37.3622, Reviews: An Introduction to Chinese Linguistics: Chan Lü; Zev Handel (2026)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-3622. Tue 03 Nov 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.3622, Reviews: An Introduction to Chinese Linguistics: Chan Lü; Zev Handel (2026)

Moderator: Steven Moran (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Managing Editor: Valeriia Vyshnevetska
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Daniel Swanson
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Editor for this issue: Valeriia Vyshnevetska <valeriia at linguistlist.org>

================================================================


Date: 03-Nov-2026
From: Christian Ranon [ckranon at neiu.edu]
Subject: Chan Lü; Zev Handel (2026)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/37-2479

Title: An Introduction to Chinese Linguistics
Publication Year: 2026

Publisher: Cambridge University Press
           http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics

Author(s): Chan Lü; Zev Handel

Reviewer: Christian Ranon

SUMMARY
An Introduction to Chinese Linguistics is a textbook aimed at students
with no prior training in linguistics, written by two University of
Washington scholars whose own course on the subject clearly shaped its
design. The book's premise is stated in its first pages: Chinese is
not one language but a family of languages descended from Old Chinese,
and linguistics is the field that lets us analyze that family
systematically. Across eleven chapters and 396 pages, Lü and Handel
move from the structure of Standard Mandarin outward to variation,
history, writing, and the communication systems of Deaf and blind
communities in China.
Chapter 1, "Chinese and Linguistics," does double duty as orientation
and argument. It dismantles the definitions students typically offer
(the language of Chinese people, the language written in characters,
the language of Beijing) and replaces them with the
mutual-intelligibility criterion, concluding that Chinese is a
language family rather than a single language with dialects. The
chapter then defines linguistics and its subfields, distinguishes
genetic from contact relationships among the languages of East Asia,
and closes with a detailed history of the modern standard: the Guanhua
koine of the Ming and Qing, the failed national pronunciation of 1913
(a standard so artificial that Y. R. Chao, who made the phonograph
records meant to teach it in the nation's schools, described himself
as its sole speaker), the Beijing-based standard of 1926 and 1932, the
1956 definition of Putonghua, and the replacement of Classical Chinese
by Baihua, illustrated with a character-by-character analysis of a
third-century BCE passage.
Chapters 2 through 7 treat the structure of the standard language.
Chapter 2 covers articulatory phonetics, the International Phonetic
Alphabet (IPA), and the sound system of Standard Mandarin: initials,
finals, tones, the neutral tone, tone sandhi, and the constraints on
syllable structure, with sustained comparison to English. Chapter 3
introduces morphology, from morpheme typology to the specifically
Chinese problem of relating morpheme, zi (character), word, and
phrase; a five-year-old's coinage of chēchuán and chuánchē for
amphibious tour buses opens the chapter and anchors its discussion of
compounding and headedness. Chapter 4 turns to the lexicon: sporadic
and large-scale borrowing across history, four types of loanwords
(phonetic loans, graphic loans, calques, and hybrids), and
internet-age neologisms such as the meme word duāng. Chapter 5, on
lexical semantics, moves from theories of word meaning through
componential analysis and lexical relations (hyponymy, four types of
antonymy, synonymy, polysemy, homonymy, homophony) to a corpus-based
treatment of collocation.
Chapters 6 and 7, together nearly a quarter of the book, cover syntax.
Chapter 6 builds up basic concepts: how parts of speech are determined
for Mandarin, noun phrases, referentiality and definiteness, measure
words and classifier variation, verb arguments, the distinction
between syntactic and semantic roles, and verb aspect as opposed to
tense, with four main aspect markers. Chapter 7 takes up sentence
types by structure and by communicative function, question formation
(question-word, yes/no, alternative, and A-not-A questions),
imperatives and exclamatories, sentence-final modal particles with
dialect comparison, and the ba- and bei-constructions in their formal,
semantic, and pragmatic dimensions.
Chapters 8 through 11 widen the lens across time, space, and modality.
Chapter 8 presents Middle Chinese and Old Chinese and the evidence
used to reconstruct them, then surveys the seven major dialect groups
(Mandarin, Yue, Wu, Min, Hakka, Gan, Xiang) and their developments
from Middle Chinese. Chapters 9 and 10 treat writing. Chapter 9
defines writing against speech, dissects the myths and half-truths
that surround Chinese characters, traces the first millennium of the
script from the oracle bones of circa 1250 BCE through its
conventionalization, and closes with the native tradition of character
analysis in the Shuōwén jiězì. Chapter 10 covers twentieth-century
character simplification (its history, mechanisms, and evaluation),
Written Cantonese as colloquial dialect writing, romanization and
other non-character scripts from the missionaries to Hanyu Pinyin, and
the century-old debate over abolishing characters. Chapter 11, a
rarity in books of this kind, introduces sign language linguistics,
the history and regional varieties of signing in China, the
distinction between Chinese Sign Language (CSL) and signed Chinese,
the morphology, lexicon, and syntax of CSL, and Chinese Braille.
Every chapter opens with learning objectives and guiding questions,
every section ends with checkpoint questions, and every chapter closes
with exercises or discussion questions, a further reading list, and a
bilingual English-Chinese glossary of technical terms. Audio
supplements, including recordings of example sentences and a
reconstruction of how the Classical Chinese passage might have
sounded, are hosted on the publisher's website.
EVALUATION
The book's greatest strength is its analytical discipline about
definitions, because by refusing the comfortable fictions about
Chinese (oldest language in the world, no grammar, a hundred thousand
characters, characters as ideographs), it forces the reader to rebuild
the object of study from evidence. The treatment of the word
"Mandarin" is a model: the word is shown to bundle together a dialect
group, a modern standard, and an imperial koine, and the exercise
asking students to disentangle these senses is the kind of task that
changes how a student reads everything afterward. This is
myth-debunking in the tradition of DeFrancis (1984), but carried into
a textbook format with checkpoints and exercises rather than left as
polemic.
A second strength is the comparative architecture. English is the
constant foil, which serves the likely audience, but the book also
insists on comparison within China. The effect is that variation is a
running theme rather than a single chapter, which pays off when
Chapters 8 and 11 arrive. The bilingual glossaries deserve mention
too: students who will read Chinese-language linguistics later get the
terminology in both languages from the start, a consistency I have not
seen matched in comparable textbooks.
The book's organizing stance is linguistic descriptivism, and it is
worth naming because it does real work. The authors state the position
plainly in Chapter 1: the definitions of language and dialect "do not
carry any value judgments," and "no dialect is presumed to be better
or worse than another." The payoff is structural. Because no variety
is inherently better, Written Cantonese, dialectal sentence-final
particles, Chinese Sign Language, and Braille can receive the same
analytical machinery as the standard, which is precisely what makes
the last four chapters cohere with the first seven. The same
discipline governs the evaluation of character simplification in
Chapter 10, where aesthetic arguments are set aside ("It is not the
place of linguists to make aesthetic judgments") in favor of stroke
counts, literacy data, and psycholinguistic evidence.
The stance also settles a score with the book's own shelf. Earlier
general introductions were faulted for the very assumption this one
rejects: reviewers criticized Ramsey (1987) for presenting mutually
unintelligible languages as "dialects" of a single Chinese (Mair
1987), and even Norman (1988) had to warn readers that Mandarin should
not be made to stand for the whole family. Lü and Handel make the
correction the foundation rather than the caveat.
The coverage of writing and of signed and tactile language goes well
beyond what comparable introductions offer. Other introductions, like
Norman (1988) and Sun (2006), treat writing more briefly, and neither
covers CSL or Braille at all. Two full chapters on writing, including
an extended engagement with the Shuōwén jiězì and a serious treatment
of Written Cantonese, give students both the modern sociolinguistic
stakes and the philological depth. Chapter 11 is necessarily a survey,
but its existence corrects a real gap, and its central distinction
between CSL and signed Chinese is precisely the kind of point an
introductory text should make.
The book is not without costs, and they are the mirror image of its
strengths. Because the authors begin with the standard language and
keep it center stage for five chapters, non-Mandarin varieties
sometimes function as comparative props rather than objects of
analysis in their own right; Chapter 8's survey of the dialect groups
is good, but a reader whose interest is Cantonese or Min phonology
will need the further reading lists quickly. The reconstruction
material in Chapter 8 is ambitious for true beginners, and instructors
should expect to scaffold the Middle Chinese evidence carefully.
Chapter 4, at twenty-four pages, is thin relative to the chapters
around it, and its internet-neologism material, while fresh, will date
faster than the rest. Sociolinguistic variation in the standard itself
(gender, register, age) is touched on mainly through the
standardization narrative; readers wanting variationist
sociolinguistics will find less here than the chapter title "Change
and Variation" might suggest. Finally, acquisition and
psycholinguistics appear only in passing (psycholinguistic studies of
script processing are invoked in Chapter 10's evaluation of
simplification); readers wanting Chinese as a second language as a
linguistic topic in its own right, rather than as background
experience, will not find it here.
A final tension belongs to the stance rather than to any chapter: a
textbook that refuses to prescribe still spends five of its eleven
chapters describing a standard. The authors manage this by
historicizing the standard rather than prescribing it, but a reader
who takes Chapter 1's descriptivism seriously may still ask why the
family gets one chapter while its most privileged member gets five.
None of these shortcomings undermines the book's achievement, and the
questions it leaves open are productive ones. If Chinese is a language
family, what would a fully family-based introductory curriculum look
like, one in which Putonghua were the first case study rather than the
default frame?
For its intended audience, students beginning the linguistic study of
Chinese, this is now the first book I would assign, and it would pair
well with a historically oriented companion such as Ramsey (1987) or
Chen (1999). Instructors of general introduction-to-linguistics
courses could also benefit from its incorporation: the 1913 standard,
the koine discussion, and the writing-system chapters are
self-contained units. Researchers will find little that is new, but
they are not the intended audience. The authors set out to give
beginners a foundation in both Chinese and linguistics, and they have
done exactly that; the book achieves its stated goals, and it raises
the standard for what introductory teaching of Chinese linguistics
should be.
REFERENCES
Chen, Ping. 1999. Modern Chinese: History and sociolinguistics.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
DeFrancis, John. 1984. The Chinese language: Fact and fantasy.
Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Mair, Victor H. 1987. Review of The languages of China, by S. Robert
Ramsey. Pacific Affairs 60(4): 671-672.
Norman, Jerry. 1988. Chinese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ramsey, S. Robert. 1987. The languages of China. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Sun, Chaofen. 2006. Chinese: A linguistic introduction. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Christian K. Ranon is a graduate student in linguistics at
Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU), Chicago, where their research
focuses on Systemic Functional Linguistics, Critical Discourse
Analysis, and the political economy of language pedagogy. They are a
volunteer English as a Second Language (ESL) ESL tutor with Oakton
College’s Volunteering in Teaching Adults (VITA) program, and they
pursue Mandarin Chinese education at Oakton College’s course sequence.
AI DISCLOSURE
The author used Kimi, a turn-based conversational Large Language
Model, to proofread and amend the language of a draft of this review
for stylistic coherence. All substantive claims, interpretations, and
citation judgements are their own.


------------------------------------------------------------------------------

********************** LINGUIST List Support ***********************
Please consider donating to the Linguist List, a U.S. 501(c)(3) not for profit organization:

https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=87C2AXTVC4PP8

LINGUIST List is supported by the following publishers:

Australian Linguistics Society https://als.asn.au/Home

Bloomsbury Publishing http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/

Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics

Cascadilla Press http://www.cascadilla.com/

De Gruyter Brill https://www.degruyterbrill.com/?changeLang=en

Edinburgh University Press http://www.edinburghuniversitypress.com

European Language Resources Association (ELRA) http://www.elra.info

John Benjamins http://www.benjamins.com/

Language Science Press http://langsci-press.org

Lincom GmbH https://lincom-shop.eu/

MDPI Languages https://www.mdpi.com/journal/languages

MIT Press http://mitpress.mit.edu/

Multilingual Matters http://www.multilingual-matters.com/

Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG http://www.narr.de/

Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke (LOT) http://www.lotpublications.nl/

Peter Lang AG http://www.peterlang.com

SIL International Publications http://www.sil.org/resources/publications

University of Toronto Press https://utppublishing.com


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-37-3622
----------------------------------------------------------