Peoples and languages

“A people”, in the sense of an ethnic group, is 民族 mínzú in Chinese, and the word poses a real translation problem. 民 means ordinary people, as opposed to those who govern; 族 shows a banner above an arrow ⟶ the clan that rallies under the same standard. In its modern sense, the compound came from Japanese at the end of the 19th century, along with a whole political vocabulary. In English, we hesitate between people, ethnic group and nation, and translated official texts often say “nationality”. None of them quite fits (on this page I write “ethnic group”, for want of anything better).

China officially recognises fifty-six ethnic groups: the 汉族 Hànzú, just over 91% of the population, and fifty-five 少数民族 shǎoshù mínzú, literally “ethnic groups in small numbers”. The list was drawn up between the 1950s and 1979, when the Jinuo of Yunnan were the last to be recognised. But the small number is relative: the 壮族 Zhuàngzú, the country's largest minority, number nearly twenty million, more than many European countries. Many of these peoples have their own language, and some their own script: Mongolian is written from top to bottom, Uyghur in the Arabic alphabet, and the Naxi have kept the 东巴文 Dōngbāwén pictograms, one of the last scripts of this kind that are still read.

The name of the Han comes from the dynasty of the same name (206 BC to AD 220). That said, not everyone applies it to themselves in the same way: in the South, and above all among the Cantonese who settled overseas, people rather called themselves 唐人 Tángrén, “people of the Tang”, hence 唐人街 Tángrénjiē, the Chinatown of our cities. To speak of themselves as a whole, the Chinese also have more lyrical formulas: 炎黄子孙, the descendants of the mythical sovereigns Yandi and Huangdi, or 龙的传人, the descendants of the dragon, the title of a 1978 Taiwanese song that became an unofficial anthem.

The neighbouring peoples, for their part, left their mark on the vocabulary. The Chinese called the nomads of the North and the West 胡 hú, and whatever came from their lands bore this character: the carrot, 胡萝卜, “the turnip of the Hu”, pepper, 胡椒, the fiddle 胡琴. Some see the same 胡 in 胡说 húshuō, “to speak like the barbarians” ⟶ to talk nonsense. I am not certain of it: 胡 also means “any old how”, and the explanation may well have come after the fact.

Now for the languages. Chinese goes by several names, and each one tells you something. 汉语 Hànyǔ is the language of the Han, as opposed to Tibetan or Mongolian; 中文 Zhōngwén is rather the written language, that of books and lessons; 普通话 pǔtōnghuà, “the common language”, is the spoken standard, based on the pronunciation of Beijing. In Taiwan, people say 国语 guóyǔ, “the national language”, and in Singapore 华语 Huáyǔ. Watch out for 韩语 Hányǔ, Korean: only the tone separates it from 汉语 (a classic mistake among beginners, and it always makes the class laugh).

That leaves the question of the 方言 fāngyán, literally “the speech of the regions”. We translate it as “dialects”, and that is where things get complicated. A Beijinger does not understand a Cantonese person speaking 粤语 Yuèyǔ: to a European linguist, these are two languages, as far apart as French and Italian, if not further. But they write with the same characters, read the same newspapers, and Chinese tradition treats them as varieties of a single language. Who is right? It all depends on the criterion you choose, and I will not settle the matter here (our page The Languages of China sets out how the country's languages are classified). The proverb, for its part, simply notes: 十里不同音，百里不同俗, ten li away the accent changes, a hundred li away the customs.

For other languages, you add 语 or 文 to the name of the country: 英语 and 英文, 法语 and 法文. In principle, 语 refers to the spoken language and 文 to the written one; in actual use, one is often taken for the other. Usage again. And when a text is incomprehensible, an English speaker says “it's all Greek to me”; a Chinese speaker talks of 天书 tiānshū, “a book from Heaven”.

Accent, 口音 kǒuyīn, gives away where you come from more surely than an identity card. A Beijinger is recognised by his 京腔 jīngqiāng, which rolls the 儿 at the end of words; someone who has travelled too much ends up with a 南腔北调 accent, neither northern nor southern. You always keep something of your 乡音 xiāngyīn, the accent of your native place: that is the whole subject of He Zhizhang's poem, on our page Return to My Homeland - He Zhizhang, about a man who left young and came back old with his accent intact. Countries and nationalities, for their part, are on the page Names and nationalities.

Our examples end with a sentence from the Analects. Sima Niu was grieving because he had no brothers; Zixia, a disciple of Confucius, answered him 四海之内，皆兄弟也, which Couvreur translates, on our page Chapter 12 of the Analects of Confucius, as “within the four seas, all men are his brothers”. The inhabited world was then believed to be surrounded by four seas, and the expression 五湖四海 still bears the trace of it: to come “from the five lakes and the four seas” is to come from everywhere. The sentence is Zixia's. People readily attribute it to Confucius.

Click on any character on the page: its stroke order is shown stroke by stroke, with the arrow that gives the direction of the movement.