Chinese (Mandarin) - Language Overview

Chinese (Mandarin) is a beautiful language. For European and American people with non-Asian background, it will also appear quite exotic due to their signs instead of letters.

Chinese (Mandarin)

Geographical Extension

Chinese is spoken throughout China in various dialects, in Taiwan and Singapore. It is recognised as minority language in the United States and Mauritius. Mandarin is by far the most dominant and wide-spread variation and is mostly spoken in the north and southwest of China.

Spoken by

With 850 million speakers throughout the world, Chinese (Mandarin) is likely the language with the most speakers. The total speakers of Chinese language variations sum up to about 1.3 billion speakers.

Language Family and History

Mandarin is the standard Chinese which is used in school, in government agencies, in the media and as a common language of communication for natives of all the various Chinese variations.

Linguists think that all variations of Chinese and similar languages have developed from an original language called Proto-Sino-Tibetan. The earliest written records of Chinese language date back to the Zhou Dynasty (1122-256 BC). The language back then is now referred to as Old or Archaic Chinese. However, linguists have not been able to come to a consent of Old Chinese pronunciation and language. Even Middle Chinese cannot be fully reconstructed so that all hypotheses concerning the outdated versions of Chinese are tentative.

In contrast to European languages, Chinese has mostly been isolated throughout history. The vast majority of Mandarin speakers can be explained by geographical circumstances. The north of China is easier to travel than the mountains and rivers of the southern parts of China. Most Chinese variations which developed in the southern parts were used for all parts of life until very recently when the government introduced an educational reform and made Mandarin the compulsory language taught at schools in the mid-20th century.

Grammar Difficulty

Mandarin grammar is based on sentence structure and word order rather than on word changes (thus as verb conjugations or plural endings). Therefore, Mandarin is classified as an analytical (relying on syntax) language. However, Mandarin possesses a great variety of particles and classifiers to distinguish different moods and aspects. For natives of non-analytical languages, those grammar structures are very confusing and it takes some time to get used to the completely different approach.

Pronunciation Difficulty

For natives of European languages, the phonetic system of Mandarin is confusing at least. Mandarin has a set amount of syllables since letters can only be combined in a certain way. To increase the amount of phonetic elements, Mandarin uses five different tones to differ between the meaning: four different intonations (high level, high rising, low falling-rising, high falling) plus one unstressed (neutral) tone. For many non-natives, it is difficult to get the different syllables' pronunciation and especially the intonations right, which leads to a great risk of misunderstandings since a slightly altered intonation also alters the meaning of Chinese words.

Special Facts

Most Chinese natives speak at least two or three different variations of Chinese, one of them usually being Mandarin. They often speak their own regional variation, and sometimes other variations as well if they lived in several places. Even in Hongkong, which was English colony until 1997, Mandarin spreads as common language next to English and Cantonese (the Chinese variation officially spoken in Hongkong).

Other languages such as Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean have borrowed a major part of their writing and even vocabulary from Chinese.

Modern Mandarin only knows about 1,200 different syllables (including the different intonations) which leads to many words with the same pronunciation. In writing, however, each word has its own character so that written Mandarin is non-ambiguous where spoken Mandarin might be misunderstood. Therefore, many Mandarin words have developed to consist of two syllables instead of the original one syllable to make words non-ambiguous in spoken language as well. Compare: the English language knows over 8,000 different syllables.