Classification of Chinese Languages

Classification of Chinese Languages

Is Chinese a language or a group of languages? Before we answer the question, let's define the word “language” at first. There are four languages commonly used by humans: signed, spoken, written, and Braille.

We take English as an example. If you define “English” as the written English, then there is only one English. If you define “English” as the spoken English, there may be many English languages. For example, British English, American English, Canadian English, Australian English, South Africa English, India English, Hawaii English, Texas English, etc., and as many as you can name.

Similarly, if you define Chinese as a written language, there is only one form -- Baihuawen. If you define Chinese as spoken, the answer varies. For example, there are two -- southern and northern, or six, seven, eight dialects, or as many as you want. The truth is that we cannot classify spoken languages by each spoken language itself, because everybody speaks differently, strictly speaking. Usually we classify spoken languages by the group of people, like countries, areas, tribes etc., as we need. Therefore, the classification of spoken languages belongs to sociology, instead of linguistics.

Welcome to New Concept Linguistics.

Chinese Languages 的分类

Chinese 是一种language还是一组language？在我们回答问题之前，让我们先定义language。人类通常使用四种language：手语，口语，书面语，和盲文。

我们以English为例。如果你定义English 为英文，那么只有一种英文。如果你定义English 为英语，可能有许多英语。例如，英国英语，美国英语，加拿大英语，澳大利亚英语，南非英语，印度英语，夏威夷英语，德克萨斯英语等，以及更多的你能说出来的各种英语。

同样的道理，如果你定义Chinese为中文，那么现在中文只有一种，就是白话文。如果你定义Chinese为汉语，那么答案有多种。例如两种话 -- 南方话和北方话。或者六种，七种，八种方言。或者你想说有多少种就多少种。因为严格地说，我们每个人说的话都不同，现实的情况是，我们并不根据口语本身对口语进行分类。通常，我们是按照我们的需要，根据人群，如国家，地区，部落等，对口语进行分类。因此，口语的分类属于社会学，而不是语言学。


请参考新概念语言学。