Fifteen Eighty Four

2: How the Chinese Greet One Another?

The title of this entry may sound like the title of a beginner’s Chinese language course featuring the expression ni hao 你好 as a simple greeting. However, we will show that that greeting one another in Chinese is far more complex than what meets the eye, and appropriately greeting someone can be difficult for both learners of Chinese and other languages.

In House et al. (2022), we found that Chinese learners of English often feel irritated by English greeting conventions because practices of greeting in Chinese and English tend to be very different. For example, as we interviewed speakers of Chinese, one of our interviewees said the following about English greeting conventions:

I found greeting customs in English robotic. Chinese people are emotional, and they only greet someone either if they know him, or if there’s a specific reason to greet him. In English this is different: there is always a sense of pressure to say hello to everyone.

What triggers such negative evaluations? The simple answer is: the act of greeting in the opening of an interaction may mean different things for speakers of Chinese and English. In English, an interaction is often opened in a ubiquitous way, that is, speakers of English use the same routine formulae to greet the other. Speakers of Chinese, on the other hand, often use different forms in different interpersonal situations, as the following examples show:

你在呀！ 我给你带了点儿茶来， 不知道你喜欢这个不？

Ah, you’re here! I brought you some tea, do you like it?

老师好， 请问您有时间吗？

Ni hao, Teacher, may I ask whether you have time?

In the first case, where an interaction is opened between two friends, the speaker does not even use a greeting form but rather a banal remark, stating the obvious. The formal greeting expression ni hao is only used in the second case where the interaction takes place between a student and a teacher where the student formally greets the other.

In summary, it seems worthwhile taking a closer look at the seemingly simple convention of greetings because greetings may vary significantly across languages, and Chinese conventions of greeting tend to be different from their Western counterparts.

The contents of this entry reflect the following article:

Juliane House, Dániel Z Kádár, Fengguang Liu, Shiyu Liu, Greeting in English as a Foreign Language: A Problem for Speakers of Chinese, Applied Linguistics, Volume 44, Issue 2, April 2023, Pages 189–216, https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amac031

We are happy to be answer any questions regarding these blog entries. We can be contacted at the following email addresses:

Dániel Z. Kádár (dannier@dlufl.edu.cn)

Juliane House (jhouse@fastmail.fm)

Read Part 1

Funding:

Our work was supported by the Center for International Cooperation and Disciplinary Innovation (‘111 Center’) hosted by Dalian University of Foreign Languages (Project number: D25023), and the National Excellence Programme, National Research Subprogramme, funded by the National Research, Development and Innovation Office of Hungary (TKP2021-NKTA-02), hosted by the ELTE Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics.