Chinese Phonology

There are many different dialects spoken in China. These dialects differ from each other drastically so that people would probably not understand each other if they use their own dialects to communicate.

Yet there is a spoken language that is shared by all people, Mandarin, the official language of the nation. Mandarin is the also called “common language” in China. And in this study, Chinese refers to Mandarin hereafter.

The phonological structure of spoken Chinese is relatively simple. The basic speech unit of Chinese is the syllable. A Chinese syllable is of one of four structures: V (vowel), CV (consonant-vowel), VC (vowel-consonant), and CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant). Each syllable is divided into two parts: the onset and the rhyme. The onset of a Chinese syllable is always a single consonant, and there is no consonant cluster in Chinese. For most syllables, the rimes consist of vowels only. Only two consonants, [n] and [ng] appear at the end of a rhyme in Chinese. Given this relatively simple syllable structure, Chinese has a much smaller number of unique syllables than spoken English, leading to many homophones in spoken Chinese. This large number of homophones is reduced somewhat using tones in the language, since a change in the tone of a syllable indicates a change in meaning. For example, the syllable [ma] could have first, second, third and fourth tone, meaning “mother”, “numb”, “horse” and “to scold,” respectively. Even though the tones reduce the number of homophones in Chinese, because of the simple structure, homophones are still common existence in Chinese.