EAS103H1 Lecture 4: Week5 Language.docx
1 Jun 2015
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Document Summary
Chinese cannot be thought of as one language, but as a group of interrelated topolects that are spoken in various places throughout the continent-sized landmass that we now refer to as china. Chinese topolects are tied to a family of languages that include tibetan, burman, and other minority languages in the south of china. (the sino-tibetan-burman language family. ) The difference between fujianese, cantonese, shanghainess, and mandarin are as vast as those between french, italian, and spanish. The various topolects spoken in china are not derivatives of one master language- Chinese- that branch off of one another; they are distinct oral languages to themselves, and thus the world dialect is misleading. One such topolect-northern-based mandarin-has been raised to the status of the national or common language. All topolects that we link under the category of chinese make use of tones, they all have the subject-object-verb word order, and they are.
