Languages and Dialects in China

Abstract

THE accompanying Linguistic Map of China, based upon the (small) Shun Pao Map of China, revised edition, 1934, gives an idea of the dis? tribution of languages and dialects in China. So far as areas are concerned it looks as if nearly half of China were non-Chinese speaking. Since however the population of China is concentrated in China proper, actually only about 5 per cent. of the people speak non-Chinese languages. Within China proper the dialects of Chinese may be divided into roughly nine main groups. Of the Cantonese group, the Hakka group (to which most of Kiangsi belongs), and the Amoy-Swatow group (to which a part of Hainan Island belongs), are characterized by their preservation of ancient consonantal endings -m, -py -t, -k. The Foochow dialect forms a group apart, though near the AmoySwatow group in many respects. The Wu-dialects (including Shanghai and Yungkia (Wenchow)) and the Hsiang group * (including most of Hunan, though Changsha is not typical) are characterized by their retaining ancient voiced or sonant initials like b-y d-y g-y v-y z-y etc. The majority of Chinese, roughly two-thirds of the population and covering three-quarters of the area of China proper, speak some form of a standard speech known as Mandarin among Westerners and among the Chinese as Kuan-huay Official Speech; P'u-funghuay General Speech; or Kuo-yuy National Language. These and other transcriptions in this note are upon the Wade system. The National Language in the new official script is Gwoyeu. Within the limits of common intelligibility and great uniformity in vocabulary, Mandarin may be further sub-divided. A Northern group includes the Hwang Ho basin, and all of Manchuria. To this group belongs the dialect of Peiping, whose pronunciation has been taken as the standard. A Southern Mandarin group covers the area between Hankow and Nanking. An extremely uniform group is South-western Mandarin, covering several provinces con? taining Chungking, Kunming, Kweiyang, and Kweilin, extending eastwards in the form of a wedge up to and including the Wu-Han cities. All Mandarin dialects agree in having very simple sound systems. They have four or five tones. They have a common vocabulary for the most frequent words like ni, you; (w)oy I; tay he, she, it; tiox te for possessive or qualifying particle; chekoy this; nakoy that; shemoy what; puy not; etc. The mutual intelligibility between speakers of these different dialects depends, as in the case of other languages, both upon their dialects and upon the education of the speakers. The three groups of Mandarin dialects may be regarded as one language, like the language of all English-speaking people of the world. Then, if abstraction is made of the fact, with all its consequences, that all China writes one common idiom in one common system of orthography, we can say that the other groups of dialects are about as far from Mandarin as say Dutch or Low German from English. On the whole, the differences between any two groups of dialects in China are less marked than