Variations in World Chineses

Although Mandarin Chinese is shared by Chinese communities such as Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, linguistic differences are frequently found among regional uses, ranging from pronunciation, orthography, vocabulary, grammar, and discourse. Along with the increasingly recognized notion of “World Chineses” in recent years, the study of the regional variations has also become more linguistically, socially, and culturally significant. Such a study facilitates more efficient communication among speakers of different varieties, reflects the social and cultural differences of the Chinese speaking communities from a linguistic perspective, and contributes to the theoretical discussion of language variation and change. With specific examples of the linguistic features exhibited in Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore Mandarin Chinese, this chapter is an overview of the current studies, methodologies, and motivations of variation. Introduction The term World Chineses, though not as common as World Englishes, is becoming more and more widely used together with the growing popularity of Mandarin Chinese as a second language and the spreading of Chinese diaspora. Like World Englishes, differences are often found in the Mandarin Chinese used in different regions. For instance, the expression 看看一下 kànkànyīxià ‘take a glimpse’ is acceptable in Singapore Mandarin, but Mandarin speakers elsewhere prefer either 看看 kànkàn ‘take a glimpse’ or 看一下 kànyīxià ‘take a glimpse’. The (dis-) preference does not imply that one expression is better than the other. There is no denying that speakers of any variant of Chinese, such as those from Singapore or different provinces of Mainland China, are bona fide speakers of Chinese. Hence Chinese cannot be defined by a single “variety”. The preferential differences over the alternative usages of 看看一下 kànkànyīxià or 看看 /看一下 kànkàn/kànkànyīxià represent a case of language variation. That is, these expressions are alternative forms of saying the same thing, even though one expression may be preferred by certain groups of speakers or communities for some reason (Labov 1972). Hence, while typical grammatical study on Chinese, such as Huang and Shi’s (2016) reference grammar, focuses on the shared generalizations of all varieties, increasing awareness leads to more and more recent studies on the variation of Mandarin. Among the studies, two important questions are how to identify the variations and what are the linguistic motivations of the variations. Methodologies to study variations in World Chineses Corpora and the study of grammatical variations The earliest studies on World Chineses were typically based on researchers’ observations and introspection, and mainly on lexical and grammatical variations. The earliest lexical