The Significance and Usage Scope of the Han Language
Hanyu, the Han Language or Chinese, is the traditional language of the Han ethnic group. It is one of the common languages of China and one of the common international languages. Hanyu has a long history and is the language with the largest number of users in the world (at least 1.5 billion, which is more than 20% of the world’s total population). Being the official language of China and Singapore, it is also one of the six working languages of the United Nations. Hanyu is mainly used in China, Singapore, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries as well as the overseas Chinese communities in the countries such as United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan.
The Structure of the Han Language
Hanyu has a standard language and several dialects. The modern standard Chinese is Mandarin, with Beijingnese as the standard sound, Mandarin as the basic dialect, and exemplary modern vernacular works as the grammatical rules. Like other languages, standard Chinese is a tonal language with topic-prominent organization and subject–verb–object word order. Standard Chinese has many initial consonants but fewer final consonants, vowels, and tones than southern varieties.
Hanyu is an analytical language which consists of three to fifteen tones on average. Its character system is an ideogram that has both ideographic and phonological functions. Hanyu includes both the spoken and written languages. The written language of ancient Hanyu is called classical Chinese, and the written language of modern Hanyu is called vernacular Chinese which is based on the modern standard Chinese as the norm.
Grammar and Vocabulary Features of the Han Language
Grammar
The biggest feature of Chinese grammar is that there is no morphological change in the strict sense. There are no changes in nouns, and there are no differences between gender and number. The verbs are not personal, nor do they have a tense. All of these characters are different from those of European languages, which makes many linguists hold the opinion that there is no grammar, nor gender of words in Chinese. Another feature of Chinese grammar is that omission is applied quite often, i.e. words that do not affect the overall meaning are often omitted.
Vocabulary
The entire Chinese character corpus comprises over 20,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. However, Chinese characters are different from Chinese words. As most Chinese words are made up of two or more characters, the number of Chinese words outnumbers that of the Chinese characters. Perhaps an accurate equivalent for a Chinese character is the morpheme, as in the Chinese language, characters represent the smallest grammatical units with various meanings.
The total number of Chinese words and lexicalized phrases is not easy to estimate. The 7th edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian (The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary) (2016), an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese as used in mainland China, records 13,000 characters with definitions of more than 70,000 words.
The Writing System of the Han Language and HSK
Chinese characters are the center of Chinese orthography which is written within imaginary square blocks. The origin of Chinese characters can be dated back very early, and the writing of Chinese characters, i.e. Chinese orthography, is developed into an aesthetic stage. Traditionally, Chinese orthography is arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and from right to left across columns.
There is also an exam called Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK), or the Chinese Proficiency Test. It is the standardized test of Standard Chinese language proficiency of China for non-native speakers.
