The present study examined the role of weaknesses in some language skills for the reading difficulties among Chinese dyslexic children. Thirty Chinese dyslexic children were compared with 30 chronological age (CA) controls and 30 reading‐level (RL) controls on a number of language and reading measures. The results showed that Chinese dyslexic children performed significantly worse than the CA controls but similarly to the RL controls in many of the linguistic measures except that the dyslexic group also performed significantly less well than the RL group in semantic skills and syntactic skills on multiple modifiers. The dyslexic children were found to have difficulties in semantic processing, syntactic skills and oral language expression as compared with the CA controls, which were also found to predict their performance in word recognition and/or sentence comprehension. In addition, measures of semantic discrimination, advanced syntactic word order, and oral narrative also significantly predicted the group membership of having or not having dyslexia. These findings suggest that weaknesses in some semantic and advanced syntactic skills are the potential source of poor word and sentence reading in Chinese developmental dyslexia. Implications of the present findings for the identification of dyslexia were discussed. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.