Sociolinguistic Aspects of the Chinese Language

Like many dynamic systems, language undergoes change over time. For Chinese, the changes have come about in different ways, which could qualitatively affect the system underlying the language, and appropriate new classes or entities have to be recognized and given new labels or names. They could involve neologism, or there could be, for example, the emergence of tones in the archaic Chinese language (or more recently in the non-Sinitic Huihui language of Hainan Island), or development toward disyllabicity, or attrition of tones in the Dungan language, which is found in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan and which has its origin in Shaanxi Province, China. The changes could give rise to new subsystems or even new alternate parallel systems (e.g., sub-dialects, pidgins and creoles, new languages, and new scripts). The impetus for such changes can be due to internal dynamics, or may have external origin as a result of contact. Very often the mutual influence of these linguistic traits can also constitute a major cause for change. These linguistic sub-varieties may not have equal status within a given social environment (e.g., social registers: local languages versus national language). One or more varieties may have greater significance within the usually stratified system (e.g., official language, high language, standard language). These developments may run their course naturally or may be managed (i.e., through language planning and policy) for a variety of reasons, and with different kinds of results (e.g., language reform, language maintenance, language endangerment, language revival). China’s territorial outreach has been at times wider than it is in the early 21st century. Many peoples speaking different languages from diverse cultures have come into intimate contact with the Chinese. The Chinese writing system was the dominant one in East Asia, where it had served as the model for the development of writing systems of other languages. Moreover, Chinese speakers have established speech communities outside China, long before the commonly known recent diaspora. Closer to home, there have been colossal concomitant political and social changes going back more than a hundred years and even more so since the 1950s. All these are an integral backdrop for studying various sociolinguistic aspects of the Chinese language, and would necessarily, if not preferably, encompass other disciplines, ranging from sociology and anthropology to cognition, and from geography to history.