EALC 430

Introduction to Chinese Linguistics

History, Dialects and Language Diversity

Chilin Shih
Language Families
 Establishing Language Kinship
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Languages may be similar to each other because they
are related to each other. It is relatively easy to learn
languages that are related
– Easy to learn Spanish if you know French
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Languages may be similar because of language
contact and borrowing
– Easy to learn the word coffee
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Historical linguistics uses comparative methods to
reconstruct proto-languages and to establish language
families. One major task is to tease apart similarity
from kinship and borrowing
Chinese Belongs to Sino-Tibetan

Sino-Tibetan

Tibeto-Burman Sinitic (Chinese)

Indo-European
Sino-Tibetan
Altaic
Miao-Yao, Austro-Asiatic, Daic
Austronesian
Chinese History
 Dynamic Maps of Chinese History
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History is constantly changing. The evolving
maps are testimonies of the sometimes very
drastic political, social and population changes
Youtube video showing the dynamic maps of Chinese history
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Language evolves with people
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It follows the population development, moves
with people through wars and migration, grows
and dies under political, social and economical
forces
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The distribution of Chinese dialects reflects
Chinese history
 History and Language
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China is a melting pot that has been growing,
shrinking, dividing, combining and mixing for
thousands of years
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From the north came the influence of the Altaic
languages. China was occupied twice from the
north: Mongolian established the Yuan Dynasty,
and Manchurian established the Qing Dynasty
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Chinese shares many linguistic characteristics
with language families to the south: Hmong-
Mien (Miao Yao), Tai-Kadai (Daic) and Austro-
Asiatic languages
Language Typology by Word Forms
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Analytic/Isolating languages
– A word tends to consist of just one morpheme
(smallest unit of meaning)
– Example: Chinese, Vietnamese
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Agglutinating languages
– Words consist of many morphemes with one-to-one
mapping relationship with meaning
– Example: Turkish, Mongolian, Manchu
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Inflectional languages
– Classes and paradigms
– Example: Italian, Russian
 Influence from Other Languages
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Some features in Mandarin maybe due to the
influence of language contact
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The retroflex -er suffix may have come from the
northern agglutinative languages in the Altaic
family like Mongolian and Manchu
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Chinese shares many features with Hmong-
Mien languages to the south, such as being
tonal and being an analytic language
Chinese Dialects
 Mandarin
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The speech of officials 官話 guan1 hua4
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Lingua-Franca of China, connecting people who
speak different dialects
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People who served in the court, provincial or
local government spoke Mandarin
 Branches of Mandarin
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Northern Mandarin
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Eastern Mandarin (Lower Yangtze Mandarin)
– Retain entering tone; initial /l/ → /n/; differentiate
literary and colloquial readings
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Southwestern Mandarin (Upper Yangtze
Mandarin) 西南官話
– Immigration into Sichuan, Yunnan during Ming/ Qing
– No retroflex, no entering tone, different tone shapes
Chinese Dialect Map
 Southern Chinese Dialects
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Wu (Shanghai)
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Min (Amoy, Xiamen, Taiwan)
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Yue (Canton/Guangzhou, Hong Kong)
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Xiang
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Gan
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Hakka
 Chinese Dialects
Phonemica.net is a website where speakers can
upload speech recordings in Chinese dialects.
Many speakers tell their own stories in a
monologue
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Provides tiers for dialectal transcription, IPA
transcription, Mandarin translation,
Romanization and English translation. Many
speech were annotated (partially) by internet
users