A Primer About the Chinese Language and Chinese Language Study

This will provide a broad overview of information about the Chinese language.

If you are considering studying Chinese, this overview can help you understand some things about the language and at least some of the aspects involved in its study. If you are already a student of the language, you may find some interesting information here of which you are presently unaware.

Dà​lǐ, Yúnnán city gate – Click on photographs to enlarge, then click on your browser’s ‘back’ button to return to text.

While Chinese is admittedly a complex language, it is definitely a learnable one. It seems overly complex primarily because we Americans know so little about it, and to learn all the facts at once can be very intimidating. Please don’t be intimidated!

It really is a great language to study and use, and it is truly interesting: just ask any student of the language! And, while this may seem obvious, it does bear repeating: the language provides a way of getting to know Chinese people personally, as well as a medium for viewing and understanding their culture.

Chinese is probably now the second most-important language for business in international trade (after English) …and for Americans, it is certainly the most important!

Naming the Chinese Language

In the West the Chinese language is popularly called Mandarin. In the Chinese language, there are many names. It can be called:

Hànyǔ or Hànwén (the language of the Hàn people,)

Zhōngguóhuà or Zhōngwén (the language of China,) [pron.: Jōng-guó-huà and Jōng-wén]

Guóyǔ (the national language,)

Pǔtōnghuà (the common language,)

or even Huáyǔ (used outside of China, it means the language of Overseas Chinese people).

Playful children on the way home from school in Dàlǐ, Yúnnán

It is however, never called Mandarin in China. In fact, the word ‘Mandarin’ doesn’t even exist in the Chinese language: Mandarin was the name given to the Chinese language by the Portuguese, from their word for ‘counselor’.

The British popularized that name in English in the early period of British trade and colonial efforts in China, principally because it was the language spoken by the managers of trade deputized by the Qīng (pron.: ‘Ching’) Emperor to deal with foreigners on trade matters, and whom the British, following the Portuguese lead, called ‘Mandarins’.

About the only places in Asia where it is referred to as Mandarin are Hong Kong, Macao and Singapore. Occasionally, you will hear Chinese referred to as Mandarin in Taiwan, but only with foreigners when speaking English, and never among locals.

In China, it is called Pǔtōnghuà, while in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao, its popular name is Guóyǔ. Regardless of place, its English translation, however, is usually just ‘Chinese’.

Written Chinese as a Lingua Franca

As is well-known, Chinese is not a phonetic language. Instead, it is a pictographic or ideographic language.

This means that the written form of the language has no direct relation to or association with the spoken language. Chinese characters do not contain explicit phonetic clues to their pronunciation as is the case with the written forms of Western and other phonetic languages.

A typical example of calligraphy that might be found in a Chinese home, in this case vertical hanging scrolls

It should be noted that, to Chinese speakers, the written form does in fact sometimes provide some implicit clues as to the pronunciation of the character, although these clues are not phonetic in nature, and derive from a Chinese speaker’s knowledge of the pronunciation families of different radicals.

In China, languages such as Mandarin (or Pǔtōnghuà, if you will,) Guǎngdōnghuà (Cantonese), Fújiànhuà (Fujianese), and Kèjiahuà (Hakka), as well as other Chinese tongues, all use the same Chinese characters (for their meaning), while allowing the different pronunciations of each of those languages in their localities.

Chinese characters are presently used in China and Japan, and were formerly used in Korea and Vietnam (both of which were formerly colonies of China), to write all those countries’ languages, regardless of their different word pronunciations. This enabled those countries to communicate (in written form) on trade and diplomatic matters.

A nationalistic Korean monarch in the 15th century initiated the creation of a native phonetic script for the Korean language (called ‘Hangul’), even though the partial use of Chinese characters continued into the modern era.

In Vietnam, the use of Chinese characters was discontinued in 1910, during the French colonial period, in favor of a Romanized transliteration developed by a French Jesuit missionary in the 16th century.

A batik from Yúnnán, of the emperor’s five-toed dragon.

Chinese characters are now infrequently used in both countries, with Korea favoring its own indigenous Hangul writing system, and Vietnam favoring the Romanized writing system introduced by the French.

In Japan, on the other hand, Chinese characters were imported into the country by the Japanese themselves, probably beginning before the sixth century, along with tea and Buddhism, and their use continues into the present day, using a limited set of 3,000 characters. The Japanese still continue to call the characters ‘Chinese’ (ie. ‘Kanji’, which in Japanese means ‘Han characters’).

In modern China many minority languages have no indigenous written forms, and for those languages Chinese characters are used to teach the children of those minorities.

The point of the foregoing is that the written form of Chinese was and is used as a ‘lingua franca’ between different languages inside China, and between different Asian nations and cultures as those languages’ and nations’ written forms, even while the various spoken languages remained unintelligible to each other because of the lack of phonetic pronunciation indicators for the characters intrinsic in the characters themselves.

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© R. Teller, 2015