ROC Taiwan 2001

ROC Yearbook 2001

Language
This calligraphy is regarded as the most elegant example of Official Script from the Eastern Han dynasty (A.D. 25-220). (Courtesy of the National Palace Museum)
  1. Linguistic Features of the Chinese Language Family
    1. The Dialects
      1. Terminology Defined
      2. Dialect Group Characteristics
  2. The Written Language
    1. Evolution of Chinese Writing
      1. Oracle Bone and Tortoise Shell Inscriptions
      2. Bronze Inscriptions
    2. Types of Chinese Characters
      1. Calligraphic Styles
      2. Simplified Versus Standard Characters
    3. The Written/Vernacular Split
  3. The National Language
    1. The Choice of Mandarin
    2. Phonetic Symbols
    3. Romanization
  4. Language in Taiwan Today
    1. Bilingual Education
    2. Foreign Language Education
Charts, tables, and boxes:

More people speak a Chinese dialect than any other tongue in the world. Phonetic diversity within the Chinese language family is manifested by a large number of mutually unintelligible dialects, creating a historical need for a common language through which speakers from the various regions might readily communicate. In the Chinese-speaking world of today; most educated people share a lingua franca, usually referred to as the National Language °ê»y in Taiwan, the "Common Language" ´¶³q¸Ü on the Chinese mainland, and Mandarin in English.

The Chinese language group º~»y is regarded as a major branch of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages, which includes Tibetan, Burmese, and numerous minority languages. Some of the outstanding characteristics of this group are its monosyllabicity, relatively simple phonological system, use of tones to distinguish different meanings, and a word order dependent syntax that lacks inflection, grammatical gender, and pluralization.

Written Chinese, which has historically provided a link among the various Chinese dialects, is unique in that it is the only major modern writing system that uses thousands of semantically meaningful characters º~¦r rather than a phonetic alphabet or syllabary of a few dozen symbols. The traditional Chinese writing system has inspired and profoundly influenced other writing systems of East Asia, and Chinese characters are still used extensively in modern Japanese and, to a much lesser extent, in modern Korean. In terms of its origin and underlying linguistic characteristics, however, Chinese is unrelated to Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Thai, and any apparent similarities are due to extensive borrowing.

A Chinese dialect is spoken by most minority peoples, as well as nearly all Han Chinese. Many minority peoples, though not all (for example, the Hui, Manchu and Taiwan aborigines), also speak languages outside the Chinese language group. Much work remains to be done in classifying and describing the many minority languages.


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