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Language Lineage

Sinitic

The Chinese languages (Mandarin, Wu, Yue, Min, Hakka, Xiang, Gan), with the longest continuous written tradition in the world, and tones that arose from lost final consonants.

c. 4000 BCE – present (written from c. 1250 BCE)China, Taiwan and Singapore, and diaspora communities worldwide
On this page
  1. Old Chinese
  2. Many Chinese Languages
  3. Vernacular, Characters and Pinyin
  4. In its own words
  5. Where it's spoken
  6. Turning points
  7. Contested classifications

01

Old Chinese

Chinese writing begins with the oracle-bone inscriptions of the Shang dynasty at Anyang, around 1250 BCE: questions to the ancestors cut into ox bones and turtle shells. The characters record words, not sounds. Old Chinese pronunciation has to be reconstructed from the rhymes of the Book of Odes, the sound elements inside characters, loanwords and the modern varieties, in work from Bernhard Karlgren to William Baxter and Laurent Sagart. In 221 BCE the Qin dynasty standardised the script across the empire.

Old Chinese was not tonal. André-Georges Haudricourt showed, as he had for Vietnamese, that the Middle Chinese 'rising' tone came from a final glottal stop and the 'departing' tone from a final -s, which is why Chinese and Vietnamese developed such similar tone systems.

02

Many Chinese Languages

The spoken varieties of Chinese are as different from one another as the Romance languages, and speakers of Cantonese and Mandarin cannot understand each other. Min, spoken in Fujian and Taiwan, split off earliest and keeps distinctions older than the 7th-century Qieyun rhyme dictionary on which Middle Chinese reconstruction is based. The southern varieties are more conservative in other ways: Cantonese keeps the final -p, -t and -k that northern Mandarin lost by the 14th century, so 'ten' is Cantonese sap but Mandarin shí.

03

Vernacular, Characters and Pinyin

For two thousand years educated Chinese wrote in Classical Chinese, far from the spoken language. In the New Culture movement of 1917–1919, Hu Shi and others argued for writing in the vernacular (báihuà), and within a decade it had become the norm. In the 1950s the People's Republic promoted Mandarin (Pǔtōnghuà) as the national standard, simplified the characters (1956), and adopted pinyin, a Latin alphabet devised under Zhou Youguang (1958), for teaching pronunciation. Pinyin is now the standard way of typing Chinese.

A sample

In its own words

Chinese (Tang-dynasty poem by Li Bai)

床前明月光
chuáng
bed
qián
front
míng
bright
yuè
moon
guāng
light
‘Before my bed, the bright moonlight’
Sources (1)
  • Li Bai (701–762). 'Quiet Night Thoughts' (Jìng yè sī), opening line.

On the map

Where it’s spoken

Hong KongSingapore
Spoken todayShading marks whole countries, not the regions within them.
  1. Taiwanc. 23 million
  2. Hong Kongc. 7 million
  3. Malaysiac. 6 million
  4. United Statesc. 3.5 million
  5. Singaporec. 2 million
  6. Chinac. 1.25 billion

Figures are rough first-language estimates, rounded, from censuses and Ethnologue. Counts for small or scattered communities are especially uncertain.

Rings along the limb

Turning points

Oldest first.

  1. Writingc. 1250 BCE

    Oracle-bone inscriptions

    Shang dynasty diviners at Anyang carve questions and answers onto bones and shells. They are the earliest substantial Chinese writing, already a developed logographic system.

    Sources (1)
    • Keightley, David N. 1978. Sources of Shang History: The Oracle-Bone Inscriptions of Bronze Age China. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  2. Writing221 BCE

    The Qin standardise the script

    After unifying China, the Qin dynasty imposes a single standard form of the characters on the regional scripts of the Warring States. A common written language across speech varieties is a unifying force from then on.

    Sources (1)
    • Norman, Jerry. 1988. Chinese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  3. Sound lawc. 3rd century BCE – 5th century CEContested

    Tones from lost final consonants

    *-ʔ → rising tone · *-s → departing tone

    The final glottal stop of Old Chinese becomes the Middle Chinese 'rising' tone, and final -s becomes the 'departing' tone. Later the loss of voiced initials splits the tones further. When the tones arose is debated.

    Figures · André-Georges Haudricourt (1911–1996)

    Compare with other stress and prosody across families →

    Sources (2)
    • Haudricourt, André-Georges. 1954. Comment reconstruire le chinois archaïque. Word 10.
    • Baxter, William H. & Laurent Sagart. 2014. Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  4. Sound lawBy the 14th century CE

    Mandarin loses its final stops

    -p -t -k → ∅ (Cantonese sap, Mandarin shí 'ten')

    Northern Chinese loses the final -p, -t and -k, and the syllables they ended are redistributed among other tones, as recorded in the Zhongyuan Yinyun rhyme book of 1324. Cantonese and other southern varieties keep them (Cantonese sap, Mandarin shí 'ten').

    Compare with other loss across families →

    Sources (1)
    • Norman, Jerry. 1988. Chinese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  5. Revitalization1917 – 1920s

    Writing as people speak

    Hu Shi and the New Culture movement campaign to replace Classical Chinese with the vernacular (báihuà) as the written language, and within a decade it becomes standard in literature, journalism and education.

    Figures · Hu Shi (1891–1962)

    Sources (1)
    • DeFrancis, John. 1984. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
  6. Writing1956 – 1958

    Simplified characters and pinyin

    The People's Republic introduces simplified characters (1956) and adopts pinyin (1958), a Latin alphabet for Mandarin developed by a committee led by Zhou Youguang. It is used for teaching, dictionaries and, today, typing.

    Figures · Zhou Youguang (1906–2017)

    Sources (1)
    • DeFrancis, John. 1984. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Outside the tree

Contested classifications

These disagreements may never be settled. Each position is given with its grounds, and no side is declared correct.

  • Widely accepted

    Min as the first Chinese split

    Min branched off before the language recorded in the Qieyun, and does not descend from Middle Chinese

    Evidence for

    Min keeps distinctions, especially among consonants, that cannot be derived from the Middle Chinese of the Qieyun, so its ancestor must be older. Jerry Norman made the case in detail.

    Evidence against

    Some of the Min features can be explained as borrowings from non-Chinese languages or as later layers, and the Qieyun may itself be a composite of several varieties rather than one language. How to model the early history of Chinese dialects is still debated.

    Sources (1)
    • Norman, Jerry. 1988. Chinese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.