121-563: Chinatown ( Chinese : 唐人街 ) is the catch-all name for an ethnic enclave of Chinese people located outside Greater China , most often in an urban setting. Areas known as "Chinatown" exist throughout the world, including Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. The development of most Chinatowns typically resulted from human migration to an area without any or with few Chinese residents. Binondo in Manila , established in 1594,
242-566: A Koreatown or Little India . One example includes Asiatown in Cleveland , Ohio . It was initially referred to as a Chinatown but was subsequently renamed due to the influx of non-Chinese Asian Americans who opened businesses there. Today the district acts as a unifying factor for the Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean, Japanese, Filipino, Indian, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, Nepalese and Thai communities of Cleveland. Further ambiguities with
363-461: A common language based on Mandarin varieties , known as Guānhuà ( 官話 / 官话 'officer speech'). While never formally defined, knowledge of this language was essential for a career in the imperial bureaucracy. In the early years of the Republic of China , Literary Chinese was replaced as the written standard by written vernacular Chinese , which was based on northern dialects. In the 1930s,
484-488: A rime dictionary published in 601, noted wide variations in pronunciation between regions, and was created with the goal of defining a standard system of pronunciation for reading the classics. This standard is known as Middle Chinese , and is believed to be a diasystem , based on a compromise between the reading traditions of the northern and southern capitals. The North China Plain provided few barriers to migration, which resulted in relative linguistic homogeneity over
605-470: A tapioca starch factory that once stood in the area. In Manila , Philippines , the area is called Mínlúnluò Qū 岷倫洛區 , literally meaning the "Mín and Luò Rivers confluence district" but is actually a transliteration of the local term Binondo and an allusion to its proximity to the Pasig River . In Philippine Spanish , the term used for Chinatown districts is parián , the etymology of which
726-500: A tone split conditioned by syllabic onsets. Syllables with voiced initials tended to be pronounced with a lower pitch, and by the late Tang dynasty , each of the tones had split into two registers conditioned by the initials, known as "upper" ( 阴 / 陰 yīn ) and "lower" ( 阳 / 陽 yáng ). When voicing was lost in all dialects except in the Wu and Old Xiang groups, this distinction became phonemic, yielding eight tonal categories, with
847-431: A "suburban" setting (and labeled as such); and Austin, Texas's Chinatown , which is in essence a "fabricated" Chinese-themed mall. This contrasts with narrower definitions, where the term only described Chinatown in a city setting. Trading centers populated predominantly by Chinese men and their native spouses have long existed throughout Southeast Asia . Emigration to other parts of the world from China accelerated in
968-456: A block wide swath of the city, overlapping into the adjacent 'Little Lon ' red light district. With restricted immigration it shrunk again, becoming a strip of Chinese restaurants by the late 1970s, when it was celebrated with decorative arches. However, with a recent huge influx of students from mainland China, it is now the center of a much larger area of noodle shops, travel agents, restaurants, and groceries. The Australian gold rushes also saw
1089-462: A book by the Rev. Hatfield, who applied the term to the Chinese part of the main settlement on the remote South Atlantic island of St. Helena . The island was a regular way-station on the voyage to Europe and North America from Indian Ocean ports, including Singapore. One of the earliest American usages dates to 1855, when San Francisco newspaper The Daily Alta California described a "pitched battle on
1210-509: A certain extent in South Korea , remain virtually identical to traditional characters, with variations between the two forms largely stylistic. There has historically been a debate on traditional and simplified Chinese characters . Because the simplifications are fairly systematic, it is possible to convert computer-encoded characters between the two sets, with the main issue being ambiguities in simplified representations resulting from
1331-678: A classification of Li Rong , distinguishing three further groups: Some varieties remain unclassified, including the Danzhou dialect (northwestern Hainan ), Mai (southern Hainan), Waxiang (northwestern Hunan ), Xiangnan Tuhua (southern Hunan), Shaozhou Tuhua (northern Guangdong), and the forms of Chinese spoken by the She people ( She Chinese ) and the Miao people . She Chinese, Xiangnan Tuhua, Shaozhou Tuhua and unclassified varieties of southwest Jiangxi appear to be related to Hakka. Most of
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#17327656080821452-457: A combination of innovations and retention of distinctions from Middle Chinese: Chinese finals may be analysed as an optional medial glide , a main vowel and an optional coda. Conservative vowel systems, such as those of Gan dialects , have high vowels /i/ , /u/ and /y/ , which also function as medials, mid vowels /e/ and /o/ , and a low /a/ -like vowel. In other dialects, including Mandarin dialects, /o/ has merged with /a/ , leaving
1573-436: A common Chinese surname or belonging to a common clan, spoken Chinese dialect , specific village, region or country of origin, and so on. Many have their own facilities. Some examples include San Francisco's prominent Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (中華總會館 Zhōnghuá Zǒng Huìguǎn ), aka Chinese Six Companies and Los Angeles' Southern California Teochew Association. The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association
1694-480: A compound word or phrase. This process is so extensive in Shanghainese that the tone system is reduced to a pitch accent system much like modern Japanese . The tonal categories of modern varieties can be related by considering their derivation from the four tones of Middle Chinese , though cognate tonal categories in different dialects are often realized as quite different pitch contours. Middle Chinese had
1815-548: A final and a tone . In general, southern varieties have fewer initial consonants than northern and central varieties, but more often preserve the Middle Chinese final consonants. Some varieties, such as Cantonese, Hokkien and Shanghainese , include syllabic nasals as independent syllables. In the 42 varieties surveyed in the Great Dictionary of Modern Chinese Dialects , the number of initials (including
1936-848: A long history. Those in Nagasaki , Kobe , and Yokohama , Japan, Binondo in Manila, Hoi An and Bao Vinh in central Vietnam all existed in 1600. Glodok , the Chinese quarter of Jakarta, Indonesia , dates to 1740. Chinese presence in India dates back to the 5th century CE, with the first recorded Chinese settler in Calcutta named Young Atchew around 1780. Chinatowns first appeared in the Indian cities of Kolkata , Mumbai , and Chennai . The Chinatown centered on Yaowarat Road in Bangkok , Thailand ,
2057-416: A marker, usually the same as the attributive marker, though some varieties use a different marker. All varieties have transitive and intransitive verbs. Instead of adjectives, Chinese varieties use stative verbs , which can function as predicates but differ from intransitive verbs in being modifiable by degree adverbs. Ditransitive sentences vary, with northern varieties placing the indirect object before
2178-625: A marketplace for trade goods. Most of them were established in the late 16th century to house Chinese migrants as part of the early Spanish colonial policy of ethnic segregation. There were numerous pariáns throughout the Philippines in various locations, the names of which still survive into modern district names. This include the Parián de Arroceros of Intramuros , Manila (which was eventually moved several times, ending up in Binondo ). The term
2299-594: A particular city as a gift from the Republic of China and People's Republic of China , or local governments (such as Chinatown, San Francisco) and business organizations. The long-neglected Chinatown in Havana , Cuba , received materials for its paifang from the People's Republic of China as part of the Chinatown's gradual renaissance. Construction of these red arches is often financed by local financial contributions from
2420-443: A primary division between northern groups (Mandarin and Jin) and all others, with Min as an identifiable branch. Because speakers share a standard written form , and have a common cultural heritage with long periods of political unity, the varieties are popularly perceived among native speakers as variants of a single Chinese language, and this is also the official position. Conventional English-language usage in Chinese linguistics
2541-665: A reduced pitch range that is determined by the preceding syllable. Most morphemes in Chinese varieties are monosyllables descended from Old Chinese words, and have cognates in all varieties: Southern varieties also include distinctive substrata of vocabulary of non-Chinese origin. Some of these words may have come from Tai–Kadai and Austroasiatic languages. Chinese varieties generally lack inflectional morphology and instead express grammatical categories using analytic means such as particles and prepositions . There are major differences between northern and southern varieties, but often some northern areas share features found in
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#17327656080822662-507: A result of availability of direct flights to China. The La Mesa District of Tijuana was formerly a small enclave, but has tripled in size as a result of direct flights to Shanghai . It has an ethnic Chinese population rise from 5,000 in 2009 to roughly 15,000 in 2012, overtaking Mexicali 's Chinatown as the largest Chinese enclave in Mexico. The New York metropolitan area , consisting of New York City , Long Island , and nearby areas within
2783-811: A significant amount of Chinese emigration to North America originated from four counties called Sze Yup , located west of the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong province, making Toishanese a dominant variety of the Chinese language spoken in Chinatowns in Canada and the United States . As conditions in China have improved in recent decades, many Chinatowns have lost their initial mission, which
2904-851: A single mid vowel with a wide range of allophones . Many dialects, particularly in northern and central China, have apical or retroflex vowels, which are syllabic fricatives derived from high vowels following sibilant initials. In many Wu dialects , vowels and final glides have monophthongized , producing a rich inventory of vowels in open syllables. Reduction of medials is common in Yue dialects . The Middle Chinese codas, consisting of glides /j/ and /w/ , nasals /m/ , /n/ and /ŋ/ , and stops /p/ , /t/ and /k/ , are best preserved in southern dialects, particularly Yue dialects such as Cantonese. In some Min dialects, nasals and stops following open vowels have shifted to nasalization and glottal stops respectively. In Jin, Lower Yangtze Mandarin and Wu dialects,
3025-460: A six-way contrast in unchecked syllables and a two-way contrast in checked syllables. Cantonese maintains these eight tonal categories and has developed an additional distinction in checked syllables. (The latter distinction has disappeared again in many varieties.) However, most Chinese varieties have reduced the number of tonal distinctions. For example, in Mandarin, the tones resulting from
3146-575: A standard national language with pronunciation based on the Beijing dialect was adopted, but with vocabulary drawn from a range of Mandarin varieties, and grammar based on literature in the modern written vernacular. Standard Chinese is the official spoken language of the People's Republic of China and Taiwan, and is one of the official languages of Singapore. It has become a pluricentric language , with differences in pronunciation and vocabulary between
3267-471: A third tone changes to a second tone when followed by another third tone. Particularly complex sandhi patterns are found in Wu dialects and coastal Min dialects. In Shanghainese, the tone of all syllables in a word is determined by the tone of the first, so that Shanghainese has word rather than syllable tone. In northern varieties, many particles or suffixes are weakly stressed or atonic syllables. These are much rarer in southern varieties. Such syllables have
3388-577: A three-way tonal contrast in syllables with vocalic or nasal endings. The traditional names of the tonal categories are 'level'/'even' ( 平 píng ), 'rising' ( 上 shǎng ) and 'departing'/'going' ( 去 qù ). Syllables ending in a stop consonant /p/ , /t/ or /k/ ( checked syllables ) had no tonal contrasts but were traditionally treated as a fourth tone category, 'entering' ( 入 rù ), corresponding to syllables ending in nasals /m/ , /n/ , or /ŋ/ . The tones of Middle Chinese, as well as similar systems in neighbouring languages, experienced
3509-620: A velar or glottal initial: Plural personal pronouns may be marked with a suffix, noun or phrase in different varieties. The suffix men 们 / 們 is common in the north, but several different suffixes are use elsewhere. In some varieties, especially in the Wu area, different suffixes are used for first, second and third person pronouns. Case is not marked, except in varieties in the Qinghai–Gansu sprachbund . The forms of demonstratives vary greatly, with few cognates between different areas. A two-way distinction between proximal and distal
3630-758: A whole. As with the Romance languages descended from Latin , the ancestral language was spread by imperial expansion over substrate languages 2000 years ago, by the Qin and Han empires in China, and the Roman Empire in Europe. Medieval Latin remained the standard for scholarly and administrative writing in Western Europe for centuries, influencing local varieties much like Literary Chinese did in China. In both cases, local forms of speech diverged from both
3751-516: A wide area. Contrastingly, the mountains and rivers of southern China contain all six of the other major Chinese dialect groups, with each in turn featuring great internal diversity, particularly in Fujian . Until the mid-20th century, most Chinese people spoke only their local language. As a practical measure, officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using
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3872-662: A zero initial) ranges from 15 in some southern dialects to a high of 35 in Chongming dialect , spoken in Chongming Island , Shanghai . The initial system of the Fuzhou dialect of northern Fujian is a minimal example. With the exception of /ŋ/ , which is often merged with the zero initial, the initials of this dialect are present in all Chinese varieties, although several varieties do not distinguish /n/ from /l/ . However, most varieties have additional initials, due to
3993-460: Is Khu người Hoa (Chinese district) or phố Tàu (Chinese street). Vietnamese language is prevalent in Chinatowns of Paris, Los Angeles, Boston, Philadelphia, Toronto, and Montreal as ethnic Chinese from Vietnam have set up shop in them. In Japanese, the term "chūkagai" (中華街, literally "Chinese Street") is the translation used for Yokohama and Nagasaki Chinatown . In Indonesia , chinatown
4114-869: Is 産 (also the accepted form in Japan and Korea), while in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan the accepted form is 產 (also the accepted form in Vietnamese chữ Nôm ). The PRC tends to print material intended for people in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, and overseas Chinese in traditional characters. For example, versions of the People's Daily are printed in traditional characters, and both People's Daily and Xinhua have traditional character versions of their website available, using Big5 encoding. Mainland companies selling products in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan use traditional characters in order to communicate with consumers;
4235-540: Is also used in Cantonese nowadays. The literal word-for-word translation of Chinatown — Zhōngguó Chéng ( 中國城 ) is also used, but more frequently by visiting Chinese nationals rather than immigrants of Chinese descent who live in various Chinatowns. Chinatowns in Southeast Asia have unique Chinese names used by the local Chinese, as there are large populations of people who are Overseas Chinese , living within
4356-820: Is among the largest umbrella groups of benevolent associations in the North America, which branches in several Chinatowns. Politically, the CCBA has traditionally been aligned with the Kuomintang and the Republic of China . The London Chinatown Chinese Association is active in Chinatown, London . Chinatown, Paris has an institution in the Association des Résidents en France d'origine indochinoise and it servicing overseas Chinese immigrants in Paris who were born in
4477-532: Is known as Pecinan , a shortened term of pe-cina-an , means everything related to the Chinese people. Most of these pecinans usually located in Java . Some languages have adopted the English-language term, such as Dutch and German . Traditional Chinese characters Traditional Chinese characters are a standard set of Chinese character forms used to write Chinese languages . In Taiwan ,
4598-462: Is most common, but some varieties have a single neutral demonstrative, while others distinguish three or more on the basis of distance, visibility or other properties. An extreme example is found in a variety spoken in Yongxin County , Jiangxi, where five grades of distance are distinguished. Attributive constructions typically have the form NP/VP + ATTR + NP, where the last noun phrase
4719-663: Is recognized as the world's oldest Chinatown. Notable early examples outside Asia include San Francisco 's Chinatown in the United States and Melbourne 's Chinatown in Australia, which were founded in the early 1850s during the California and Victoria gold rushes, respectively. A more modern example, in Montville, Connecticut , was caused by the displacement of Chinese workers in New York's Manhattan Chinatown following
4840-470: Is similarly used as a literary form by speakers of all varieties. Dialectologist Jerry Norman estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese. These varieties form a dialect continuum , in which differences in speech generally become more pronounced as distances increase, although there are also some sharp boundaries. However, the rate of change in mutual intelligibility varies immensely depending on region. For example,
4961-456: Is the head and the attributive marker is usually a cognate of de 的 in the north or a classifier in the south. The latter pattern is also common in the languages of Southeast Asia. A few varieties in the Jiang–Huai, Wu, southern Min and Yue areas feature the old southern pattern of a zero attributive marker. Nominalization of verb phrases or predicates is achieved by following them with
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5082-566: Is to use dialect for the speech of a particular place (regardless of status), with regional groupings like Mandarin and Wu called dialect groups . Other linguists choose to refer to the major groups as languages. However, each of these groups contains mutually unintelligible varieties. ISO 639-3 and the Ethnologue assign language codes to each of the top-level groups listed above except Min and Pinghua, whose subdivisions are assigned five and two codes respectively. Some linguists refer to
5203-651: Is uncertain. In the rest of the Spanish Empire , the Spanish-language term is usually barrio chino ( Chinese neighborhood ; plural: barrios chinos ), used in Spain and Latin America . (However, barrio chino or its Catalan cognate barri xinès do not always refer to a Chinese neighborhood: these are also common terms for a disreputable district with drugs and prostitution, and often no connection to
5324-493: The Chinese Commercial News , World News , and United Daily News all use traditional characters, as do some Hong Kong–based magazines such as Yazhou Zhoukan . The Philippine Chinese Daily uses simplified characters. DVDs are usually subtitled using traditional characters, influenced by media from Taiwan as well as by the two countries sharing the same DVD region , 3. With most having immigrated to
5445-540: The Chinese quarter of Singapore , which by 1844 was already being called "China Town" or "Chinatown" by the British colonial government. This may have been a word-for-word translation into English of the Malay name for that quarter, which in those days was probably "Kampong China" or possibly "Kota China" or "Kampong Tionghua/Chunghwa/Zhonghua". The first appearance of a Chinatown outside Singapore may have been in 1852, in
5566-570: The Guangdong area. A community began to form in the eastern end of Little Bourke Street , Melbourne by the mid-1850s; the area is still the center of the Melbourne Chinatown , making it the oldest continuously occupied Chinatown in a western city (since the San Francisco one was destroyed and rebuilt). Gradually expanding, it reached a peak in the early 20th century, with Chinese business, mainly furniture workshops, occupying
5687-777: The Kensiu language . Varieties of Chinese There are hundreds of local Chinese language varieties forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family , many of which are not mutually intelligible . Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast part of mainland China. The varieties are typically classified into several groups: Mandarin , Wu , Min , Xiang , Gan , Jin , Hakka and Yue , though some varieties remain unclassified. These groups are neither clades nor individual languages defined by mutual intelligibility, but reflect common phonological developments from Middle Chinese . Chinese varieties have
5808-612: The Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area , Chinese varieties require an intervening classifier when a noun is preceded by a demonstrative or numeral. The inventory of classifiers tends to be larger in the south than in the north, where some varieties use only the general classifier cognate with ge 个 / 個 . First- and second-person pronouns are cognate across all varieties. For third-person pronouns, Jin, Mandarin, and Xiang varieties have cognate forms, but other varieties generally use forms that originally had
5929-521: The San Gabriel Valley , which are not necessarily considered "Chinatowns" in the sense that they do not necessarily contain the Chinese architectures or Chinese language signs as signatures of an officially sanctioned area that was designated either in law or signage stating so, differentiate areas that are called "Chinatowns" versus locations that have "significant" populations of people of Chinese descent. For example, San Jose, California in
6050-490: The September 11th attacks in 2001. Oxford Dictionaries defines "Chinatown" as "... a district of any non-Asian town, especially a city or seaport , in which the population is predominantly of Chinese origin". However, some Chinatowns may have little to do with China. Some "Vietnamese" enclaves are in fact a city's "second Chinatown", and some Chinatowns are in fact pan-Asian , meaning they could also be counted as
6171-640: The Shanghainese -language character U+20C8E 𠲎 CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-20C8E —a composition of 伐 with the ⼝ 'MOUTH' radical—used instead of the Standard Chinese 嗎 ; 吗 . Typefaces often use the initialism TC to signify the use of traditional Chinese characters, as well as SC for simplified Chinese characters . In addition, the Noto, Italy family of typefaces, for example, also provides separate fonts for
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#17327656080826292-608: The transcontinental railroad was built, more Chinatowns started to appear in railroad towns such as St. Louis , Chicago , Cincinnati , Pittsburgh and Butte, Montana . Chinatowns then subsequently emerged in many East Coast cities , including New York City , Boston , Philadelphia , Providence and Baltimore . With the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation , many southern states such as Arkansas , Louisiana and Georgia began to hire Chinese for work in place of slave labor. The history of Chinatowns
6413-852: The tree model to Chinese. Scholars account for the transitional nature of the central varieties in terms of wave models . Iwata argues that innovations have been transmitted from the north across the Huai River to the Lower Yangtze Mandarin area and from there southeast to the Wu area and westwards along the Yangtze River valley and thence to southwestern areas, leaving the hills of the southeast largely untouched. Some dialect boundaries , such as between Wu and Min, are particularly abrupt, while others, such as between Mandarin and Xiang or between Min and Hakka, are much less clearly defined. Several east-west isoglosses run along
6534-466: The 1860s with the signing of the Treaty of Peking (1860), which opened China's borders to free movement. Early emigrants came primarily from the coastal provinces of Guangdong (Canton, Kwangtung) and Fujian (Fukien, Hokkien) in southeastern China – where the people generally speak Toishanese , Cantonese , Hakka , Teochew (Chiuchow) and Hokkien . In the late 19th century and early 20th century,
6655-461: The 1890s, "Chinatown" appeared mainly in connection with California. At first, Australian and New Zealand journalists also regarded Chinatowns as Californian phenomena. However, they began using the term to denote local Chinese communities as early as 1861 in Australia and 1873 in New Zealand. In most other countries, the custom of calling local Chinese communities "Chinatowns" is not older than
6776-653: The 20th century. The first Chinatown in London was located in the Limehouse area of the East End of London at the start of the 20th century. The Chinese population engaged in business which catered to the Chinese sailors who frequented the Docklands . The area acquired a bad reputation from exaggerated reports of opium dens and slum housing . France received a large settlement of Chinese immigrant laborers, mostly from
6897-463: The Beijing dialect distinguishes mā ( 妈 / 媽 'mother'), má ( 麻 'hemp'), mǎ ( 马 / 馬 'horse) and mà ( 骂 / 罵 'to scold'). The number of tonal contrasts varies between dialects, with Northern dialects tending to have fewer distinctions than Southern ones. Many dialects have tone sandhi , in which the pitch contour of a syllable is affected by the tones of adjacent syllables in
7018-685: The Chinatown community. Some of these structures span an entire intersection, and some are smaller in height and width. Some paifang can be made of wood , masonry or steel and may incorporate an elaborate or simple design. A major component of many Chinatowns is the family benevolent association, which provides some degree of aid to immigrants. These associations generally provide social support, religious services, death benefits (members' names in Chinese are generally enshrined on tablets and posted on walls), meals, and recreational activities for ethnic Chinese, especially for older Chinese migrants. Membership in these associations can be based on members sharing
7139-415: The Chinatown in Philadelphia has a sizeable non-Chinese population residing within the community. A recent study also suggests that the demographic change is also driven by gentrification of what were previously Chinatown neighborhoods. The influx of luxury housing is speeding up the gentrification of such neighborhoods. The trend for emergence of these types of natural enclaves is on the decline (with
7260-437: The Chinese.). In Portuguese, Chinatown is often referred to as Bairro chinês ( the Chinese Neighbourhood ; plural: bairros chineses ). In Francophone regions (such as France and Quebec ), Chinatown is often referred to as le quartier chinois ( the Chinese Neighbourhood ; plural: les quartiers chinois ). The most prominent Francophone Chinatowns are located in Paris and Montreal . The Vietnamese term for Chinatown
7381-665: The Huai and Yangtze Rivers. A north-south barrier is formed by the Tianmu and Wuyi Mountains . Most assessments of mutual intelligibility of varieties of Chinese in the literature are impressionistic. Functional intelligibility testing is time-consuming in any language family, and usually not done when more than 10 varieties are to be compared. However, one 2009 study aimed to measure intelligibility between 15 Chinese provinces. In each province, 15 university students were recruited as speakers and 15 older rural inhabitants recruited as listeners. The listeners were then tested on their comprehension of isolated words and of particular words in
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#17327656080827502-425: The Latin alphabet supplanted Latin itself, and states eventually developed their own standard languages . In China, Literary Chinese was predominantly used in formal writing until the early 20th century. Written Chinese, read with different local pronunciations, continued to serve as a source of vocabulary for the local varieties. The new standard written vernacular Chinese , the counterpart of spoken Standard Chinese,
7623-435: The Malay 'Kreta Ayer' in reference to the water carts that used to ply the area. The Chinatown in Kuala Lumpur , Malaysia , (where 2 million ethnic Chinese comprise 30% of the population of Greater Kuala Lumpur ) while officially known as Petaling Street (Malay: Jalan Petaling ), is referred to by Malaysian Chinese by its Cantonese name ci cong gaai ( 茨廠街 , pinyin: Cíchǎng Jiē ), literally "tapioca factory street", after
7744-413: The New York metropolitan area. New York's status as an alpha global city, its extensive mass transit system, and the New York metropolitan area's enormous economic marketplace are among the many reasons it remains a major international immigration hub. The Manhattan Chinatown contains the largest concentration of ethnic Chinese in the Western hemisphere , and the Flushing Chinatown in Queens has become
7865-451: The People's Republic of China, traditional Chinese characters are standardised according to the Table of Comparison between Standard, Traditional and Variant Chinese Characters . Dictionaries published in mainland China generally show both simplified and their traditional counterparts. There are differences between the accepted traditional forms in mainland China and elsewhere, for example the accepted traditional form of 产 in mainland China
7986-413: The Portuguese colonial period, for instance, had a large Chinese population in Campo China. They settled down at port towns under the authority's approval for trading. After the European colonial powers seized and ruled the port towns in the 16th century, Chinese supported European traders and colonists, and created autonomous settlements. Several Asian Chinatowns, although not yet called by that name, have
8107-419: The United States during the second half of the 19th century, Chinese Americans have long used traditional characters. When not providing both, US public notices and signs in Chinese are generally written in traditional characters, more often than in simplified characters. In the past, traditional Chinese was most often encoded on computers using the Big5 standard, which favored traditional characters. However,
8228-416: The United States has 63,434 people (2010 U.S. Census) of Chinese descent, and yet "does not have a Chinatown ". Some "official" Chinatowns have Chinese populations much lower than that. Many tourist-destination metropolitan Chinatowns can be distinguished by large red arch entrance structures known in Mandarin Chinese as Paifang (sometimes accompanied by imperial guardian lion statues on either side of
8349-437: The city government and private property owners which allowed Chinese persons to inherit and inhabit dwellings within the city. Many Chinese found jobs working for large companies seeking a source of labor, most famously as part of the Central Pacific on the Transcontinental Railroad . Since it started in Omaha , that city had a notable Chinatown for almost a century. Other cities in North America where Chinatowns were founded in
8470-447: The city of Wenzhou , in the Zhejiang province of China. Significant Chinatowns sprung up in Belleville and the 13th arrondissement of Paris . By the late 1970s, refugees and exiles from the Vietnam War played a significant part in the redevelopment of Chinatowns in developed Western countries. As a result, many existing Chinatowns have become pan-Asian business districts and residential neighborhoods. By contrast, most Chinatowns in
8591-435: The coastal area from Zhejiang to eastern Guangdong . Standard Chinese takes its phonology from the Beijing dialect, with vocabulary from the Mandarin group and grammar based on literature in the modern written vernacular . It is one of the official languages of China and one of the four official languages of Singapore . It has become a pluricentric language , with differences in pronunciation and vocabulary between
8712-517: The context of sentences spoken by speakers from all 15 of the provinces surveyed. The results demonstrated significant levels of unintelligibility between areas, even within the Mandarin group. In a few cases, listeners understood fewer than 70% of words spoken by speakers from the same province, indicating significant differences between urban and rural varieties. As expected from the wide use of Standard Chinese , speakers from Beijing were understood more than speakers from elsewhere. The scores supported
8833-573: The development of a Chinatown in Sydney , at first around The Rocks , near the docks, but it has moved twice, first in the 1890s to the east side of the Haymarket area, near the new markets, then in the 1920s concentrating on the west side. Nowadays, Sydney's Chinatown is centered on Dixon Street. Other Chinatowns in European capitals, including Paris and London , were established at the turn of
8954-933: The dialects of the Southern zone are derived from a standard used in the Yangtze valley during the Han dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD), which he called Old Southern Chinese, while the Central zone was a transitional area of dialects that were originally of southern type, but overlain with centuries of Northern influence. Hilary Chappell proposed a refined model, dividing Norman's Northern zone into Northern and Southwestern areas, and his Southern zone into Southeastern (Min) and Far Southern (Yue and Hakka) areas, with Pinghua transitional between Southwestern and Far Southern areas. The long history of migration of peoples and interaction between speakers of different dialects makes it difficult to apply
9075-581: The direct object and southern varieties using the reverse order. All varieties have copular sentences of the form NP1 + COP + NP2, though the copula varies. Most Yue and Hakka varieties use a form cognate with xì 係 'to connect'. All other varieties use a form cognate with shì 是 , which was a demonstrative in Classical Chinese but began to be used as a copula from the Han period. All varieties form existential sentences with
9196-425: The docks in south Liverpool, this area was heavily bombed during World War II, causing the Chinese community moving to the current location Liverpool Chinatown on Nelson Street. The Chinatown in San Francisco is one of the largest in North America and the oldest north of Mexico. It served as a port of entry for early Chinese immigrants from the 1850s to the 1900s. The area was the one geographical region deeded by
9317-686: The exceptions being the continued growth and emergence of newer Chinatowns in Queens and Brooklyn in New York City), only to be replaced by newer "Disneyland-like" attractions, such as a new Chinatown that will be built in the Catskills region of New York . This includes the endangerment of existing historical Chinatowns that will eventually stop serving the needs of Chinese immigrants. Newer developments like those in Norwich, Connecticut , and
9438-607: The former French Indochina . Traditionally, Chinatown-based associations have also been aligned with ethnic Chinese business interests, such as restaurant, grocery, and laundry (antiquated) associations in Chinatowns in North America. In Chicago's Chinatown, the On Leong Merchants Association was active. Although the term "Chinatown" was first used in Asia, it is not derived from a Chinese language. Its earliest appearance seems to have been in connection with
9559-419: The greatest differences in their phonology , and to a lesser extent in vocabulary and syntax . Southern varieties tend to have fewer initial consonants than northern and central varieties, but more often preserve the Middle Chinese final consonants. All have phonemic tones , with northern varieties tending to have fewer distinctions than southern ones. Many have tone sandhi , with the most complex patterns in
9680-493: The inverse is equally true as well. In digital media, many cultural phenomena imported from Hong Kong and Taiwan into mainland China, such as music videos, karaoke videos, subtitled movies, and subtitled dramas, use traditional Chinese characters. In Hong Kong and Macau , traditional characters were retained during the colonial period, while the mainland adopted simplified characters. Simplified characters are contemporaneously used to accommodate immigrants and tourists, often from
9801-403: The languages previously dominant in these areas, and forms of the language spoken in different regions began to diverge. During periods of political unity there was a tendency for states to promote the use of a standard language across the territory they controlled, in order to facilitate communication between people from different regions. The first evidence of dialectal variation is found in
9922-548: The literary standard and each other, producing dialect continua with mutually unintelligible varieties separated by long distances. However, a major difference between China and Western Europe is the historical reestablishment of political unity in 6th century China by the Sui dynasty , a unity that has persisted with relatively brief interludes until the present day. Meanwhile, Europe remained politically decentralized, and developed numerous independent states. Vernacular writing using
10043-432: The local varieties as languages, numbering in the hundreds. The Chinese term fāngyán 方言 , literally 'place speech', was the title of the first work of Chinese dialectology in the Han dynasty , and has had a range of meanings in the millennia since. It is used for any regional subdivision of Chinese, from the speech of a village to major branches such as Mandarin and Wu. Linguists writing in Chinese often qualify
10164-494: The lower-pitched allophones occur with initial voiced consonants. (Traditional Chinese classification nonetheless counts these as different tones.) Most Wu dialects retain the tone categories of Middle Chinese, but in Shanghainese several of these have merged. Many Chinese varieties exhibit tone sandhi , in which the realization of a tone varies depending on the context of the syllable. For example, in Standard Chinese
10285-480: The main routes of migration and communication in southern China. The first scientific classifications, based primarily on the evolution of Middle Chinese voiced initials, were produced by Wang Li in 1936 and Li Fang-Kuei in 1937, with minor modifications by other linguists since. The conventionally accepted set of seven dialect groups first appeared in the second edition (1980) of Yuan Jiahua 's dialectology handbook: The Language Atlas of China (1987) follows
10406-725: The mainland. The increasing use of simplified characters has led to concern among residents regarding protecting what they see as their local heritage. Taiwan has never adopted simplified characters. The use of simplified characters in government documents and educational settings is discouraged by the government of Taiwan. Nevertheless, with sufficient context simplified characters are likely to be successfully read by those used to traditional characters, especially given some previous exposure. Many simplified characters were previously variants that had long been in some use, with systematic stroke simplifications used in folk handwriting since antiquity. Traditional characters were recognized as
10527-682: The majority of Chinese text in mainland China are simplified characters , there is no legislation prohibiting the use of traditional Chinese characters, and often traditional Chinese characters remain in use for stylistic and commercial purposes, such as in shopfront displays and advertising. Traditional Chinese characters remain ubiquitous on buildings that predate the promulgation of the current simplification scheme, such as former government buildings, religious buildings, educational institutions, and historical monuments. Traditional Chinese characters continue to be used for ceremonial, cultural, scholarly/academic research, and artistic/decorative purposes. In
10648-983: The merging of previously distinct character forms. Many Chinese online newspapers allow users to switch between these character sets. Traditional characters are known by different names throughout the Chinese-speaking world. The government of Taiwan officially refers to traditional Chinese characters as 正體字 ; 正体字 ; zhèngtǐzì ; 'orthodox characters'. This term is also used outside Taiwan to distinguish standard characters, including both simplified, and traditional, from other variants and idiomatic characters . Users of traditional characters elsewhere, as well as those using simplified characters, call traditional characters 繁體字 ; 繁体字 ; fántǐzì ; 'complex characters', 老字 ; lǎozì ; 'old characters', or 全體字 ; 全体字 ; quántǐzì ; 'full characters' to distinguish them from simplified characters. Some argue that since traditional characters are often
10769-628: The mid-nineteenth century include almost every major settlement along the West Coast from San Diego to Victoria . Other early immigrants worked as mine workers or independent prospectors hoping to strike it rich during the 1849 Gold Rush . Economic opportunity drove the building of further Chinatowns in the United States. The initial Chinatowns were built in the Western United States in states such as California , Oregon , Washington , Idaho , Utah , Colorado and Arizona . As
10890-613: The official script in Singapore until 1969, when the government officially adopted Simplified characters. Traditional characters still are widely used in contexts such as in baby and corporation names, advertisements, decorations, official documents and in newspapers. The Chinese Filipino community continues to be one of the most conservative in Southeast Asia regarding simplification. Although major public universities teach in simplified characters, many well-established Chinese schools still use traditional characters. Publications such as
11011-700: The original standard forms, they should not be called 'complex'. Conversely, there is a common objection to the description of traditional characters as 'standard', due to them not being used by a large population of Chinese speakers. Additionally, as the process of Chinese character creation often made many characters more elaborate over time, there is sometimes a hesitation to characterize them as 'traditional'. Some people refer to traditional characters as 'proper characters' ( 正字 ; zhèngzì or 正寫 ; zhèngxiě ) and to simplified characters as 簡筆字 ; 简笔字 ; jiǎnbǐzì ; 'simplified-stroke characters' or 減筆字 ; 减笔字 ; jiǎnbǐzì ; 'reduced-stroke characters', as
11132-474: The past had been largely inhabited by Chinese from southeastern China. In 2001, the events of September 11 resulted in a mass migration of about 14,000 Chinese workers from Manhattan's Chinatown to Montville, Connecticut , due to the fall of the garment industry. Chinese workers transitioned to casino jobs fueled by the development of the Mohegan Sun casino. In 2012, Tijuana's Chinatown formed as
11253-781: The predominant forms. Simplified characters as codified by the People's Republic of China are predominantly used in mainland China , Malaysia, and Singapore. "Traditional" as such is a retronym applied to non-simplified character sets in the wake of widespread use of simplified characters. Traditional characters are commonly used in Taiwan , Hong Kong , and Macau , as well as in most overseas Chinese communities outside of Southeast Asia. As for non-Chinese languages written using Chinese characters, Japanese kanji include many simplified characters known as shinjitai standardized after World War II, sometimes distinct from their simplified Chinese counterparts . Korean hanja , still used to
11374-712: The result of opportunities such as the California Gold Rush and the Transcontinental Railroad drawing the population in, creating natural Chinese enclaves that were almost always 100% exclusively Han Chinese, which included both people born in China and in the enclave, in this case American-born Chinese . In some free countries such as the United States and Canada, housing laws that prevent discrimination also allows neighborhoods that may have been characterized as "All Chinese" to also allow non-Chinese to reside in these communities. For example,
11495-521: The set of traditional characters is regulated by the Ministry of Education and standardized in the Standard Form of National Characters . These forms were predominant in written Chinese until the middle of the 20th century, when various countries that use Chinese characters began standardizing simplified sets of characters, often with characters that existed before as well-known variants of
11616-527: The south, and vice versa. The usual unmarked word order in Chinese varieties is subject–verb–object , with other orders used for emphasis or contrast. Modifiers usually precede the word they modify, so that adjectives precede nouns. Instances in which the modifier follows the head are mainly found in the south, and are attributed to substrate influences from languages formerly dominant in the area, especially Kra–Dai languages . Nouns in Chinese varieties are generally not marked for number. As in languages of
11737-433: The split of Middle Chinese rising and departing tones merged, leaving four tones. Furthermore, final stop consonants disappeared in most Mandarin dialects, and such syllables were distributed amongst the four remaining tones in a manner that is only partially predictable. In Wu, voiced obstruents were retained, and the tone split never became phonemic: the higher-pitched allophones occur with initial voiceless consonants, and
11858-534: The states of New York , New Jersey , Connecticut , and Pennsylvania , is home to the largest Chinese-American population of any metropolitan area within the United States and the largest Chinese population outside of China, enumerating an estimated 893,697 in 2017, and including at least 12 Chinatowns, including nine in New York City proper alone. Steady immigration from mainland China , both legal and illegal, has fueled Chinese-American population growth in
11979-535: The stops have merged as a final glottal stop , while in most northern varieties they have disappeared. In Mandarin dialects final /m/ has merged with /n/ , while some central dialects have a single nasal coda, in some cases realized as a nasalization of the vowel. All varieties of Chinese, like neighbouring languages in the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area , have phonemic tones . Each syllable may be pronounced with between three and seven distinct pitch contours, denoting different morphemes. For example,
12100-445: The streets of [SF's] Chinatown". Other Alta articles from the late 1850s make it clear that areas called "Chinatown" existed at that time in several other California cities, including Oroville and San Andres. By 1869, "Chinatown had acquired its full modern meaning all over the U.S. and Canada. For instance, an Ohio newspaper wrote: "From San Diego to Sitka..., every town and hamlet has its 'Chinatown'." In British publications before
12221-715: The structure, to greet visitors). Other Chinese architectural styles such as the Chinese Garden of Friendship in Sydney Chinatown and the Chinese stone lions at the gate to the Victoria, British Columbia Chinatown are present in some Chinatowns. Mahale Chiniha , the Chinatown in Iran , contains many buildings that were constructed in the Chinese architectural style. Paifangs usually have special inscriptions in Chinese. Historically, these gateways were donated to
12342-474: The term can include Chinese ethnoburbs which by definition are "... suburban ethnic clusters of residential areas and business districts in large metropolitan areas An article in The New York Times blurs the line further by categorizing very different Chinatowns such as Chinatown, Manhattan , which exists in an urban setting as "traditional"; Monterey Park's Chinatown , which exists in
12463-405: The term to distinguish different levels of classification. All these terms have customarily been translated into English as dialect , a practice that has been criticized as confusing. The neologisms regionalect and topolect have been proposed as alternative renderings of fāngyán . The usual unit of analysis is the syllable, traditionally analysed as consisting of an initial consonant ,
12584-591: The texts of the Spring and Autumn period (771–476 BC). Although the Zhou royal domain was no longer politically powerful, its speech still represented a model for communication across China. The Fangyan (early 1st century AD) is devoted to differences in vocabulary between regions. Commentaries from the Eastern Han (25–220 AD) provide significant evidence of local differences in pronunciation. The Qieyun ,
12705-497: The three forms. Standard Chinese is much more widely studied than any other variety of Chinese, and its use is now dominant in public life on the mainland. Outside of China and Taiwan, the only varieties of Chinese commonly taught in university courses are Standard Chinese and Cantonese . Local varieties from different areas of China are often mutually unintelligible, differing at least as much as different Romance languages and perhaps even as much as Indo-European languages as
12826-570: The three forms. It is also one of the six official languages of the United Nations . At the end of the 2nd millennium BC, a form of Chinese was spoken in a compact area along the lower Wei River and middle Yellow River . Use of this language expanded eastwards across the North China Plain into Shandong , and then southwards into the Yangtze River valley and the hills of south China. Chinese eventually replaced many of
12947-636: The traditional character set used in Taiwan ( TC ) and the set used in Hong Kong ( HK ). Most Chinese-language webpages now use Unicode for their text. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommends the use of the language tag zh-Hant to specify webpage content written with traditional characters. In the Japanese writing system , kyujitai are traditional forms, which were simplified to create shinjitai for standardized Japanese use following World War II. Kyūjitai are mostly congruent with
13068-985: The traditional characters in Chinese, save for minor stylistic variation. Characters that are not included in the jōyō kanji list are generally recommended to be printed in their traditional forms, with a few exceptions. Additionally, there are kokuji , which are kanji wholly created in Japan, rather than originally being borrowed from China. In the Korean writing system , hanja —replaced almost entirely by hangul in South Korea and totally replaced in North Korea —are mostly identical with their traditional counterparts, save minor stylistic variations. As with Japanese, there are autochthonous hanja, known as gukja . Traditional Chinese characters are also used by non-Chinese ethnic groups. The Maniq people living in Thailand and Malaysia use Chinese characters to write
13189-483: The twentieth century. Several alternate English names for Chinatown include China Town (generally used in British and Australian English ), The Chinese District , Chinese Quarter and China Alley (an antiquated term used primarily in several rural towns in the western United States for a Chinese community; some of these are now historical sites). In the case of Lillooet, British Columbia, Canada, China Alley
13310-518: The ubiquitous Unicode standard gives equal weight to simplified and traditional Chinese characters, and has become by far the most popular encoding for Chinese-language text. There are various input method editors (IMEs) available for the input of Chinese characters . Many characters, often dialectical variants, are encoded in Unicode but cannot be inputted using certain IMEs, with one example being
13431-481: The varieties of Mandarin spoken in all three northeastern Chinese provinces are mutually intelligible, but in the province of Fujian, where Min varieties predominate, the speech of neighbouring counties or even villages may be mutually unintelligible. Proportions of first-language speakers Classifications of Chinese varieties in the late 19th century and early 20th century were based on impressionistic criteria. They often followed river systems, which were historically
13552-513: The various major cities of Southeast Asia. As the population of Overseas Chinese, is widely dispersed in various enclaves, across each major Southeast Asian city, specific Chinese names are used instead. For example, in Singapore , where 2.8 million ethnic Chinese constitute a majority 74% of the resident population, the Chinese name for Chinatown is Niúchēshǔi ( 牛車水 , Hokkien POJ : Gû-chia-chúi ), which literally means "ox-cart water" from
13673-585: The vocabulary of the Bai language of Yunnan appears to be related to Chinese words, though many are clearly loans from the last few centuries. Some scholars have suggested that it represents a very early branching from Chinese, while others argue that it is a more distantly related Sino-Tibetan language overlaid with two millennia of loans. Jerry Norman classified the traditional seven dialect groups into three zones: Northern (Mandarin), Central (Wu, Gan, and Xiang) and Southern (Hakka, Yue, and Min). He argued that
13794-473: The words for simplified and reduced are homophonous in Standard Chinese , both pronounced as jiǎn . The modern shapes of traditional Chinese characters first appeared with the emergence of the clerical script during the Han dynasty c. 200 BCE , with the sets of forms and norms more or less stable since the Southern and Northern dynasties period c. the 5th century . Although
13915-504: The world's largest Chinatown. The COVID-19 pandemic has adversely affected tourism and business in Chinatown, San Francisco and Chinatown, Chicago , Illinois as well as others worldwide. The features described below are characteristic of many modern Chinatowns. The early Chinatowns such as those in San Francisco and Los Angeles in the United States were naturally destinations for people of Chinese descent as migration were
14036-859: Was a parallel commercial street adjacent to the town's Main Street, enjoying a view over the river valley adjacent and also over the main residential part of Chinatown, which was largely of adobe construction. All traces of Chinatown and China Alley there have disappeared, despite a once large and prosperous community. In Chinese , Chinatown is usually called 唐人街 , in Cantonese Tong jan gai , in Mandarin Tángrénjiē , in Hakka Tong ngin gai , and in Toisan Hong ngin gai , literally meaning "Tang people's street(s)". The Tang dynasty
14157-574: Was a zenith of the Chinese civilization, after which some Chinese call themselves. Some Chinatowns are indeed just one single street, such as the relatively short Fisgard Street in Victoria , British Columbia , Canada. A more modern Chinese name is 華埠 (Cantonese: Waa Fau, Mandarin: Huábù) meaning "Chinese City", used in the semi-official Chinese translations of some cities' documents and signs. Bù , pronounced sometimes in Mandarin as fù , usually means seaport ; but in this sense, it means city or town . Tong jan fau ( 唐人埠 "Tang people's town")
14278-446: Was also carried into Latin America by Filipino migrants. The central market place of Mexico City (now part of Zócalo ) selling imported goods from the Manila galleons in the 18th and early 19th centuries was called "Parián de Manila" (or just "Parián"). Along the coastal areas of Southeast Asia , several Chinese settlements existed as early as the 16th century according to Zheng He and Tomé Pires ' travel accounts. Melaka during
14399-562: Was founded at the same time as the city itself, in 1782. Many Chinese immigrants arrived in Liverpool in the late 1850s in the employ of the Blue Funnel Shipping Line , a cargo transport company established by Alfred Holt . The commercial shipping line created strong trade links between the cities of Shanghai , Hong Kong , and Liverpool, mainly in the importation of silk, cotton, and tea . They settled near
14520-701: Was not always peaceful, especially when labor disputes arose. Racial tensions flared when lower-paid Chinese workers replaced white miners in many mountain-area Chinatowns, such as in Wyoming with the Rock Springs Massacre . Many of these frontier Chinatowns became extinct as American racism surged and the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed. In Australia, the Victorian gold rush , which began in 1851, attracted Chinese prospectors from
14641-502: Was to provide a transitional place into a new culture. As net migration has slowed into them, the smaller Chinatowns have slowly decayed, often to the point of becoming purely historical and no longer serving as ethnic enclaves . In the Spanish Philippines , where the oldest surviving Chinatowns are located, the district where Chinese migrants ( sangleyes ) were required to live is called a parián , which were also often
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