Mandarin / 普通话

History and Evolution

About 2500 years ago Old Chinese evolved into Classical Chinese, which became the standard language for formal writing until the 20th century (analogous to the role of Latin in Europe). This, together with China’s tradition of imperial rule, worked in favor of linguistic unity despite wide regional variation in the spoken language. In 1279 Kublai Khan established Beijing as his new capital and the Beijing dialect gradually rose to prominence and became known in English as “Mandarin,” finally becoming the official language of China in 1909.

Geographic Distribution

Mandarin is spoken by two-thirds of the population of the People’s Republic of China, where it is known as pǔtōnghuà (普通话, “common language”).  It is also an official language of Taiwan, where it is known as guóyǔ (國語, “national language”). Taiwanese informal speech differs considerably in vocabulary and pronunciation (e.g. “r” sounds become “l”).

Mandarin is an official language of Singapore and is widespread in Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

Although in the past most Chinese immigrants to other countries were Cantonese speakers, Mandarin is now displacing Cantonese in areas such as New York City.

Prominence in Society

In the PRC and Taiwan, Mandarin is the language of official broadcasts and education. It is one of the six official languages of the United Nations.

Unique Characteristics

Elements of the sentence generally appear as separate one-syllable units even when they are part of a compound word. Due to the loss or merging of consonants over time, many words in Mandarin sound alike but have come to be distinguished using a system of four tones: high level, rising, dipping, and falling (plus an occasional fifth “neutral” tone).

Mandarin has no articles and no grammatical inflections such as verb tenses, noun cases, or plural forms, so word order is crucial. The basic word order is Subject-Verb-Object, but many sentences are topic-prominent, which means that the “topic” is stated first, as in 这本书我看过了 (The book, I have read it).

Mandarin has almost no phrasal verbs such as “let go” or “put up with,” which are extensively used in modern English.

Mandarin and related Chinese languages have an extensive noun classifier system. When a noun is preceded by a number or a demonstrative (e.g., “this” or “those”) it must also have a classifier appropriate to the object’s type or shape. In English, an example would be “two sheets of paper.” There are over 120 classifiers, although only about two dozen of them occur frequently.

Mandarin is written not with an alphabet but with characters that stand for individual elements of meaning. There are approximately 10,000 in use in Mandarin although 3,000 is the minimum for literacy. The PRC now uses a system of simplified characters; the traditional ones are still used in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Today they are often written left to right, although in the past they were written top to bottom and then right to left.

Loanwords in English

Mandarin words made their way into the English vocabulary primarily through trade, first through indirect contact during the Ming and Qing dynasties, and, later, through direct contact related to the importation of tea and other goods.

• feng shui (风水, “wind and water”; arranging spaces according to the flow of energy)
• gung ho (from 工業合作社, “to work together in harmony”; enthusiasm)
• kung fu (功夫, “achievement through diligence”; a martial art)
• kowtow (叩头; to genuflect before a ruler)
• lose face (a literal translation of 丟臉; to be socially humiliated)
• wok (镬, a cauldron; a pan for stir-frying)

Say Whaaat?

Unfamiliarity with the concept of modal verbs (such as “could” or “may”) can lead to Chinese speakers sounding unintentionally dictatorial when speaking English.

There are only seven vowels, and words can only end with a vowel or with the Mandarin equivalents of “r,” “n,” or “ng.” Foreign loanwords are therefore avoided in favor of coinages. For example, 电话 (telephone) is a combination of the characters for “electricity” and “speech.”

Mandarin and English both happen to display a rare linguistic phenomenon known as r-coloring, in which a vowel changes pronunciation when next to “r,” such as in “worse” or “better.”

Writer: Darrin McGraw

Cantonese / 廣東話

History and Evolution

Cantonese is the second most commonly spoken Chinese language, after Mandarin. It belongs to the Yue subgroup of the Chinese languages of the Sino-Tibetan language family, one of the world’s primary language families.

In 214 CE, the Qin Dynasty colonized the southern region of China and brought with them the northern Han language, which never really took root due to political turmoil and the mountainous region’s geographical isolation. Instead, the indigenous Yue languages flourished, including Cantonese, which is believed to have emerged by the 7th century CE.

During Southern Song Dynasty (1127–1279 CE), the city of Canton (now Guangzhou), with its strategic location on the Pearl River Delta, became the largest port in China and prospered from maritime trade networks extending across Asia and into the Middle East and Europe. With the increasing economic power of the Guangdong province, its local dialect—Cantonese—became the prestigious dialect of Yue languages.

In an attempt to control foreign influence, later Chinese dynasties imposed bans on maritime commerce known as the hai jin (海禁). From 1757 to 1842, the Canton System directed all international trade through the single, southern port at Canton. The city became one of the most important economic centers worldwide, which also brought the Cantonese language into significant contact with foreign speakers.  

Due to the turmoil of the Opium Wars with Britain in the mid-19th century, millions of Cantonese speakers emigrated, making Cantonese the most commonly spoken language in Chinese immigrant communities.

When the Qing Dynasty declared Mandarin the official language of China in 1900, Cantonese continued to serve as the lingua franca in the southern region. Beginning in the mid-20th century, however, the government of the People’s Republic of China promoted the use of Mandarin, resulting in the growth of bilingualism among dialect speakers. Despite these policies, Cantonese remains a thriving language in the southern region of China, as well as in Hong Kong, Macau and numerous overseas communities.

In the early 21st century, the province of Guangdong again emerged as China’s economic powerhouse. This time, however, the region’s economic importance may have actually served to displace—rather than elevate—the Cantonese language. Each year, approximately 30 million migrant workers travel to work in the province, which has a permanent population of 80 million. Given that approximately a quarter of the workforce hails from non-Cantonese speaking provinces, Mandarin increasingly serves as the lingua franca of work and daily life. Despite these developments, Cantonese remains an integral part of the cultural identity of southern Chinese.

Geographic Distribution

With approximately 55 million Cantonese speakers in China, and another 20 million speakers abroad, the largest Cantonese-speaking communities are located in Hong Kong and Macau, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

Cantonese is divided into four major dialects. The dominant dialect of Cantonese is the Guangzhou (Yuehai) dialect, which is also spoken in neighboring Hong Kong and Macau. The Gao-Yang dialect is spoken to the west of Guangzhou, while Siyi dominates in the east. The Guinan dialects, of which Nanning is considered the standard, are spoken throughout the autonomous, southwestern region of Guangxi. Cantonese dialects are not all mutually intelligible, highlighting the significant range of variation within the language.

Prominence in Society

Cantonese is the official language in Hong Kong and Macau, along with English and Portuguese. Because Cantonese predominates, it is the de facto official language of both autonomous regions, used in government and in public schools.

Although national media programming in China is only produced in Mandarin, there are a number of regional media outlets producing Cantonese-language television and newspapers. In 2010, Guangzhou Television signaled that it was considering replacing Cantonese programming with Mandarin, sparking massive protests. Cantonese is also used in Cantopop, a style of music popular across China.

Unique Characteristics

Of the five major subgroups within Chinese—Mandarin, Yue, Wu, Min, and Hakka—Cantonese (Yue) is more closely related to Min and Hakka than it is to Mandarin or Wu. While Cantonese and Mandarin share some vocabulary, marked differences in pronunciation, sentence structure, and grammar render the spoken languages mutually unintelligible. In general, Cantonese tends to preserve some of the older grammatical forms and pronunciation of Middle Chinese and uses traditional, rather than simplified, characters in writing.

Cantonese is a tonal language with 6 to 9 tones (depending on the dialect) which are essential to meaning. For example, the word “fan” has 3 different meanings depending on which high tone is used: high-level is 芬 (fān, meaning “fragrant”), high-falling is 分 (fàn, meaning “to divide”), and high-rising is 粉 (fán, meaning “flour”).

Like other Chinese languages, Cantonese is an isolating, or analytic language, meaning that words have only one grammatical form. Grammatical function is expressed through word order, prepositions, and context. Accordingly, verbs are not conjugated into tenses. Instead, markers of time such as “yesterday” or “tomorrow” indicate tense: the character 而 (now) in the following sentence indicates the present tense: 我 而家 食 緊 飯 (I/now/eat/am/rice).

Loanwords in English

The region’s longstanding role in international trade helps explain why Cantonese has a greater number of foreign loanwords than Mandarin. At the same time, Cantonese is also the Chinese language that has given English the most loanwords, including many food-related words.

• bok choi (白菜, “white vegetable”)
• lo mein (撈麵, “scooped noodle”)
• tofu (豆腐)
• dim sum (點心, “touches the heart”; a style of bite-sized appetizer dishes)
• Hoisin (海鮮, “seafood”)
• wok (鑊; a pan for stir-frying)
• won-ton (雲吞, “cloud swallow,” referencing its shape)

To have a “yen” (craving) for something comes from the Cantonese 癮 (“addiction”), a loan word that originated in the Opium Wars of the 19th century.

The phrase “chop chop” (“hurry up”) is believed to come from the Cantonese 速速 (cuk cuk). “Gung-ho” (being enthusiastic about something) comes from 工合 (gun hap) and “kowtow” (to show reverence) comes from 叩頭, meaning “to knock head” when bowing one’s head low to show respect. The Cantonese 功夫 (gun fu; literally, “great efforts”) is a combination of the words "gun" and kung fu that is a form of hand-to-hand combat in close quarters that uses guns in unusual ways.

Say Whaaat?

According to legend, Cantonese almost became the official language in China after the 1911 Revolution, but it lost to Mandarin by just one vote cast by the founding members of the new state.

Writer: Carly Ottenbreit

Mongolian / / Монгол хэл

History and Evolution

Mongolian belongs to the Central Mongolic branch of the East-Central Asian Mongolic language family, one of the world’s primary language families. Historically, linguists tended to group it in the Altaic language family, along with Turkic languages, Korean, and Japanese, but this theory has been largely discredited in recent scholarship.

The ancient Proto-Mongolic language spoken among the nomadic Mongolian tribes gave rise to Middle Mongolian, the language spoken at the height of the Mongol Empire during the 13th to 15th centuries CE.

In 1208, Genghis Khan, who was illiterate, commissioned a Uyghur scribe to invent the language’s first orthography (spelling system). The script, which is written from left to right in vertical columns, was based on the Old Uyghur alphabet and became known as the Traditional Mongolian script. Additional scripts were created in following centuries, including the Phags-pa and Monglian Square scripts, both based on Tibetan.

The conversion of Mongolians to Buddihism in the 16th century marks the beginning of Classical Mongolian, which is the direct predecessor of the modern language. The Soyombo script was invented to better translate Chinese and Sanskrit Buddhist texts, and Mongolian literature flourished during this time.

The Traditional Mongolian script remained the most widely used until February 1941, when the Soviet-influenced Mongolian People’s Republic replaced it with a Latin-based script. Less than two months later, the party introduced a Cyrillic alphabet, which remains the standard script in Mongolia. After the fall of the Soviet Union, however, the Mongolian government began teaching the traditional script in public schools to promote traditional Mongolian language and culture. The Traditional Mongolian script remains the standard in Inner Mongolia and China.

Geographic Distribution

Mongolian is the official language of Mongolia and the Khalkha dialect serves as the standard language. Other dialects exist, particularly among ethnic minorities in the remote eastern and western regions.

Mongolian is an official provincial language of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in China, which is home to approximately 4.1 million Mongols. In Inner Mongolia, the three main dialect groups include Southern Mongolian (which consists of Chakhar, Ordos, Baarin, Khorchin, Kharchin, and Alasha), Oirat, and Barghu-Buryat. Mongolian dialects are also spoken among ethnic Mongols living in the Chinese provinces of Liaoning, Jilin, Heilongjiang, and Gansu.

Within Mongolia, most dialects are mutually intelligible, while greater variation exists in the more linguistically diverse Inner Mongolia and China.

Prominence in Society

The 1992 Constitution of Mongolia establishes Mongolian as the official state language and it is used in government, education, and the media.

Unique Characteristics

Like Turkic languages, Mongolian is an agglutinative language, meaning that affixes are attached to express meaning. Nouns, for example, take one of eight grammatical cases indicated with suffixes, making it a heavily inflected language. Nouns do not have gender or definite articles.

Mongolian has vowel harmony, meaning that only select vocalic sounds may be found near each other. For example, if the first vowel is “a,” “ʊ,” “ɔ,” (back vowels) or “I” (neutral vowel), the word may not contain “e,” “u,” “o” (front vowels).

The typical sentence structure is subject-object-verb.

Loanwords in English

There are no Mongolian loanwords in English.

Say Whaaat?

In Mongolian, male given names tend to highlight qualities of strength, while female names reference colors or flowers. Names typically consist of a combined adjective and noun, such as Gansükh (steel ax) or Tömörbaatar (iron hero) for men, or Altantsetseg (golden flower) and Narantuyaa (sunbeam) for women. Surnames can be patronymic or matronymic and come before the given name: if a father named Tsakhia has a son and names him Elbegdorj, the son’s full name becomes Tsakhia Elbegdorj.

An unusual Mongolian male name is Melscho, a combination of the initials of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Chiobalsan, a former Mongolian president, which was popular during the Soviet period.

Among social media users in Inner Mongolia and China, Mongolian is often transcribed in the Latin script, since the vertical Traditional Mongolian script is not supported by most software applications.

The longest palindrome in Mongolian is hadgalagdah, meaning “to be kept.”

Writer: Carly Ottenbreit

Tibetan / ལྷ་སའི་སྐད་

History and Evolution

The written form of Standard Tibetan has changed little since the 9th century, and traces its ancient roots to Sanskrit imported over the Himalayas from India. In fact, sounding out Tibetan text would roughly approximate how the language sounded in the first millennium, when it was a highly phonetic language, and pronunciation closely followed the spelling of words. While the orthography is essentially unchanged, most dialects of spoken Tibetan have diverged considerably, the exception being the Western dialects, which most closely follow Old, or Classical, Tibetan. A contemporary Tibetan speaker living in Ladakh, India, may not understand someone from Lhasa, but might have understood that same Lhasa native a thousand years ago.

Geographic Distribution

Standard Tibetan, the dialect spoken in the central region of Tibet around the capital, Lhasa, is the most widely spoken of the Tibetic languages, a group of mutually unintelligible Sino-Tibetan languages spoken across a vast region encompassing eastern Central Asia, from the Indian subcontinent to the Tibetan Plateau. There are roughly eight million speakers of the various Tibetic languages; according to a 1990 census, there are 1.2 million speakers of Standard Tibetan, located mostly in central Tibet, with others scattered across the world, including those who have fled Tibet for reasons of political and religious freedom.

Prominence in Society

Standard Tibetan is the language of government, education, and culture in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China. Classical Tibetan is the language of Tibetan Buddhism.

Unique Characteristics

There are at least three registers in Standard Tibetan, including a formal spoken style, Zhe-sa (polite, respectful speech); Phal-skad (demotic language), a vernacular style; and Chos-skad (religious language), a literary style prominent in Buddhist religious scriptures and commentaries.

Tibetan is written with an Indic script, with a historically conservative orthography that reflects Old Tibetan phonology. Most Tibetan dialects use the same script, although they tend not to be mutually intelligible.

Tibetan uses rising and falling tones to convey meaning; thus the same word can have different meanings depending on tone. For example, the word he word kham (ཁམ་, "piece") is pronounced /kʰám/ with a high flat tone, while the word Khams (ཁམས་, "the Kham region") is pronounced /kʰâm/ with a high falling tone.

Loanwords in English

English has incorporated a handful of Tibetan words, primarily to describe people and animals native to Tibet or which reflect Tibetan culture.

• lama (a Buddhist monk)
• Sherpa (“eastern dweller”; an ethnic group from the Himalayan region of Nepal and Tibet; a guide or porter)
• yak (a long-haired, domesticated ox)
• yeti (a Sherpa name for the mythical creature known as the Abominable Snowman; “Bigfoot”)

Say Whaaat?

In Tibet, adult illiteracy remains high and, despite compulsory education, many rural Tibetan children have no access to public schools.

Language is a fiercely political topic in Tibet, with many claiming that the Chinese government is deliberately trying to extinguish the Tibetan language. Those who dispute this claim point to the fact that instruction in the primary grades is typically conducted in the Tibetan language, although secondary schools teach in Chinese.

The area where the Tibetan language is most threatened is not in Tibet but in Ladakh, India, where the Western Tibetan dialect is gradually being supplanted by Hindi and English.

Writer: Bruce Falstein