6 - Chinese language and culture

Summary

The Chinese language, which is a communication system used by the Chinese people on a daily basis to accomplish various goals in life, unavoidably carries many features reflecting some of the commonly held social beliefs in their culture. Culture can be roughly defined as socially learned patterns of behavior and interpretive practices, in which language plays a most important part (Duranti 1997: 49). In fact, the ways in which many Chinese words, idioms, popular sayings, metaphors, and neologisms (newly coined words, see section 6.1 for a detailed discussion) are widely used among the Chinese correspond to the cultural beliefs and experiences that have shaped China as a country over the last three millennia. This chapter deals with various Chinese expressions in relation to these cultural underpinnings with the goal to situate some common Chinese usages such as idiomatic expressions to the social contexts of the Chinese-speaking community.

Furthermore, the Chinese people, who have been in contact with many foreign cultures and languages throughout history, have also embraced and integrated into their own culture many foreign concepts and ideas. The second half of this chapter shows how language contacts, interactions between various cultural groups speaking different languages in Chinese history, have led to an extensive amount of borrowed terms in the modern Chinese lexicon.

Finally, the structures of neologisms including many Chinese words of European origin and the morpheme–syllable Chinese writing system are examined together to show the importance of meaning in coining neologisms in Chinese.