Author: Mahima Khan

Chinese language

Introduction

The Chinese language is highly considered the oldest languageofthe world with a unique history of at least six thousand years. The ancient Chinese language went through many changes in its variety of carnations. The Chinese language has its unique and ancient written pattern and spoken style as well. This language with a variety of hundred languages is not buildup just in days but it took more than centuries(Šamajová& Zahradníková, 2022). The Chinese language has a vast background and ages to develop and stable position. The dialects of the Chinese language have been changing according to the regions and political changes. This is very interesting in the Chinese language that the majority of characters are written versions of spoken sound that may consist of meanings. The Chinese language is multidimensional as there is a unity in the written language but a variety of dialects and spoken is quite different and this wide range is very deep and impressive. Spoken Chinese can be identified with a distinguishing feature of its high level of internal diversity.

History of the language

Chinese is a language that is as old as the world. Its origin is mentioned since 8500 _c .2070BCE.This language has the potential and life that it has survived a long period and remains strong even with an increase in the kingdom of China(Guo, 2021). The Chineselanguage belongs to the Sino_Tibten language group.As the same as the English is quite different along with Germans, Hindus, French, etc. Tibetan is a major genetic grouping of language.The Sino _Tibetan society has prevailed from northeastern India to northeastern China. This is also studied that there are billion plus speakers of the Chinese language from Southeast Asia, South Asia. The earliest era of this language writing system was mostly in pictorial form.The writing styles based on the pictorial pattern were abandoned soon because it was quite difficult to represent the abstract ideas in the pictorial form, and sometimes it happened that that idea of the same object was drawn differently and that created a great kind of issues to understand the exact idea(Weinmann, Neilsen, & Slavich, 2021).Thus,in the 3^rd century B.C.E,Chinese writing was officially designed that is not much different than today's modern Chinese writing. There is a variety of languages in China and the prominent language is Standard Chinese based on central mandarin, but the fact is that there are hundreds of related Chinese languages, named as Hanyu, a simplified version;traditional Chinese 漢語; named as pinyin.

Thegrammar of the language

The Chinese language is unique in its structure and a kind of tough subject to command over the Chinese language. English is declared as an Indo-European language(Xie, Ryder, & Chen, 2019). This means the under discussion  language family includes a lot more languages enlisted as Spanish,French,and Portuguese along with these Slavic languages too like Russian,Czech.and Polish, and a lot more.it means all the mentioned languages havethe same pattern of word sentence structure such as a subject-verb-object,on the contrary Chinese, has a unique setup,it is not the same lie the Indo-European family,it is originated and is named from the Sino-Tibetan language,with a quite system and structure of grammar(Fan, 2021).While this individuality in the grammatical structure quite pleases its reader with its simplicity and consistent logical structure.

Chinese does not consist of any alphabet;rather it has characters named “hanzi (汉字)”that are used to describe the different sounds.These characters can also be written using the roman letters system called PINYIN. It is advised that all beginners of the Chinese language must have to learn the pinyin language to master Chinese grammar.

Letters in the language

In the Chinese language, there are 24 basic characters, and all the thousands of the others are considered as the combination of these basic elements China has ever wondered the world with its surprises and the same is with the case of language(Nguyen, 2021).This language has a system of more than 7000 characters,this is well described in the modern Chinese Mandarin expresses that there are 7000 characters in the Chinese language...If any beginner wants to learn Chinese only 2600 characters must be learned well.

Figure 1: Chinese Letters

Phonetic system

In Chinese,Pinyin is the common phonetic system.This system is used in schools of the mainland to teach Chinese to children.And also adopted by the foreigners to learn Mandarin as the 2^nd language.Pinyin is a source for transcribing the standard language Mandarin Chinese with 25 European characters, but the letter “v” is not used ever .(Chao, 2020).There is a similarity between the characters of both letters with a slight difference between both.There is a need to pay  attention particularly  to the letters that may not be pronounced entirely as one would expect, ch,j,q,r, sh,x,z, and Zh.The only way to learn the Chinese language is just by learning their meanings and pronunciation by rote(Zhang, 2019).Luckily there are phonetic systems that help a lot of the students to study Chinese characters.These phonetics are used in the dictionaries and textbooks so that the students may learn Chinese very easily with a specific character.There is a variety of phonetic systems in the Chinese language as pinyin and Bopomofo. Pinyin is not only the phonetic system in the Chinese language to learn Mandarin, but there are also several systems and Bopomofo is another system regarding this.The basic advantage of the Bopomofo system is to identify its characters easily.

In Mandarin Chinese there are Twenty One basic sounds:

	Unaspirated	Aspirated	Nasal	Voiceless fricative	Voiced fricative
Labial	B	P	m	F
Alveolar	D	T	n		L
Velar	G	K		h
Palatal	J	Q		x
Dental sibilant	Z	C		s
Retroflex	Zh	Ch		sh	R

 

In Mandarin Chinese there are 35 basic  sounds:

6 simple basics:	a, e, I, o, u, ü
13 compound finals:	ai, ao, ei, ia, iao, ie, iou, ou, ua, uai, üe, uei, uo
16 nasal finals:	8 front nasals: an, en, ian, in, uan, üan, uen, ün 8 back nasals: ang, eng, iang, ing, iong, ong, uang, ueng

 

 List of Additional syllables in Mandarin Chinese:

7 special cases:

er, hm, hng, m, n, ng, ~r

 

This is the Chinese phonetic alphabet chart that represents the Chinese language, but these are not pronounced as the letters in the European English language.

 

The language of EU

This is a fact that China is a country that is making its place in the European countries and these countries are taking a great interest in learning the Chinese language.This has been surveyed in European countries that In the United Kingdom Chinese is spoken as mother tongue.

The UK 0.53%

Malta 0.39%

Austria region 0.37%

Belgium 0.36%

Germany 0.32%

France 0.25%

Ireland 0.23%

Netherlands 0.4%

This language is being adopted on a large scale in European countries.To develop the trade sector and also with a rich cultural ancient land with a combination of the old and the Modern cultural beauty and pride.

How many people speak this language?

China is a country that has a historical rich background on a cultural basis as well literature basis.The whole population of China speaks the Chinese Language.Along with China,this language is immersed all around the world(Mezard, 2018).According to Ethnologue, Chinese with all its varieties and especially Mandarin and Wu is the most spoken language all over the world.And there are nearly 1.31 billion people who speak the Chinese language as well.This is approximately 16% of the whole world.This ratio of spoken Chinese language shows how successfully this language is being adopted around the world.This I because of China's political policies and economical strategies, which may be enabling other countries to learn and speak the Chinese language.

Is it the language of public policy?

This is well described and declared by the Government of China that “all ethnic groups in China are free and they a choice to settle and develop their own spoken system and language that can be written “Public policy can be described as what the government does or does not about solving an issue that they face or the people of their country. Thus Chinese language is declared as the official language of China, and the Chinese speak a variety of languages all over the country (Li, S. 2020). Thegovernment has made a policy about the language as there should be one language that must be declared as the official language of China. Mandarin is the official language of China and this satirized scale helps in developing the public policy to develop better communication with the other nation around the world. Thus the steps taken to make the language in a uniform condition, the government has made rules and regulations to university the language as this was the most discussed issue during independence.

Does it become a policy issue to the country?

China is a country that has a set of verities of language and multiscripts of 56 nationalities,along with more than 10 written scripts and even more than a hundred languages.During the 18^th Meeting of 9^th NationalPeople’s Congress standing committee of the people of China, in October2000,a historical decision about the Law of the People s Republic of China on the Standard Spoken and scripted  Chinese language has been presented as the first national law on language.This law considers the Putonguage and standard Chinese characters as the national general language.According to this law,Putonghua and standard characters of the Chinese language.This has been accepted by all the Chinese regions to develop a standardized pattern of Language .this has not created any kind of issue or problem for the Chinese people and also with the Chinese government policies.

Are there any resources allocated in the promotion of this language?

As the law became a part of the constitution of Chinese government, the Chinese, from all the provinces, set or designed themeasures for implementation of the language to discuss thepreciseissues. This is a great fact that such policies implemented by the government reveal that the decades of efforts, China has proven its framework for a language law scheme. Such language policy introduced by the government was just toosumptuous the guiding ideology, objective, and responsibilities (Yin et al., 2021). In this regard, one of the main tools is to promote the Putonghua language as the national language,is by celebrating Putonghua Promotion week, which is seized during the 3^rd week of September each year since 1998.This celebration involves almost every part of the country not only big cities but also the towns and villages. To make the Putonghua Dialect implemented,Putonghua Proficiency Test has been introduced.This language standard is considered the key to getting the job officially.This dialect is a must and necessary for those who want to join teaching and the media.

Whether this language has silenced any other language?

China is a country that has a variety of languages, dialects, accents, and spoken differences but with the basic structure of writing. There are various languages in China with sound policies on regional, national, and international levels. The changes implemented by the government are so strong, reasonable, and true in the sense that the republic of China accepted it widely and made it possible to make it a language of the policy, language of trade, business, and also the language of international affairs (Cassels et al., 2021).

The effects of the policy of the government regarding the life of other languages have not affected at all.This policy and the law have not affected negatively the region as the people of China are already used to various dialects to use in their spoken, so it has no major differences.The government has taken this step to make it easy for foreigners to study in their country,to publish newspapers,and to print books as well.This has made learning the Chinese language easy for foreigners.Though the implementation of Putonghua as a national language has affected minority languages as there is a difference in the dialect, accent, and script as well.

Works Cited

Chao, S.-Y. (2020). Queer Representations in Chinese-language Film and the Cultural Landscape: Amsterdam University Press.

Fan, H. (2021). Exploring the Value of Chinese Language and Literature Research in Cultural Inheritance. Frontiers in Educational Research, 4(16).

Guo, Z. (2021). A Study of Chinese Language Teaching at British Universities: How Communicative Are Chinese Teachers’ Methods. Int. J. Chin. Lang. Teach, 2, 66-86.

Mezard, M. (2018). Brief history of Chinese medicine in France. Chinese Medicine and Culture, 1(3), 103-107.

Nguyen, T. T. T. (2021). English and Chinese language ideologies among Vietnamese students in Taiwan: the construction of an ideal neoliberal self. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 1-22.

Šamajová, K., & Zahradníková, M. (2022). Key Factors in the successful implementation of Chinese language courses in upper secondary schools: a case study from the Czech Republic. The Language Learning Journal, 1-14.

Weinmann, M., Neilsen, R., & Slavich, S. (2021). Multiculturalism and the “broken” discourses of Chinese language education. The future of multiculturalism in turbulent times. Asia-Europe Education Dialogue series. Abingdon: Routledge, Taylor & Francis.

Xie, Y., Ryder, L., & Chen, Y. (2019). Using interactive virtual reality tools in an advanced Chinese language class: A case study. TechTrends, 63(3), 251-259.

Zhang, H. (2019). Study on existing problems and suggested solutions of teaching in history of Chinese modern literature course. Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, 294, 401-405.

Han, Y., & Cassels Johnson, D. (2021). Chinese language policy and Uyghur youth: examining language policies and language ideologies. Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 20(3), 183-196.

Yin, J., Ding, Y., & Song, M. (2021). Literacy planning: Family language policy in Chinese kindergartener families. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 1-14.

Li, S. (2020). “We only speak Chinese at home”: A case study of an immigrant Chinese family’s Family Language Policy in New Zealand. He Kapu, 6(3), 41-50.