Chan Sin-Wai - The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Chinese Language

• (1) ,,,,,
  Of course, this does not mean that local people have been entirely integrated into the Han nationality in all of the areas where the Han have penetrated. In fact, this is not so because even now there are many minorities which have mixed with the Han race within Han regions.

Fei Xiaotong , Minority Development in China

In (1) there are about 44 morphemes (free, as well as bound) and 11 of them are taken from Classical Chinese, e.g. extend to, take as, is certainly not like this, even now, live together and within. Actually, classical expressions like these are not merely remnants, they are actually required to make the written text sound natural. Zhang (2002) promoted that people should incorporate some literary expressions into their own writing() (Zhang 2002: 134).

Why is this syncretization of literary forms into the vernacular necessary? Feng (2005) argued that it is essentially a result of register requirements, and Sun (2012) also argued that literary Chinese serves a distinctive linguistic function in modern times which has ensured its survival. In other words, modern formal Chinese would have been difficult to develop without utilizing some literary Chinese. Thus, literary and colloquial Chinese cannot truly be divorced in the modern context of language communication as will be explained below.

It is well known that if a writing style is too literary it may not easily be understood by ordinary or sometimes even educated people; while if it is too colloquial (informal) it will not be acceptable in formal situations because of its lack of formality. The traditional dilemma of separating colloquial expressions from literary diction in modern written Chinese has arisen from the inseparability of vernacular grammar with literary expressions which makes it possible to create a formal register of writing. Thus, the formal and informal styles of Chinese can be analyzed as in .

illustrates several important points which are elaborated on below. First, what is called written Chinese should be defined in terms of the formal style of writing in Modern Chinese.

Second, the notions of informal/formal and spoken/written are not isomorphic, i.e. formal does not only imply written, nor does spoken always refer to informal, and vice versa. Formal Chinese is also an utterable language and is not reserved only for writing, even if written language usually refers to formal or elevated registers. The definition given in example (2a) implies that formal Chinese can be both spoken and written.

Diagram of formal and informal Chinese (Feng 2006)

Third, Classical Chinese and Modern Chinese should be clearly distinguished here: Classical Chinese refers to the language with many linguistic features of the Han and pre-Han periods (i.e. up to the third century) which remained prevalent up until the May Fourth Movement, while Modern Chinese is defined in terms of its auditory comprehensibility to the ordinary people of today. Thus, according to Feng (2009), speech that cannot be understood by means of its sound alone by an ordinary high school graduate will not be considered modern (for a more detailed discussion of this criterion, see Feng 2003a, 2003b; Sun 2012).

Fourth, formal expressions in Modern Chinese come from two major sources: Classical Chinese and completely new expressions that developed within the formal system itself after 1911. For example, there are systematically developed formal expressions like jinxing carry out:

(2)	(a)
Women	yiding	yao	dui	zhege	wenti	jinxing	yanjiu.
we	definitely	need	towards	this	issue	carry-out