Abstract:
In English, the term “Chinese” is commonly used to refer to the standard language of the People's Republic of China, i.e. Standard Mandarin Chinese, or Putonghua. A widely held belief is that the so-called Chinese “dialects” share more or less the same grammatical system, with variation mostly confined to their sound system and lexicon. However, from a linguist’s point of view, China is home to an immense range of diversity, which can be used as a testing ground for our theories on language, identity, change, and variation. In this talk, we shall first discuss the concepts of “language” and “dialect” as they apply to the Chinese context, focussing also on the unique relationship between the spoken and written language(s), and we shall show how the diversity we find among the languages of China developed historically, and what useful insights we can draw from it for the study of language.

Speaker:
Prof. Giorgio Francesco ARCODIA is professor of Chinese language and linguistics at the Department of Asian and North African Studies, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His research on Sinitic languages has been published in numerous journals and in edited volumes. He is the author of Lexical Derivation in Mandarin Chinese (Crane Publishing, 2012) and co-author of Chinese Linguistics: An Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2021). His work primarily focuses on Chinese linguistics and linguistic typology, with particular attention to the areal typology of Sinitic languages, word formation processes, the expression of grammatical meaning, and the development of morphological structures.

Date: 30 March 2026 (Monday)
Time: 4:30 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. (4:00 p.m.: Tea Reception)
Venue: Activities Room, 2/F, Art Museum East Wing, CUHK
Moderator: Prof. Carole Hang-fung HOYAN (Director,  Centre for China Studies, CUHK; Professor, Department of Chinese Language & Literature, CUHK)
Language: English
Registration: Click here
Enquiries: 3943 0405/ This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.