There are several dialects of the Chinese language with enough differences to make then unintelligible to speakers of a different dialect despite an identical written form. Fortunately for both the Chinese and those who try to understand them, most of them speak the same dialect: Mandarin.

What we call modern Chinese is actually about nine hundred years old, having evolved around the eleventh century from what we would call archaic Chinese and middle Chinese. Archaic Chinese differentiated consonant sounds by the use of heavy aspiration or breathing, and the sound of the language is thought to have been rich, but was not yet tonal. We know this because of the many writings that exist from that period in China, as well as from sounds borrowed from Chinese by Japanese or Korean.

Of course, languages continue to grow and change over time – the Chinese of the eleventh century probably didn’t have a word for a computer – but the basic structure has remained largely the same since that time. Sounds began to disappear from the language as it simplified so that more and more words became homonyms. Because of this, compound words arose to make distinctions between the many homonymic words, making compound words even more common than the traditional monosyllabic words of the language.

In more modern times, there has been an attempt to modernize Chinese even further to make it more compatible with Western society. A movement to create a standardized alphabet for the language was begun, however if successful it would be detrimental to the future understanding of historical texts and records as characters disappeared from use. Because of this danger to literature and records, it is unlikely that this measure will become effective any time soon.

The dialect of Mandarin is also a symbol of the attempt at linguistic unity within China, with many people in most of the regions of modern China versed in Mandarin now. It is the most common dialect by far, with over eight hundred thousand speakers versus, for example, Cantonese with only eighty thousand. As China becomes more of a global player, their attempts at standardization become stronger. This does not mean that the regional dialects are vanishing – only that the people of China must also be able to communicate as a whole in order to stand up in the global marketplace.

The history of Chinese is rich and beautiful, with many historians contesting that it is the oldest language still in use today. While this may or may not be true, it is hard to argue that Chinese is not filled with history. This language, especially in written form, is also one of the most complicated languages around, making it the object of a lifetime’s worth of study for many scholars.

Patrick Stump writes for Lingo 24
http://www.lingo24.com/