ABSTRACT
One billion people speak Mandarin, the most prominent member of the Sino-Tibetan language family and the official language of media, government, and education in the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan. The vast remainder of Chinese are second-language Mandarin speakers. The hoary misconceptions about Chinese can be summarized as condemning it as “musical, monosyllabic, and misleading”. Chinese is often called an isolating or an analytic language, according to early 19th-century terminology that has yet to be supplanted. Chao organized his monumental Chinese grammar around the delineation of covert categories. Chinese, like many other related and unrelated East Asian languages such as Thai or Vietnamese, assigns a lexical pitch called tone to every morpheme. Chinese style prefers nouns, names, or ellipsis over pronouns, so pronouns are rarer than in English. Increasing studies of Chinese–English bilingual children throw light on which subsystems, such as tone and order, are particularly vulnerable to outside models.
