Sinophone

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Map of the Chinese-speaking world.
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Countries and regions with a native Chinese-speaking majority
Countries and regions where Chinese is not native but an official or educational language
Countries with significant Chinese-speaking minorities Map-Sinophone World.png
Map of the Chinese-speaking world.
  Countries and regions with a native Chinese-speaking majority
  Countries and regions where Chinese is not native but an official or educational language
  Countries with significant Chinese-speaking minorities

Sinophone, which means "Chinese-speaking", typically refers to an individual who speaks at least one variety of Chinese (that is, one of the Sinitic languages). Academic writers often use the term Sinophone in two definitions: either specifically "Chinese-speaking populations where it is a minority language, excluding Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan" or generally "Chinese-speaking areas, including where it is an official language". [1] Many authors use the collocation Sinophone world or Chinese-speaking world to mean the Chinese-speaking world itself (consisting of Greater China and Singapore) or the distribution of the Chinese diaspora outside of Greater China.

Contents

Mandarin Chinese is the most commonly spoken variety of the Chinese language today, with over 1 billion total speakers (approximately 12% of the world population), of which about 900 million are native speakers, making it the most spoken first language in the world and second most spoken overall. [2] It is the official variety of Chinese in mainland China, Taiwan, and Singapore. Meanwhile, Cantonese is the official variety of Chinese in Hong Kong and Macau and is also widely spoken among significant Overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia as well as the rest of the world.

Etymology

  1. Sum of 'Cantonese' and 'Mandarin'.
  2. Figures for Cantonese.
  3. Sum of 'Chinese' and 'Chinese and English'.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chinese language</span> National language of China

Chinese is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China. Approximately 1.35 billion people, or 17% of the global population, speak a variety of Chinese as their first language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mandarin Chinese</span> Major branch of Chinese languages

Mandarin is a group of Chinese language dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language of China. Because Mandarin originated in North China and most Mandarin dialects are found in the north, the group is sometimes referred to as Northern Chinese. Many varieties of Mandarin, such as those of the Southwest and the Lower Yangtze, are not mutually intelligible with the standard language. Nevertheless, Mandarin as a group is often placed first in lists of languages by number of native speakers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Standard Chinese</span> Standard form of Chinese and official language of China

Standard Chinese is a modern standard form of Mandarin Chinese that was first codified during the republican era (1912‒1949). It is designated as the official language of mainland China and a major language in the United Nations, Singapore, and Taiwan. It is largely based on the Beijing dialect. Standard Chinese is a pluricentric language with local standards in mainland China, Taiwan and Singapore that mainly differ in their lexicon. Hong Kong written Chinese, used for formal written communication in Hong Kong and Macau, is a form of Standard Chinese that is read aloud with the Cantonese reading of characters.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yue Chinese</span> Primary branch of Chinese spoken in southern China

Yue is a branch of the Sinitic languages primarily spoken in Southern China, particularly in the provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Min Chinese</span> Primary branch of Sinitic spoken in southern China and Taiwan

Min is a broad group of Sinitic languages with about 70 million native speakers. These languages are spoken in Fujian province as well as by the descendants of Min-speaking colonists on the Leizhou Peninsula and Hainan and by the assimilated natives of Chaoshan, parts of Zhongshan, three counties in southern Wenzhou, the Zhoushan archipelago, Taiwan and scattered in pockets or sporadically across Hong Kong, Macau, and several countries in Southeast Asia, particularly Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Vietnam, Brunei. The name is derived from the Min River in Fujian, which is also the abbreviated name of Fujian Province. Min varieties are not mutually intelligible with one another nor with any other variety of Chinese.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Southern Min</span> Branch of the Min Chinese languages

Southern Min, Minnan or Banlam, is a group of linguistically similar and historically related Chinese languages that form a branch of Min Chinese spoken in Fujian, most of Taiwan, Eastern Guangdong, Hainan, and Southern Zhejiang. Southern Min dialects are also spoken by descendants of emigrants from these areas in diaspora, most notably in Southeast Asia, such as Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Brunei, Southern Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Southern and Central Vietnam, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York City. Minnan is the most widely-spoken branch of Min, with approximately 48 million speakers as of 2017–2018.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Varieties of Chinese</span> Family of local language varieties

There are hundreds of local Chinese language varieties forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family, many of which are not mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast part of mainland China. The varieties are typically classified into several groups: Mandarin, Wu, Min, Xiang, Gan, Jin, Hakka and Yue, though some varieties remain unclassified. These groups are neither clades nor individual languages defined by mutual intelligibility, but reflect common phonological developments from Middle Chinese.

Taishanese, alternatively romanized in Cantonese as Toishanese or Toisanese, in local dialect as Hoisanese or Hoisan-wa, is a Yue Chinese dialect native to Taishan, Guangdong. Although related, Taishanese has little mutual intelligibility with Cantonese. Taishanese is also spoken throughout Sze Yup, located on the western fringe of the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong China. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, most of the Chinese emigration to North America originated from Sze Yup. Thus, up to the mid-20th century, Taishanese was the dominant variety of the Chinese language spoken in Chinatowns in Canada and the United States. It was formerly the lingua franca of the overseas Chinese residing in the United States.

Cantonese is the traditional prestige variety of Yue Chinese, a Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages originating from the city of Guangzhou and its surrounding Pearl River Delta, with over 82.4 million native speakers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Teochew Min</span> Southern Min language of China

Teochew, also known as Teo-Swa, is a Southern Min language spoken by the Teochew people in the Chaoshan region of eastern Guangdong and by their diaspora around the world. It is sometimes referred to as Chiuchow, its Cantonese rendering, due to English romanization by colonial officials and explorers. It is closely related to Hokkien, as it shares some cognates and phonology with Hokkien.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Written Cantonese</span> Cantonese written tradition

Written Cantonese is the most complete written form of a Chinese language after that for Mandarin Chinese and Classical Chinese. Written Chinese was the main literary language of China until the 19th century. Written vernacular Chinese first appeared in the 17th century, and a written form of Mandarin became standard throughout China in the early 20th century. Cantonese is a common language in places like Hong Kong and Macau. While the Mandarin form can to some extent be read and spoken word for word in other Chinese varieties, its intelligibility to non-Mandarin speakers is poor to incomprehensible because of differences in idioms, grammar and usage. Modern Cantonese speakers have therefore developed new characters for words that do not exist and have retained others that have been lost in standard Chinese.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hoklo people</span> Han Chinese subgroup

The Hoklo people are a Han Chinese subgroup who speak Hokkien, a Southern Min language, or trace their ancestry to southeastern Fujian in China, and known by various related terms such as Banlam people, Minnan people, or more commonly in Southeast Asia as the Hokkien people. The Hokkien people are found in significant numbers in mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, Brunei, Myanmar, the United States, Hong Kong, and Macau. The Hokkien people have a distinct culture and architecture, including Hokkien shrines and temples with tilted sharp eaves, high and slanted top roofs, and finely detailed decorative inlays of wood and porcelain. The Hokkien language, which includes Taiwanese Hokkien, is the mainstream Southern Min, which is partially mutually intelligible to the Teochew language, Hainanese, Leizhou Min, and Haklau Min.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pinghua</span> Branch of Chinese spoken in Guangxi

Pinghua is a pair of Sinitic languages spoken mainly in parts of Guangxi, with some speakers in Hunan. Pinghua is a trade language in some areas of Guangxi, spoken as a second language by speakers of Zhuang languages. Some speakers are officially classified as Zhuang, and many are genetically distinct from most other Han Chinese. The northern subgroup is centered on Guilin and the southern subgroup around Nanning. The Southern dialect has several notable features such as having four distinct checked tones, and using various loanwords from the Zhuang languages, such as the final particle wei for imperative sentences.

The Han Chinese people can be defined into subgroups based on linguistic, cultural, ethnic, genetic, and regional features. The terminology used in Mandarin to describe the groups is: "minxi", used in mainland China or "zuqun", used in Taiwan. No Han subgroup is recognized as one of People's Republic of China's 56 official ethnic groups, in Taiwan only three subgroups, Hoklo, Hakka and Waishengren are recognized.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sinitic languages</span> Branch of Sino-Tibetan languages

The Sinitic languages, often synonymous with the Chinese languages, are a group of East Asian analytic languages that constitute a major branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. It is frequently proposed that there is a primary split between the Sinitic languages and the rest of the family. This view is rejected by some researchers but has found phylogenetic support among others. The Macro-Bai languages, whose classification is difficult, may be an offshoot of Old Chinese and thus Sinitic; otherwise, Sinitic is defined only by the many varieties of Chinese unified by a shared historical background, and usage of the term "Sinitic" may reflect the linguistic view that Chinese constitutes a family of distinct languages, rather than variants of a single language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Languages of Taiwan</span> Austronesian and Sino-Tibetan languages

The languages of Taiwan consist of several varieties of languages under the families of Austronesian languages and Sino-Tibetan languages. The Formosan languages, a geographically designated branch of Austronesian languages, have been spoken by the Taiwanese indigenous peoples for thousands of years. Owing to the wide internal variety of the Formosan languages, research on historical linguistics recognizes Taiwan as the Urheimat (homeland) of the whole Austronesian languages family. In the last 400 years, several waves of Han emigrations brought several different Sinitic languages into Taiwan. These languages include Taiwanese Hokkien, Hakka, and Mandarin, which have become the major languages spoken in present-day Taiwan.

Malaysian Mandarin (simplified Chinese: 马来西亚华语; traditional Chinese: 馬來西亞華語; pinyin: Mǎláixīyà Huáyǔ; Wade–Giles: Ma3-lai2-hsi1-ya4 Hua2-yü3) is a variety of Mandarin Chinese spoken in Malaysia by ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. Today, Malaysian Mandarin is the lingua franca of the Malaysian Chinese community.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chinese language in the United States</span> Chinese languages; the third-most spoken after English and Spanish

Chinese, including Mandarin and Cantonese among other varieties, is the third most-spoken language in the United States, and is mostly spoken within Chinese-American populations and by immigrants or the descendants of immigrants, especially in California and New York. Around 2004, over 2 million Americans spoke varieties of Chinese, with Mandarin becoming increasingly common due to immigration from mainland China and to some extent Taiwan. Within this category, approximately one third of respondents described themselves as speaking Cantonese or Mandarin specifically, with the other two thirds answering "Chinese", despite the lack of mutual intelligibility between different varieties of Chinese. This phenomenon makes it more difficult to readily identify the relative prevalence of any single Chinese language in the United States.

Shu-mei Shih is a Korean-born Taiwanese American scholar and literary theorist. She is a Professor of Comparative Literature, Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies at University of California, Los Angeles and was the president of the American Comparative Literature Association from 2021 to 2022. In 2018, she was also appointed as Honorary Chair Professor of Taiwan Languages, Literature and Culture at National Taiwan Normal University and is the current director of the UCLA-NTNU Taiwan Studies Initiative of the UCLA Asia Pacific Center.

References

  1. McDonald, Edward. The '中国通' or the 'Sinophone'? Towards a political economy of Chinese language teaching, School of Asian Studies, University of Auckland, 2010.
  2. "Summary by language size". Ethnologue. 3 October 2018.
  3. "On the Phone | Printculture". 2012-11-30. Retrieved 2022-10-19.
  4. Shih, Shu-mei; Tsai, Chien-hsin; Bernards, Brian (2013-01-22). Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader. Columbia University Press. ISBN   978-0-231-52710-1.
  5. Republic of Singapore Independence Act 1965( No. 9 of 1965,1985 Rev. Ed. ), s7.
  6. Norman (1988), p. 191.
  7. West, Barbara A. (2009). Encyclopedia of the Peoples of Asia and Oceania. Facts on File. pp. 289–290. ISBN   978-0816071098. eBook: ISBN   978-1438119137.
  8. Kamila Ghazali. "National Identity and Minority Languages". UN Chronicle. Archived from the original on November 2, 2012. Retrieved 4 September 2013.
  9. Gomez (2012), p. 185.
  10. Wurm, Mühlhäusler & Tryon (2011), p. 698.
  11. Yang, Gong et al., The Teaching and Learning of Chinese as a Second or Foreign Language: The Current Situation and Future Directions, Frontiers of Education in China, March 2020.
  12. Shao, Grace. Chinese Progresses as a World Language, Language Magazine, 6 January 2021.
  13. Wakefield, John C., ed. (2019). Cantonese as a Second Language: Issues, Experiences, and Suggestions for Teaching and Learning. Routledge Studies in Applied Linguistics. Manhattan, New York: Routledge. p. 45. ISBN   978-1-032-09316-1.
  14. "Summary by language size". Ethnologue. 3 October 2018. Retrieved 2021-03-07.
  15. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 "Population by language, sex and urban/rural residence". UNdata. Archived from the original on 19 May 2016. Retrieved 13 October 2015.
  16. "IPUMS USA". usa.ipums.org. Retrieved 2019-03-31.

Works cited

  • Gomez, Terence (2012). Chinese Business in Malaysia: Accumulation, Accommodation and Ascendance. Routledge. ISBN   978-1-136-11226-3.
  • Norman, Jerry (1988). Chinese. Cambridge language surveys. Cambridge University Press. ISBN   978-0-521-29653-3.
  • Wurm, Stephen A.; Mühlhäusler, Peter; Tryon, Darrell T. (2011). Atlas of Languages of Intercultural Communication in the Pacific, Asia, and the Americas: Vol I: Maps. Vol II: Texts. Walter de Gruyter. ISBN   978-3-11-081972-4.

General references

See also

Sinophone
Traditional Chinese 漢語圈
Simplified Chinese 汉语圈
Literal meaningHan language circle
Transcriptions
Standard Mandarin
Hanyu Pinyin Hànyǔquān
Bopomofo ㄏㄢˋ ㄩˇ ㄑㄩㄢ
Wade–Giles Han4-yü3-ch'üan1
IPA [xân.ỳ.tɕʰɥɛ́n]
Yue: Cantonese
Yale Romanization Honyúhgyuhn
Jyutping hon3 jyu5 gyun6
IPA [hɔn˧.jy˩˧.kyn˨]