narrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this toing-and-froing process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese share a corpus linguistic of terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European languages.

Education

Chinese as a Foreign or Second Language

With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and has become an increasingly popular subject of study amongst the young in the Western world, as in the UK.

In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test (comparable to the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.

See also

Culture of China

Chinese calendar

Confucius

Social structure of China

(source:wikipedia)