It's that time of week again! This is the ninth installment of our fun facts series and this week we're thinking big. Read on for Bloomsbury Linguistics' Five Fun Facts about Mandarin Chinese!
1) It is estimated that 1 person in every 5 of the world’s population speaks a form of Chinese. With over 800 million speakers, Mandarin is the most widely used and has more native speakers than any other language. Used in some form as a national lingua franca since the 14th century, Mandarin is now the official language of the People’s Republic of China.
2) The English word ‘mandarin’ originally meant an official of the Chinese empire. These officials often had a variety of different home dialects and so spoke a standard language based on various northern dialects. Jesuit missionaries learnt this language in the 16th century and called it ‘mandarin’, or ‘language of the officials.’
3) Contrary to popular perceptions, Mandarin is not that complex. The grammar is straightforward and has none of the tenses, plurals, cases or genders common to European languages. The hardest bit is learning the tones. There are four tones in Mandarin, so one word can have up to four different meanings based on the intonation used to say it. For example:To practice the tones, try this tongue twister:
四是四，十是十，十四是十四，四十是四十，四十四只石狮子是死的
Sì shì sì, shí shì shí, shísì shì shísì, sìshí shì sìshí, sìshísì zhī shí shīzi shì sǐ de
Four is four, ten is ten, fourteen is fourteen, forty is forty. Forty four stone lions are dead.
4) For people learning Mandarin, the most difficult aspect is usually learning the Chinese characters. Chinese characters are not an alphabet. The writing system is roughly logosyllabic: a character generally represents one syllable of spoken Chinese and may be a word on its own or a part of a polysyllabic word. Over 2,000 characters need to be memorised to read a typical Chinese newspaper, and it is estimated that a Chinese college graduate recognizes 4,000 to 5,000 characters, and 40,000 to 60,000 words. Luckily Chinese can also be transliterated into Pinyin, which uses the Latin script.
This is ‘China’ written in character form. The left character shows some land (the world) with a line through the middle, representing China at the centre of the world. The right character is land with a king in the middle (王) with treasure next to him, represented by the dash on the right.
5) The classification of Chinese dialects evolved during the 20th century. In his Language Atlas of China (1987), the linguist Li Rong called Mandarin a ‘supergroup’ divided into eight dialect groups, distinguished by their treatment of the Middle Chinese entering tone. These are: Northeastern, Beijing, Ji-Lu, Jiao-Liao, Zhongyaun, Lan-Yin, Jiang-Huai, Southwestern. Rong believed that the Jin dialect was separate from Mandarin, something many other linguists dispute.
Linguistic map of Mandarin subgroups, including the disputed Jin dialect. Click the image to see the full sized map!
Come back next Thursday for five fun facts about ‘Singlish’!
Andrew Wardell
Editorial Assistant | Linguistics
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