LINGUISTIC VARIETIES AND MULTILINGUAL NATIONS

Click to edit Master subtitle style VARIETIES OF SPOKEN

CHINESE

Balqis bt Mohd Nasir 0827426

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Introduction

Chinese language was originally spoken by the Han Chinese. of the two Sino-Tibetan languages spoken by about one-fifth of the total population of Earth. Chinese comprises many regional varieties, the primary ones being Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, and Min. mutually intelligible, but for sociological and political reasons are considered a single Chinese language.
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One

Spoken

Not

Diversity
Chinese

consists of several dialect continuums. Differences in speech generally become more noticeable as distances increase with degree of change in intelligibility depending on region. the varieties of Mandarin spoken in all three northeastern Chinese provinces are mutually intelligible, but in the small province of Zhejiang a person from one valley may be completely unable to understand the language from the next, though both are considered dialects of Wu 4/28/12 Chinese.

i.e.

 Set

of seven dialect groups:

a) Mandarin(836 million speakers) - The group of dialects spoken in northern and southwestern China, makes up the largest spoken language in China. - Standard Mandarin, called Putonghua or Guoyu in Chinese, belongs to this group. - The official spoken language of the People's Republic of China, and Singapore. Also the official language of
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b) Wu (77 million) - Spoken in the provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and Shanghai. - Includes Shanghai dialect, sometimes taken as the representative of all Wu dialects. - Wu's subgroups are extremely diverse, which possibly comprises hundreds of distinct spoken forms which are not mutually intelligible amongst each other.
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c) Yue (Cantonese) (71 million) - Spoken in Guangdong, Guangxi, Hong Kong, Macau, parts of Southeast Asia and by Overseas Chinese with an ancestry tracing back to the Guangdong region. - Term "Cantonese" may cover all the Yue dialects. Not all varieties of Yue are mutually intelligible.

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d) Min (60 million) - Spoken in Fujian, Taiwan, parts of Southeast Asia particularly in Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore, and amongst Overseas Chinese who trace their roots to Fujian and Taiwan, particularly in New York City. - The largest Min language is Hokkien. - Also the most diverse, divided into seven subgroups defined on the basis of relative mutual intelligibility.
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e) Xiang (Hunanese) (36 million) - Spoken in Hunan. Xiang is usually divided into the "old" and "new" dialects, with the new dialects being significantly influenced by Mandarin. f) Hakka (34 million) - spoken by the Hakka people, a cultural group of the Han Chinese, in several provinces across southern China, in Taiwan, and in parts of Southeast Asia such as Malaysia and Singapore.
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g) Gan (31 million) - Spoken in Jiangxi, northwest of Fujian, and some parts of Anhui and Hubei. In the past, it was viewed as closely related to Hakka dialects.

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Sociolinguistic
Bilingualism

with Mandarin

- In southern China (not including Hong Kong and Macau) well-educated Chinese are generally fluent in Standard Mandarin, and most people have at least a good passive knowledge of it, in addition to being native speakers of their own local dialect. - Standard Mandarin is usually considered more formal and is required when speaking to a person who does not 4/28/12 understand the local dialect.

- The local dialect (be it nonstandard Mandarin or non-Mandarin) 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 Standard 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.
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Knowing the local dialect gives 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.
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Due to the variety in Chinese speech, Mandarin speakers from each area of China are very often prone to combine words from their local tongue into their Mandarin conversations. In addition, each area of China has its recognizable accents while speaking Mandarin. Generally, the nationalized standard form of Mandarin pronunciation is only heard on news and radio broadcasts. Even in the streets of Beijing, the flavour of Mandarin varies in pronunciation from the Mandarin heard on the media. 4/28/12

 Political

Issues

- Within mainland China, there has been a consistent urge towards promoting the standard language; for instance, the education system is entirely Mandarinmedium from the second year onwards. - At the national level, differences in dialect generally do not correspond to political divisions or categories, and this has prevented dialect from becoming the basis of identity politics.

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- Finally, the linguistic diversity of southern China makes it likely that in any large group of Chinese, Standard Mandarin will be the only form of speech that everyone understands. - In Taiwan, the government had a policy of promoting Standard Mandarin over the local languages, such as Taiwanese and Hakka. This policy was implemented rigidly when Standard Mandarin was the only language of instruction in schools, while English was offered as the compulsory second language.
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Examples of variation
The

Min languages are often regarded as one that has great differences from Standard Mandarin, in phonology, grammar, and vocabulary. illustrate: in Taiwanese, a variety of Hokkien in Min language, to express the idea that one is feeling a little ill ("I am not feeling well."), one might say:

To

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Go k-k lng tm-poh- b sngkhoi. which, when translated words by words into Mandarin, it would result to semantically unrecognizable sentence: W jij rn yu dnb w shungkui.
4/28/12 Could roughly be interpreted as:

Conclusion
The

situation in China has some characteristics that might be described as bilingualism or multilingualism: it is common for speakers of Chinese to be able to speak several varieties of the language, typically Standard Mandarin, the local dialect, and in some regions occasionally a regional lingua franca, such as Cantonese.

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Q & A Session
1)

What do you think the benefits that you will get by learning Chinese language in Malaysia? What will happen to Malay language in Malaysia if Chinese or English became more and more dominant in terms of its usage and status? Do you think Malay will survive or not?
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1)

References
Holmes, J. (2008). An introduction to sociolinguistic (3rd edition). England: Pearson Education Limited. Anonymous. (2010, July 15). Spoken chinese. Wikipedia. Retrieved July 28, 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Spoken_Chinese Anonymous. (2010, June 25). Varieties of
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