The “Writing as Language” Myth

“Chinese language has 5000 years of history”.

“Pinyin is not Chinese”.

“Only Chinese characters represent real Chinese.”

So go the often-heard statements about the Chinese language. Each of these statements is wrong, though, due to the mistaken equation of language with writing. Chinese language does not have 5000 years of history; Chinese writing does; the history of the Chinese language should be many times longer than 5000 years. Pinyin is indeed Chinese, as long as it writes down the Chinese speech, just as Cyrillic-based Dungan is Chinese, which records the Northwestern dialect of Mandarin. If only characters represent Chinese, then what about spoken Chinese that may not be either read or written? We certainly cannot say that we are not speaking Chinese, can we? Chinese characters do indeed represent Chinese, but they are also used to represent a large portion of Japanese and Korean vocabulary. We cannot say that Japanese and Korean are Chinese, just because they use Chinese characters, can we?

We need to be clear that writing is not itself language. Writing is only a secondary and visual representation of the spoken language. How we represent language does not change the language itself. That writing is secondary can be further supported from the following facts:

1. Speech existed long before writing came into being.

2. Children learn to speak as a matter of course, but have to learn to read and write.

3. There are spoken languages that are without writing, but the only written

languages without speech are dead languages (Latin, for example).

4. There are still illiterate people, who cannot be said NOT to have language.

There is no question that writing is important. It transcends time and space. It is more permanent than speech, which is ephemeral. It can be more accurate and more refined, as it is not subject to the same time constraints that spontaneous speech is. But the primacy of speech cannot be denied.

Given the primacy of speech, then it follows that however we represent Chinese, be it with characters or alphabetic writing, the Chinese language will remain Chinese. There is no writing system that is indispensable for a given language. Examples of the same language being represented by different writing systems abound. Hindu-Urdu is represented by Hindi script and the Arabic script; Serbo-croation is represented by Cyrillic and Roman scripts. The Northwest Mandarin dialect of Dungan has been at various times written with the Arabic script and the Cyrillic scripts.