ABSTRACT
The Chinese (also called Sinitic) language family is a diversifi ed group of languages and dialects descended from a common ancestor spoken perhaps no more than about 2,000 years ago. In terms of time depth and degree of linguistic diversity, it has been compared to the Romance language family descended from Latin (Norman 1988: 187). Chinese as a written language is attested as early as 1250 BCE in the Shāng dynasty oracle bone inscriptions. Based on the interpretation of fi rst-millennium-BCE rhyming texts and of the structural elements of Chinese characters a stage of the language spoken in the central plains area of northern China termed Old Chinese (OC) can be reconstructed. (For more on the characteristics of OC, see later in the chapter.) However, many of the features reconstructed for OC are not refl ected in later varieties of Chinese. Taking into consideration migration history and the results of comparative-historical analysis of modern Chinese languages, it appears likely that the common ancestor of modern Sinitic was a late OC koine that spread rapidly during the great Qín-Hàn imperial expansion toward the end of the fi rst millennium BCE . 1
Chinese is often described, in conformity with the perceptions of Chinese speakers themselves, as a single language with many regional dialects. From a linguistic perspective, however, the degree of diversity and lack of mutual intelligibility among the regional varieties demonstrate that the “dialects” are in fact distinct, if closely related, languages. The Standard Mandarin word for the regional varieties of Chinese, fāngyán ᯩ䀰, is usually translated as “dialect” in English. 2 However, as many scholars have pointed out (e.g. Mair 1991), this is misleading. The term fāngyán literally means “regional speech,” and does not draw any distinction between mutually intelligible and unintelligible varieties. Even when used in a technical sense by Chinese linguists, the term fāngyán is not equivalent to the English technical term dialect .
