ABSTRACT
Language is a fundamental building block of any culture. Chinese, Zhongwen or Hanyu, is commonly known as the language with the largest number of speakers, about 1.3 billion. However, sharing the language of Chinese does not guarantee mutual intelligibility among all its speakers. Hence, what is commonly known as the “Chinese language” is in fact a linguistic misnomer. Chinese, in its singular form, implies a monolithic linguistic entity, whereas in reality, the so-called Chinese language consists of numerous fangyan, or groups of regional varieties, some of which can be as different as the Romance languages of Europe (Norman 1988). Thus a Chinese speaker from the northern part of the country, such as the capital city of Beijing, is unlikely to understand another Chinese speaker from the southern part of the country, like the city of Guangzhou. Linguists usually classify the Chinese varieties into seven or eight regional groups, Beifanghua or Guanhua (Mandarin), Wu, Yue (Cantonese), Gan, Xiang, Kejia (Hakka) and Min, which some scholars further divide into northern Min and southern Min (De Francis 1984). The non-Mandarin varieties are also commonly known as southern dialects. Furthermore, many linguists identify four major dialect groups within Mandarin: northern, northwestern, southwestern, Jiang-Huai (Norman 1988; Chen 1999). One northern Mandarin dialect, Beijing Mandarin, is officially designated as the phonological basis for the standard language of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), or Putonghua. Hence, according to linguistic views of Chinese languages and dialects, the term “Chinese” masks linguistic diversity among and within regional language varieties. By associating the term “Chinese” or the “Chinese language” with the people(s) of China and those of Chinese origin, the singular label makes invisible, or rather erases, the vast number of languages used by ethnic minority groups living in Han Chinese dominant territories – namely, the PRC and Taiwan 1 – and non-Chinese languages used in Chinese diaspora communities around the world. However, the reader needs to be aware of a difference between the earlier linguistic description of what constitutes Chinese and a widely shared view among many Chinese speakers that the various fangyan are sub-varieties of a single language called “Chinese” (see, e.g. De Francis 1984; Chen 2007). The fact that speakers of diverse, even mutually unintelligible fangyan share a standard Chinese writing system further strengthens this belief in a shared Chinese language among speakers of regional dialects. The Chinese script, or Hanzi “Chinese characters” as it is called in Mandarin, is believed by many to be a unifying 100emblem of Chinese culture that transcends linguistic, geographic and temporal divides. However, as De Francis (1984) points out, the appearance of the uniformity and universality of the written Chinese script across space and time is largely an illusion.
