01 introduction and typological features

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1 1. Some basic facts  Chinese is a Sino-Tibetan language that is spoken by about 1.3 billion people, i.e. about one-fifth of the world’s population. It is also one of the six working languages of the United Nations. (For a family tree of Sino-Tibetan languages, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SinoTibetanTree.svg ) English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family. (For a family tree of Indo-European languages, see http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/linguistics/pie2.gif ). It is a global language and the leading language of international discourse. In terms of population, English is probably the third most natively spoken language in the world, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. (For a list of top languages, see http://web.archive.org/web/19990429232804/www.sil.org/ethnologue/top100.html  )  The Chinese language is called 汉语 (Hànyǔ, literally ‘Han language’) in Chinese because it is spoken by the Han people, the largest ethnic group in China.  Chinese has a number of dialects, which share the same written form but can be mutually unintelligible when spoken. The dialects are traditionally categorized into seven groups: (1) Mandarin (Northern); (2) Min (Fujian and Taiwan); (3) Xiang (Hunan); (4) Gan (Jiangxi); (5) Wu (Jiangsu, Shanghai, and Zhejiang); (6) Hakka (Guangdong, Guangxi); (7) Yue (Guangdong). As for English, aside from its two major dialects, i.e. British English and American English, there are numerous other varieties of English, which include, in most cases, several subvarieties (e.g. Newfoundland English within Canadian English; African American Vernacular English and Southern American English within American English.  This course concerns English and Standard Mandarin, which is spoken by about 850 million people. Standard Mandarin is based on the Beijing dialect and is called Pǔtōnghuà (普通话) in Mainland China, which literally means “common language.” In Taiwan, Mandarin is referred to as “Gu óyǔ” (国语); in Singapore, it is called “Hu á yǔ” (华语).  Chinese/Mandarin distinguishes itself from most other languages by being tonal and having a special writing system, which employs Chinese characters ( 汉字 hànzì ). These characters are logograms in that each symbol represents one meaningful unit of the language as well as one syllable.

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