Chinese Mandarin Voice Over Agency

Chinese (汉语 / 漢語; Hànyǔ or 中文; Zhōngwén) is a group of related but in many cases mutually unintelligible language varieties, forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Chinese is spoken by the Han majority and many other ethnic groups in China. Nearly 1.2 billion people (around 16% of the world’s population) speak some form of Chinese as their first language.

The varieties of Chinese are usually described by native speakers as dialects of a single Chinese language, but linguists note that they are as diverse as a language family. The internal diversity of Chinese has been likened to that of the Romance languages, but may be even more varied. There are between 7 and 13 main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin (about 960 million), followed by Wu (80 million), Yue (60 million) and Min (70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. All varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic.

Putonghua / Guoyu, often called “Mandarin”, is the official standard language used by the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of China (Taiwan), and Singapore (where it is called “Huayu” or simply Chinese). It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The governments of both countries intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore, it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools.

In mainland China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature: it is common for a Chinese to be able to speak two or even three varieties of the Sinitic languages (or “dialects”) together with Standard Chinese. For example, in addition to putonghua, a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese; and, if he or she grew up elsewhere, then he or she may also be likely to be fluent in the particular dialect of that local area. A native of Guangzhou may speak both Cantonese and putonghua. In addition to Mandarin, most Taiwanese also speak Minnan, Hakka or an Austronesian language. A Taiwanese may commonly mix pronunciations, phrases, and words from Mandarin and other Taiwanese languages, and this mixture is considered normal in daily or informal speech.

The official Chinese designation for the major branches of Chinese is fāngyán (方言, literally “regional speech”), whereas the more closely related varieties within these are called dìdiǎn fāngyán (地点方言/地點方言 “local speech”). Conventional English-language usage in Chinese linguistics is to use dialect for the speech of a particular place (regardless of status) while regional groupings like Mandarin and Wu are called dialect groups. Because varieties from different groups are not mutually intelligible, some scholars prefer to describe Wu and so on as languages. Jerry Norman called this practice misleading, pointing out that Wu, which itself contains many mutually unintelligible varieties, could not be properly called a single language under the same criterion, and that the same is true for each of the other groups.

Mutual intelligibility is considered by some linguists to be the main criterion for determining whether varieties are separate languages or dialects of a single language, although others do not regard it as decisive, particularly when cultural factors interfere as they do with Chinese. As Campbell (2008) explains, linguists often ignore mutual intelligibility when varieties share intelligibility with a central variety (i.e. prestige variety, such as Standard Mandarin), as the issue requires some careful handling when mutual intelligibility is inconsistent with language identity. John DeFrancis considers the mutual unintelligibility too great for the term “dialects” to be used to refer to the different varieties, but also objects to considering them as separate languages, as it incorrectly implies a set of disruptive “religious, economic, political, and other differences” between speakers that exist, for example, between French Catholics and English Protestants in Canada, but not between speakers of Cantonese and Mandarin in China, owing to China’s near-uninterrupted history of centralized government.

Because of the difficulties involved in determining the difference between language and dialect, other terms have been proposed: ISO 639-3 follows Ethnologue in assigning individual language codes to the 13 main subdivisions, while Chinese as whole is classified as a ‘macrolanguage’. Other options include vernacular, lect regionalect, topolect, and variety.

Chinese itself has a term for its unified writing system, Zhōngwén (中文),[citation needed] while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hànyǔ (汉语/漢語, “spoken language[s] of the Han Chinese”[citation needed])—this term could be translated to either “language” or “languages” since Chinese lacks grammatical number. For centuries in China, owing to the widespread use of a written standard in Classical Chinese, there was no uniform speech-and-writing continuum, as indicated by the employment of two separate morphemes yǔ 语/語 and wén 文. The characters used in written Chinese are logographs that denote morphemes as a whole[citation needed] rather than their phonemes, although most logographs are compounds of similar-sounding characters and semantic disambiguation (the “radical”). Modern-day Chinese speakers of all kinds communicate using the modern standard written language, the written form of Standard Chinese.

Most Chinese people consider the spoken varieties as one single language because speakers share a common culture and history, as well a shared national identity and a common written form. Han native speakers of Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese, for instance, may consider their own linguistic varieties as distinct spoken varieties, but the Han Chinese as one—albeit internally very diverse—ethnicity. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmented and disunified than it actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. Additionally, in Taiwan it is closely associated with Taiwanese independence, some of whose supporters promote the local Taiwanese Hokkien variety.