9.1 Where Chinese Is Spoken — Epoché
What you will be able to do Use the names 普通话 , 國語 , 华语 , 汉语 and 中文 correctly, and say which is used where. Explain what is meant by "the Chinese dialects", and why "dialect" is a misleading translation of 方言 . Say where simplified characters are standard and where traditional characters are, and name the places that use neither exclusively. State what this course teaches, and what it does not. Prerequisites : 0.1, which gave you the syllable and the tone. This lesson is background and can be read at any point, though its practice also assumes volume 3. See lesson 0.1 Sounds and Tones if you have not done it. If you have come here in order, you have now spent more than fifty lessons learning a language whose name has not been settled. That is not pedantry: the different names carry different claims, they are used in different places, and a learner who uses the wrong one in the wrong place sounds either foreign or careless. This lesson fixes the vocabulary and draws the map, and it stops short of anything that is not a fact about language. Five names for something like one thing English says "Chinese" and stops. Chinese has several names, and they divide the field differently. 普通话 pǔtōnghuà means "the common speech". It is the official name in the People's Republic of China for the standard spoken language, defined on the pronunciation of Beijing, with the northern dialects as its base and the grammar of model modern written Chinese as its norm. This is the language of this course, and it is what you will hear in a classroom, a news broadcast or a railway announcement anywhere in mainland China. 國語 guóyǔ, "the national language", is the name used in Taiwan for what is very nearly the same standard. The differences are real but small: some vocabulary, a scattering of pronunciations, and a preference for traditional characters in writing. A speaker of one understands a speaker of the other without effort. 华语 huáyǔ ( 華語 in traditional characters), "the language of the Chinese people", is the usual name in Singapore and Malaysia. In Singapore Chinese is one of four official languages; in Malaysia it is widely used, though Malay is the only official language. Singapore uses simplified characters and 普通话 pronunciation, so a learner of this course is at home there. 汉语 Hànyǔ, "the language of the Han", is the academic and textbook name. It is the term in the name of the standard proficiency examination and in the titles of many textbooks, which is why you have met it since lesson 1.4. Strictly it covers the whole family of Chinese varieties, not only the standard. 中文 Zhōngwén is the loosest and the commonest in ordinary conversation. Its second character means "writing", so it leans towards the written language, but in practice it is used for either. If you are not sure which name to use, this is the safe one. A short rule that will serve you: say 中文 when you mean "Chinese" in general, 普通话 when you mean the spoken standard, and use whichever of 國語 or 华语 the person in front of you used first. What "dialect" hides You will read that Chinese has dialects. The English word does damage here, because it suggests accents and local words — the relation of Yorkshire to Sussex. The relation among the main branches of Chinese is closer to that among Romance languages. The conventional grouping recognises seven to ten branches. Mandarin is by far the largest. The others include Wu, spoken around Shanghai; Yue, whose best-known form is Cantonese; Min, which includes Hokkien and Taiwanese; Hakka; Xiang; and Gan. Speakers of two different branches usually cannot hold a conversation in their home speech. A Cantonese speaker and a Mandarin speaker who share no third language are as stuck as a Portuguese speaker and a Romanian one. What holds the group together is not mutual intelligibility but three other things. The first is the writing system: characters are not tied to one pronunciation, so the same written sentence can be read aloud in any branch, with entirely different syllables. The second is a common ancestor and a shared stock of vocabulary that is recognisable once the sound correspondences are known. The third is the standard language itself, which most people now also speak, learned at school. The Chinese term is 方言 fāngyán, literally "regional speech". It carries no claim about intelligibility, which is why it fits the facts better than "dialect" does. When you read that someone speaks a 方言 at home and 普通话 at work, understand it, for the major groups such as Cantonese, as two languages rather than an accent; some 方言 belong to the Mandarin family, such as the speech of Chengdu, and are much closer to 普通话 . One practical consequence: Cantonese is not a stepping stone to Mandarin or the reverse. If Cantonese is what you want, you want a different course. What this course gives you that transfers is the writing system, which is a large part of the work, though written Cantonese also uses characters and words of its own. Which characters, and where Lesson 1.7 explained how the simplified forms were made and lesson 1.8 showed you the traditional ones. The geography is simple enough to hold in a table. Place Standard written form Spoken standard Mainland China Simplified 普通话 Singapore Simplified 华语 , the same standard Malaysia Simplified in schools; both in print 华语 Taiwan Traditional 國語 Hong Kong and Macau Traditional Cantonese, with 普通话 also taught Two things the table cannot show. First, the split is about the written standard, not about what individual people can read: an educated reader in Taipei can usually read simplified text with a little effort, and one in Beijing can usually read traditional text. Second, the sentence pool this course draws its examples from is about 45 per cent traditional, partly because it was written by contributors from many places. That measured fact is why this course shows both forms from its first character lessons on, rather than deferring traditional characters to an a