An intermediate case: Mandarin Chinese

A. It is common worldwide for a language to be streamlined somewhat when at one point, more people learn it as a second language than as a first one. Languages like this are less imposingly complex than a language such as Tsez.

B. This is true of Mandarin Chinese in comparison to other Chinese languages, such as Cantonese. Mandarin has four tones; Cantonese has six (or depending on how one counts, nine). A Mandarin word can end only in n or “ng”—there is no such word in Mandarin as fap or fam. But a Cantonese word can end in six different consonants, p, t, k, m, n, and “ng.” Cantonese has about 30 of the sentence-final particles that convey attitude; Mandarin has only about a half dozen of these. Mandarin is the “easy” language among the Chinese group.

C. In antiquity, the northern part of China where Mandarin is spoken was ruled by people speaking such languages as Mongolian and Manchu. These people learned Mandarin as a second language and passed this “learner’s variety” down the generations. Chinese developed “normally” in the south and became such varieties as Cantonese and Taiwanese. In the north, Chinese was, as it were, “semi-Riau-ized.”

Other cases: Many languages have undergone what Mandarin did. Swahili is one of the only Bantu languages out of more than 500 that has no tones, and this is because only a small number of Muslim people on the east African coast use it as a first language. For centuries, Swahili has been east Africa’s main lingua franca, learned by most of its speakers as a second or third language. This has rendered it less Tsez-esque than the other Bantu languages.

Our lesson is that it is normal for languages to be awesomely complex, regardless of the societal level of advancement of their speakers. What is unusual is when languages are less complex than these tribal ones. Languages get “shaved down” when history leads them to be spoken more as second languages than as first ones. We are now in a position to understand some aspects of English better, then to proceed to pidgin and creole languages.