[...]... population The native language of the Han people is called Hanyu the Han Language’ or Zhongwen ‘Language of China’ The broader sense of the English word Chinese refers to anyone from China The narrower sense of the word refers to the Han people or their native language There are over 1,000 million native speakers of Chinese (including some non-Han groups such as Hui and Man), who make up about a fifth of the. .. exactly the tones fall: On the entire syllable? On the voiced part of the syllable? On the nuclear vowel only? Or on the nuclear vowel and the coda? Moreover, since the 1960s, there have been important advances in phonological theory, which are not reflected in the standardization literature Since the 1950s, generative linguistics has significantly changed the field of phonology In particular, a number of. .. ‘language of the of cials’ or ‘Mandarin’ since the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) Chinese emperors made several efforts to standardize the language The first came from the emperor Shi Huang Di of the Qin Dynasty (221–206 BC), 1.2 3 H I S TO RY who unified the orthography of Chinese characters (a character is basically a monosyllabic word written as one graphic unit) During the Liu Chao period (AD 222–589), Chinese. .. regard, Chinese is the largest language in the world Chinese can be divided into several dialect families Each family in turn consists of many dialects Yuan (1989) divides Chinese into seven dialect families The Mandarin family (or the Northern family) is the largest, with over 70 per cent of the speakers The second largest, at about 8 per cent, is the Wu family, spoken in the area around Shanghai and the. .. to be the original Chinese The standardization movement reached a turning point after the founding of the Republic of China in 1912 Many of the active scholars had a western education and they introduced to China modern techniques of analysis, such as articulatory phonetics, acoustic phonetics, and phonemics Since then many descriptive works have been published, mostly in Chinese, on SC and other dialects... the Republic of China was founded in 1912 The People’s Republic of China (founded in 1949) continued to support the reform Over a period of half a century, three goals have been achieved: a standard spoken language, an alphabetic writing system, and vernacular writing 1.3.1 Standard Spoken Chinese The of cial body for language reform set up by the Republic of China proposed that a standard spoken Chinese. .. [th, w, j], therefore, the distribution of [a] is complete, but the distributions of [ɤ, o, e] complement one another Because of this, [ɤ, o, e] are said to be in complementary distribution, in that the distribution of one does not overlap with the distribution of another Sounds in complementary distribution can be represented by the same phoneme for two reasons; their distributions added together are... attempted by people from other dialect families As a result, most SC speakers, or most of those who think they are speaking SC, do not have a perfect pronunciation According to a recent survey (Chinese Ministry of Education 2004), 53 per cent of the people on Mainland China can speak SC, and of these, 20 per cent are fluent This puts the number of fluent SC speakers at about one tenth of the Chinese population... example, although I have previously discussed the topics of Chapter 9 (Duanmu 1990) and Chapter 11 (Duanmu 1989), the present analyses are quite different The Of ce of the Associate Provost for Academic and Multicultural Affairs and the Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, provided partial support in the summer of 1998, which facilitated the completion of this book P R E FA C E T O T H E PA... with scattered pockets in other parts of China and South East Asia The remaining two families, Xiang and Gan, are spoken in the provinces of Hunan and Jiangxi, respectively A striking aspect of Chinese is the lack of intelligibility across dialect families, that is, speakers from different dialect families often cannot understand each other Because of this, it is often said that Chinese dialects are in . The Phonology of Standard Chinese THE PHONOLOGY OF THE WORLD’S LANGUAGES General Editor: Jacques Durand The Phonology of Danish Hans Basbøll The Phonology of Dutch Geert Booij The Phonology of. Phonology of Standard Chinese San Duanmu The Phonology of Polish Edmund Gussmann The Phonology of English Michael Hammond The Phonology of Norwegian Gjert Kristoffersen The Phonology of Portuguese . Wheeler The Phonology of German Richard Wiese In preparation The Phonology of Icelandic and Faroese Kristján Árnason The Phonology of Tamil Prathima Christdas The Phonology of Italian Martin Krämer The