Characteristics of Chinese Language

Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the people in the world speak some form of Chinese as their native language. Even though many dialects of Chinese are so different they are mutually unintelligible, they are all classified as one Chinese language. The official language of government and education in the People‘s Republic of China is called Putonghua 普通话 (means the common speech), which is based on Beijing-area Mandarin. Mandarin, the official language in Taiwan, is called Guo'yu 國語. Mandarin is called Hua'yu 华语 in South East Asia. Since there is no alphabet in the Chinese language, the principles of the Hanyu Pinyin (means Chinese spell sound) system is used as an oral representation of Chinese characters. This is the basis for creating the Latin script reading of a character, and represents the spoken sounds of Putonghua. While there are many spoken dialects in Chinese, there is only one written Chinese. The Chinese written language is of an old and conservative type that assigns a single distinctive symbol, or character, to each word in the vocabulary. Each character represents a word or idea rather than a sound. In the mid 1950s, the Chinese government simplified some 2000 of the most frequently used characters in an effort to popularize literacy. Today, China and Singapore use these “Simplified Chinese” characters called Jian Ti Zi 简体字 (literally means simple-style-characters), and Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao still use “Traditional Chinese” characters called Fan Ti Zi 繁體字 ( literally means complicated-style-characters).

Let’s look at some characteristics of the Chinese language.

• Chinese is monosyllabic and each individual character represents an idea or thing. Chinese often uses combinations of monosyllables to express different meanings. Today there is a trend of more and more polysyllabic words forming.
• Chinese is a tonal language and the variance in pitch creates a different representation of meaning to the listener. Tone is extremely important in Chinese, as the same pronunciation with different tones can mean totally different things, and when you say Chinese without proper tones, you may not be understood at all.
• Chinese has SVO (subject + verb+ object) word order.
• Chinese is a topic-prominent language, which organizes its syntax to make sentences "topic-comment structured", where the topic is the thing being talked about (predicated), and the comment is what is said about the topic. This structure is independent of the syntactic ordering of SVO (subject + verb+ object), and may be marked by mentioning the topic first in the sentence and then the comment.
• Chinese is an isolating language in which almost every word consists of a single morpheme (a meaningful unit of language). Chinese depends on word order and sentence structure rather than changes in the form of the word through inflection.
• Chinese does not have tenses. There are, however, words to indicate the passage of time, tomorrow, now, and so forth.
• Chinese does not use grammatical gender.
• Chinese has an extensive measure word system.