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【Abstract】 There is a general belief that the language that people speak usually determines and/or strongly affects the way those people look at the world, and in many cases, the way people speak identify them as belonging to a particular social class. Based on this understanding, this paper will try to interpret how the Chinese language has helped construct and shape Chinese national identity, regional identity, and personal identity, by which Chinese people are definable and recognizable in terms of Chinese characters, pronunciation, and grammar respectively.
【Key words】 Chinese language; identity
【基金项目】 注：本文为湖北省教育厅人文社会科学资助项目"国际合作办学专业课程全英语教学模式本土化研究"（项目编号：2009B190）的阶段性成果；高等学校省级教学教改项目"IELTS对我国高校英语教学的导向意义研究"（项目编号：2009186）的阶段性成果；中国冶金教育学会教育科学研究规划重点课题"基于国际合作办学的双语师资培养模式研究"（项目编号：YZG09015）的研究成果。
According to different dictionaries, identity has several synonyms such as individuality, personality, distinctiveness and uniqueness. Eccles (2009) puts forward the following questions: Who am I? What am I about? What is my place in my social group? What do I value? What do I want to do with my life? when noting that those questions are related to what psychologists call identity (p. 78).Christine Mallinson, the author of the book The Deconstruction of Identity in Everyday Talk, defines identity as "stable features of persons that exist prior to any particular situation, and are dynamic and situated accomplishments, enacted through talk, changing from one occasion to the next" (p.17).
When searching online with a key word "identity", a tremendous wealth of related information on the theme in terms of cultural, linguistic, social, regional and national aspects will be found soon. It is so true that identity is too complicated to be defined accurately since it involves, implicitly and/or explicitly, language, culture and other variables, like history and politics and so forth. Among those variables, language plays a crucial role in forming identity.
Chinese national identity in general
With the development of modern society, i.e., globalization, technological advances, and new formations of transportation and communication, people from all over the world have been, more or less, engaging in transnational identity formation practices and Chinese people are no exception. As David Karp (2008) states in his dissertation for his Master's degree that identities are "multiple, indeterminate, ambiguous, contested, contingent and fluid"rather than "pure, defined, singular fixed, bounded within the frontiers of the nation-state."(p.14).
although Chinese people throughout the nation consist of the majority Han Chinese, fifty five minority groups, and overseas Chinese, as a nation, the spirit of Confucianism has been generally and widely considered to be the key factor of the Chinese identity. It may very well be true that the globalization process has been shaping, to a certain extent, the identity of everyone, including Chinese people; the national identity of Chinese people in general remains consistently stable and comparatively unique.
Chinese people have a very strong need to belong to the family, the organization, and the whole society; they value family cohesiveness, love peace and harmoniousness. Chinese people happily pass the essential of ancient philosophical thoughts from one generation to another, and they proudly inherit moral excellence and righteousness; they firmly advocate the virtue of lenience, patience, diligence, and industriousness.
The qualities of a typical Chinese make Chinese people throughout the world who they are. Chinese people have been educated to develop and cultivate, generation after generation, and they are, including myself of course, all very proud to be Chinese and have never doubted their Chinese identify with those deep-rooted conceptions in mind. It is all those elements or characteristics that together constitute their identity thus making them unique as Chinese.
The role of Chinese characters
Generally, Chinese people tend to find a good or reasonable balance between intrapersonal harmony and a positive self-identity through non-confrontational communication in public when acquiring their social identity because they are cultivated and encouraged to do so ever since they are able to hold a pen to practice writing the very first character. I can still recall vividly how I unwillingly practiced writing those basic strokes, combined strokes and then every single character day by day until I virtually mastered some thousand characters as a child. However, when giving a profound and all-sided thought, I should admit, happily and thankfully, it was the harsh work that really helped me to grow to be a typical Chinese and later on a popular university language teacher.
I believe that Chinese characters imply many, if not all, essential features of Chinese identity. This can be interpreted explicitly and/or implicitly in terms of the rules of character writing system. Traditionally, Chinese characters were written with a Chinese brush, and the strokes therefore were roughly straight, not evenly of the same thickness of each stroke. Chinese children are all cultivated and trained harshly to write good, neat, balanced and beautiful characters.
I also believe the process of practicing and mastering characters virtually sends a very clear message to Chinese young kids that excellent students should endure under arduous conditions and make painstaking efforts to study so as to achieve the aim set for them. Meanwhile, countless anecdotes, fables and stories reinforce this message time and again in different ways along their journey towards excellence. features like curiosity, adventure, excitement, exploration and inquiry are always inferior to rote learning.
Rote learning, a typical, may be only way to master Chinese characters, is not only a necessary first step to lay a solid foundation for deeper learning; it surely is perfect practice and requisite for Chinese people wanting to be successful academically. Of course, this is probably also the main or even the only reason why Chinese students in general, even scholars, tend to "borrow" ideas without acknowledging their owners as "being wealthy in knowledge through rote learning" has always been highly encouraged, valued and appreciated in China.
All in all, I strongly believe that Chinese writing system has been playing a decisive role in shaping Chinese identity at macrocosm level, or national level. The unique Chinese writing system should be the foundation stone of Chinese identity: collective and dependent. Chinese people appreciate collectivism, believing obligations to the society take precedence. Chinese culture admires diffuseness, preferring to look at the whole rather than the parts and favoring a group decision-making process. Chinese people are outer-directed, caring more about what people around them think. Chinese children are not encouraged to be outstanding, since "a single flower does not make a spring", "One tree does not make a forest". Chinese people live for other people, their children, parents, and relatives, other than live for themselves, and they appreciate and enjoy this self- sacrifice generation after generation.
The role of Chinese grammar
In my opinion, like Chinese characters, it is Chinese grammar that helps shape Chinese identity at the macrocosm level.
Unlike those alphabetic languages, in which much information is carried by the use of auxiliaries and by verb inflections, Chinese is an uninflected language so it conveys meaning through word order, adverbials or context. To many foreigners, Chinese simply has no grammar at all in terms of tense, gender, mood, inflectional morphology and word order from their perspectives, which seems to be well approved by the fact that Chinese is always acquired slowly, with significant difficulty and considerable inaccuracy, by its learners, both adult foreigners and Chinese children as well.
Chinese has no complicated tenses and the concept of time in Chinese is not handled through the use of different tenses and verb forms. Instead, Chinese relies on expressing aspect. Actually, Chinese words have only one grammatical form as they are individual fixed characters. By this I mean, unlike most Indo-European languages, Chinese verbs never conjugate through inflectional suffixes. Take English as an example, there are six different forms of each word, namely, base form, infinitive, third-person singular present, simple past, present participle, and past participle. Chinese verbs, however, always remain the same, their base form, wherever and wherever they appear in sentences.
Based on my experience of being a Mandarin teacher for many years, I completely understand why my foreign students from English speaking countries claim that Chinese is definitely among the languages with the simplest grammar. To them, the tough part of the Chinese language is writing, i.e., memorizing "millions of those tedious strokes". As for grammar, referring here to the rules for changing forms of words; Chinese simply does not have verb, noun, adverb or adjective suffixes for inflection at all. Moreover, Chinese does not have stuff like articles, phrasal verbs, or complex rules governing the position of such sentence elements like prepositions.
I often hear foreigners complain that they have no clue and have to guess which tense Chinese people are talking about when communicating orally, and they are so confused when trying hard to guess individual words, word phases, as well as idioms in each sentence while reading Chinese sentences, let along articles. The reality that even Chinese children all have to struggle extremely hard and experiment pretty long to acquire their native language may well illustrate how difficult Chinese language is.
Generally, Chinese is a topic-prominent language, a typical high context language, relying highly on information sharing. To Chinese people language is not just a tool for communication only. Chinese people value the quantity, quality, relation and manner of communication quite differently from people with different cultures. It is so true that Chinese people have their own communication style, constructed or determined by Chinese grammar system, in terms of the tone of voice, facial expression, gestures, posture and/or status of the speaker. Chinese tend to give more information than is needed; they tend to be not direct by hiding assumptions, and even conveying double-meanings by using idioms, slangs, or dialects. In a word, it is believable that Chinese identity derives, directly and mainly, from the unique characteristics of the Chinese language.
The role of Chinese pronunciation
Compared with characters, Chinese pronunciation system plays a crucial role, in my opinion, in shaping the regional identity of Chinese people in terms of dialects.
Chinese pronunciation has its unique features. To begin with, Chinese is a tonal language, meaning that it uses the pitch, highness or lownes, of a phoneme sound to distinguish word meaning. In standard Chinese, known as Mandarin, there are four different tones excluding neutral tone. This emphasis on tones makes Mandarin completely different from other languages. In Mandarin, to change the tone is to change the word itself whereas in many alphabetic languages, English for example, the tone or intonation could be used to exclaim, question, rebuke and so on.
Finally, there are two elements to the Chinese language: the written language, known as characters, and the spoken language, including a number of different dialects. Unlike alphabetic languages, in which words are combinations of a set of letters, Chinese words are individual characters, not telling how they are pronounced and even worse, they are usually pronounced differently in different dialects. This means that written Chinese characters indicate no "pronunciation", therefore, they cannot be "sounded out" easily like alphabetic words, and they can also be spoken in a variety of ways depending on the dialect used.
The features of Chinese stated above illustrate the fact that to virtually master any specific character, a learner needs to learn its written form as well as the way it is pronounced by memorizing as there is no obvious link between the character itself and its sound. Although for Chinese native speakers, characters are generally ideograms and phonogram in nature, meaning that most characters are meaning-deducible and sound-guessable. There are many spoken varieties, so-called dialects, used throughout China, and the pronunciation of the characters varies tremendously in different regions. Although people from the north of China can not always communicate well verbally with southerners, Mandarin as lingua franca can always help. Mandarin has been teaching in schools throughout Mainland China, as well as in Taiwan province. It is also widely spoken in Singapore, Hong Kong, and other parts of Southeast Asia among Chinese people.
I tend to think that each dialect has played a crucial role in shaping regional identity of its speakers. Cantonese, for example, having nine tones rather than four tones, is quite different from Mandarin. Wuhan dialect, for instance, has contributed a lot to the identity of typical Wuhan people. In general, for example, Wuhan people are a bit too loud, but always frank and outspoken. Local language plays an important role in the development of people's regional identity.
Conclusion
The Chinese language is only a very small part of Chinese identity and many other factors definitely play a mute role in Chinese people's behavior. The issue of identity is based on a sense of being, knowing and believing that is constantly in the process of being re-defined (Fishman, 1983). Cultural traditions, attendance at social gatherings, discipline, chores, work ethics and relationships, place, ancestry, values, beliefs, religion, history, appearance, and so forth, together with individual characteristics such as skin color, sex, height, age, etc., have all influenced, implicitly and explicitly, consciously and unconsciously, willing and unwillingly, a person's national, regional, personal identity. The connotation of Chinese identity is inclusively undergoing a dynamic change.
【References】
［1］ Eccles,J.(2009).Who am I and what am I going to do with my life? Personal and collective identities as motivators of action. Educational Psychologist, 44(2), 78-89.
［2］ Joshua,F.(1983).Language and Ethnicity in Bilingual Education. New York: Academic Press.
［3］ Karp,D.(2008).Identity in Post-Mao China. Unpublished master's thesis, International Studies and Diplomacy of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, United Kingdom.
［4］ Mallinson ,C.(2002).The Deconstruction of Identity in Everyday Talk. Everyday Talk: Building and Reflecting Identities. New York: Guilford.
【Key words】 Chinese language; identity
【基金项目】 注：本文为湖北省教育厅人文社会科学资助项目"国际合作办学专业课程全英语教学模式本土化研究"（项目编号：2009B190）的阶段性成果；高等学校省级教学教改项目"IELTS对我国高校英语教学的导向意义研究"（项目编号：2009186）的阶段性成果；中国冶金教育学会教育科学研究规划重点课题"基于国际合作办学的双语师资培养模式研究"（项目编号：YZG09015）的研究成果。
According to different dictionaries, identity has several synonyms such as individuality, personality, distinctiveness and uniqueness. Eccles (2009) puts forward the following questions: Who am I? What am I about? What is my place in my social group? What do I value? What do I want to do with my life? when noting that those questions are related to what psychologists call identity (p. 78).Christine Mallinson, the author of the book The Deconstruction of Identity in Everyday Talk, defines identity as "stable features of persons that exist prior to any particular situation, and are dynamic and situated accomplishments, enacted through talk, changing from one occasion to the next" (p.17).
When searching online with a key word "identity", a tremendous wealth of related information on the theme in terms of cultural, linguistic, social, regional and national aspects will be found soon. It is so true that identity is too complicated to be defined accurately since it involves, implicitly and/or explicitly, language, culture and other variables, like history and politics and so forth. Among those variables, language plays a crucial role in forming identity.
Chinese national identity in general
With the development of modern society, i.e., globalization, technological advances, and new formations of transportation and communication, people from all over the world have been, more or less, engaging in transnational identity formation practices and Chinese people are no exception. As David Karp (2008) states in his dissertation for his Master's degree that identities are "multiple, indeterminate, ambiguous, contested, contingent and fluid"rather than "pure, defined, singular fixed, bounded within the frontiers of the nation-state."(p.14).
although Chinese people throughout the nation consist of the majority Han Chinese, fifty five minority groups, and overseas Chinese, as a nation, the spirit of Confucianism has been generally and widely considered to be the key factor of the Chinese identity. It may very well be true that the globalization process has been shaping, to a certain extent, the identity of everyone, including Chinese people; the national identity of Chinese people in general remains consistently stable and comparatively unique.
Chinese people have a very strong need to belong to the family, the organization, and the whole society; they value family cohesiveness, love peace and harmoniousness. Chinese people happily pass the essential of ancient philosophical thoughts from one generation to another, and they proudly inherit moral excellence and righteousness; they firmly advocate the virtue of lenience, patience, diligence, and industriousness.
The qualities of a typical Chinese make Chinese people throughout the world who they are. Chinese people have been educated to develop and cultivate, generation after generation, and they are, including myself of course, all very proud to be Chinese and have never doubted their Chinese identify with those deep-rooted conceptions in mind. It is all those elements or characteristics that together constitute their identity thus making them unique as Chinese.
The role of Chinese characters
Generally, Chinese people tend to find a good or reasonable balance between intrapersonal harmony and a positive self-identity through non-confrontational communication in public when acquiring their social identity because they are cultivated and encouraged to do so ever since they are able to hold a pen to practice writing the very first character. I can still recall vividly how I unwillingly practiced writing those basic strokes, combined strokes and then every single character day by day until I virtually mastered some thousand characters as a child. However, when giving a profound and all-sided thought, I should admit, happily and thankfully, it was the harsh work that really helped me to grow to be a typical Chinese and later on a popular university language teacher.
I believe that Chinese characters imply many, if not all, essential features of Chinese identity. This can be interpreted explicitly and/or implicitly in terms of the rules of character writing system. Traditionally, Chinese characters were written with a Chinese brush, and the strokes therefore were roughly straight, not evenly of the same thickness of each stroke. Chinese children are all cultivated and trained harshly to write good, neat, balanced and beautiful characters.
I also believe the process of practicing and mastering characters virtually sends a very clear message to Chinese young kids that excellent students should endure under arduous conditions and make painstaking efforts to study so as to achieve the aim set for them. Meanwhile, countless anecdotes, fables and stories reinforce this message time and again in different ways along their journey towards excellence. features like curiosity, adventure, excitement, exploration and inquiry are always inferior to rote learning.
Rote learning, a typical, may be only way to master Chinese characters, is not only a necessary first step to lay a solid foundation for deeper learning; it surely is perfect practice and requisite for Chinese people wanting to be successful academically. Of course, this is probably also the main or even the only reason why Chinese students in general, even scholars, tend to "borrow" ideas without acknowledging their owners as "being wealthy in knowledge through rote learning" has always been highly encouraged, valued and appreciated in China.
All in all, I strongly believe that Chinese writing system has been playing a decisive role in shaping Chinese identity at macrocosm level, or national level. The unique Chinese writing system should be the foundation stone of Chinese identity: collective and dependent. Chinese people appreciate collectivism, believing obligations to the society take precedence. Chinese culture admires diffuseness, preferring to look at the whole rather than the parts and favoring a group decision-making process. Chinese people are outer-directed, caring more about what people around them think. Chinese children are not encouraged to be outstanding, since "a single flower does not make a spring", "One tree does not make a forest". Chinese people live for other people, their children, parents, and relatives, other than live for themselves, and they appreciate and enjoy this self- sacrifice generation after generation.
The role of Chinese grammar
In my opinion, like Chinese characters, it is Chinese grammar that helps shape Chinese identity at the macrocosm level.
Unlike those alphabetic languages, in which much information is carried by the use of auxiliaries and by verb inflections, Chinese is an uninflected language so it conveys meaning through word order, adverbials or context. To many foreigners, Chinese simply has no grammar at all in terms of tense, gender, mood, inflectional morphology and word order from their perspectives, which seems to be well approved by the fact that Chinese is always acquired slowly, with significant difficulty and considerable inaccuracy, by its learners, both adult foreigners and Chinese children as well.
Chinese has no complicated tenses and the concept of time in Chinese is not handled through the use of different tenses and verb forms. Instead, Chinese relies on expressing aspect. Actually, Chinese words have only one grammatical form as they are individual fixed characters. By this I mean, unlike most Indo-European languages, Chinese verbs never conjugate through inflectional suffixes. Take English as an example, there are six different forms of each word, namely, base form, infinitive, third-person singular present, simple past, present participle, and past participle. Chinese verbs, however, always remain the same, their base form, wherever and wherever they appear in sentences.
Based on my experience of being a Mandarin teacher for many years, I completely understand why my foreign students from English speaking countries claim that Chinese is definitely among the languages with the simplest grammar. To them, the tough part of the Chinese language is writing, i.e., memorizing "millions of those tedious strokes". As for grammar, referring here to the rules for changing forms of words; Chinese simply does not have verb, noun, adverb or adjective suffixes for inflection at all. Moreover, Chinese does not have stuff like articles, phrasal verbs, or complex rules governing the position of such sentence elements like prepositions.
I often hear foreigners complain that they have no clue and have to guess which tense Chinese people are talking about when communicating orally, and they are so confused when trying hard to guess individual words, word phases, as well as idioms in each sentence while reading Chinese sentences, let along articles. The reality that even Chinese children all have to struggle extremely hard and experiment pretty long to acquire their native language may well illustrate how difficult Chinese language is.
Generally, Chinese is a topic-prominent language, a typical high context language, relying highly on information sharing. To Chinese people language is not just a tool for communication only. Chinese people value the quantity, quality, relation and manner of communication quite differently from people with different cultures. It is so true that Chinese people have their own communication style, constructed or determined by Chinese grammar system, in terms of the tone of voice, facial expression, gestures, posture and/or status of the speaker. Chinese tend to give more information than is needed; they tend to be not direct by hiding assumptions, and even conveying double-meanings by using idioms, slangs, or dialects. In a word, it is believable that Chinese identity derives, directly and mainly, from the unique characteristics of the Chinese language.
The role of Chinese pronunciation
Compared with characters, Chinese pronunciation system plays a crucial role, in my opinion, in shaping the regional identity of Chinese people in terms of dialects.
Chinese pronunciation has its unique features. To begin with, Chinese is a tonal language, meaning that it uses the pitch, highness or lownes, of a phoneme sound to distinguish word meaning. In standard Chinese, known as Mandarin, there are four different tones excluding neutral tone. This emphasis on tones makes Mandarin completely different from other languages. In Mandarin, to change the tone is to change the word itself whereas in many alphabetic languages, English for example, the tone or intonation could be used to exclaim, question, rebuke and so on.
Finally, there are two elements to the Chinese language: the written language, known as characters, and the spoken language, including a number of different dialects. Unlike alphabetic languages, in which words are combinations of a set of letters, Chinese words are individual characters, not telling how they are pronounced and even worse, they are usually pronounced differently in different dialects. This means that written Chinese characters indicate no "pronunciation", therefore, they cannot be "sounded out" easily like alphabetic words, and they can also be spoken in a variety of ways depending on the dialect used.
The features of Chinese stated above illustrate the fact that to virtually master any specific character, a learner needs to learn its written form as well as the way it is pronounced by memorizing as there is no obvious link between the character itself and its sound. Although for Chinese native speakers, characters are generally ideograms and phonogram in nature, meaning that most characters are meaning-deducible and sound-guessable. There are many spoken varieties, so-called dialects, used throughout China, and the pronunciation of the characters varies tremendously in different regions. Although people from the north of China can not always communicate well verbally with southerners, Mandarin as lingua franca can always help. Mandarin has been teaching in schools throughout Mainland China, as well as in Taiwan province. It is also widely spoken in Singapore, Hong Kong, and other parts of Southeast Asia among Chinese people.
I tend to think that each dialect has played a crucial role in shaping regional identity of its speakers. Cantonese, for example, having nine tones rather than four tones, is quite different from Mandarin. Wuhan dialect, for instance, has contributed a lot to the identity of typical Wuhan people. In general, for example, Wuhan people are a bit too loud, but always frank and outspoken. Local language plays an important role in the development of people's regional identity.
Conclusion
The Chinese language is only a very small part of Chinese identity and many other factors definitely play a mute role in Chinese people's behavior. The issue of identity is based on a sense of being, knowing and believing that is constantly in the process of being re-defined (Fishman, 1983). Cultural traditions, attendance at social gatherings, discipline, chores, work ethics and relationships, place, ancestry, values, beliefs, religion, history, appearance, and so forth, together with individual characteristics such as skin color, sex, height, age, etc., have all influenced, implicitly and explicitly, consciously and unconsciously, willing and unwillingly, a person's national, regional, personal identity. The connotation of Chinese identity is inclusively undergoing a dynamic change.
【References】
［1］ Eccles,J.(2009).Who am I and what am I going to do with my life? Personal and collective identities as motivators of action. Educational Psychologist, 44(2), 78-89.
［2］ Joshua,F.(1983).Language and Ethnicity in Bilingual Education. New York: Academic Press.
［3］ Karp,D.(2008).Identity in Post-Mao China. Unpublished master's thesis, International Studies and Diplomacy of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, United Kingdom.
［4］ Mallinson ,C.(2002).The Deconstruction of Identity in Everyday Talk. Everyday Talk: Building and Reflecting Identities. New York: Guilford.