An Analysis of the Differences Among Regional Varieties of Chinese in Malay Archipelago

TL;DR

This study quantitatively analyzes regional Chinese variants in the Malay Archipelago, revealing significant lexical and syntactic differences influenced by local cultures and societies.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of Chinese language variations across five countries, highlighting how local contexts shape Chinese language evolution overseas.

Findings

Chinese variants differ significantly from standard Chinese

Distinctive local Chinese words are identified and classified

Chinese language evolution is heavily influenced by local cultures

Abstract

Chinese features prominently in the Chinese communities located in the nations of Malay Archipelago. In these countries, Chinese has undergone the process of adjustment to the local languages and cultures, which leads to the occurrence of a Chinese variant in each country. In this paper, we conducted a quantitative analysis on Chinese news texts collected from five Malay Archipelago nations, namely Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines and Brunei, trying to figure out their differences with the texts written in modern standard Chinese from a lexical and syntactic perspective. The statistical results show that the Chinese variants used in these five nations are quite different, diverging from their modern Chinese mainland counterpart. Meanwhile, we managed to extract and classify several featured Chinese words used in each nation. All these discrepancies reflect how Chinese evolves overseas, and demonstrate the profound impact rom local societies and cultures on the development of Chinese.