A comparative study on lexical and syntactic features of Chinese news texts in Malay Archipelago

Abstract Chinese in the Malay Archipelago has evolved into distinct regional written varieties due to adaptation to local languages and cultures, requiring exploration of their lexical and syntactic differences from standard written Chinese. In this paper, we conduct a quantitative analysis on Chinese news texts collected from five Malay Archipelago regions, trying to figure out their differences with the texts in standard written Chinese from a lexical and syntactic perspective. The statistical results show that the regional written Chinese varieties used in these five regions are quite different, diverging from their modern Chinese mainland counterpart. All these discrepancies reflect how Chinese evolves overseas, and demonstrate the profound impact of local societies and cultures on the development of Chinese.