Influence of Western Languages on the Modern Chinese Language - Research Paper Example

Mandarin is the official national language used in Mainland China (PRC) and Republic of China (Taiwan); approximately 70 per cent of the population speak it and it’s used in the education system and government, while around 70 million people, especially from Guangdong and Guangxi provinces, speak Cantonese (omniglot.com, n.d). Majority of these speakers are the youth generation below age 40 and those that reside closer to urban areas. However, the use of the languages and its spread across the rural areas of PRC and ROC is limited compared to urban areas just like the old to the younger population.

Existence and evolution of Chinese languages can be traced back to Zhou dynasty where the languages lacked tonal elements, then the middle Chinese era of Song and eventually Ming dynasties, which paved way for the early and modern Chinese dialects. The increased population and its dispersion across the vast regions of China from the 17th century led to the development of different Chinese dialects to date. Historically, people of China spoke unintelligible Chinese from their local and geographical regions.

When the Portuguese came into contact with the Chinese prior to the 19th century, together with the Chinese they invented a specialized speaking practice which served as lingua franca between the elites; this was called the Guanhua, which served as the spoken medium (the language of administration, education and high culture) before it was adopted as a written medium (Wheatley, n.d, p.1). During the Ming dynasty, the mandarin was used by the ruling class, when the capital of China changed into Beijing.

The guanhan primarily based on Beijing speech was no doubt a precursor of the modern mandarin. Though a standard mandarin from Beijing was adopted, the language has systematic variations across the geographical regions. Apparently, people from the north may not communicate clearly using their local spoken mandarin unless it’s written down. Both Cantonese and Mandarin belong to the Sino Tibetan language family and are written using Chinese characters, but vary in their tonal system and oral languages.