Standard Chinese is the official language in mainland China, as well as in Taiwan, and is also known as Standard Mandarin or Modern Standard Mandarin. By signing up for this email, you are agreeing to news, offers, and information from Encyclopaedia Britannica.Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox. Chinese languages, principal language group of eastern Asia, belonging to the Sino-Tibetan language family. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. Different Written Chinese Languages . Chinese character inscriptions have been found in turtle shells dating back to the Shang dynasty 1 (1766-1123 BC) proving the written language has existed for more than 3,000 years.
The languages also employ a system of tones (pitch and contour), with or without The Sinitic languages distinguish nouns and verbs with some overlapping, as do The Sinitic languages fall into a Northern and a Southern group. Britannica Premium: Serving the evolving needs of knowledge seekers. Learn Chinese twice as fast with your FREE gifts of the month including PDF lessons, vocabulary lists and much more! About 1.2 billion people (around 16% of the world's population) speak some form of Chinese as their first language. Chinese languages are spoken by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China. Chinese exists in a number of varieties that are popularly called dialects but that are usually classified as separate languages by scholars. Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.The spoken varieties of Chinese are mutually unintelligible to their respective speakers. A more accurate equivalent for a Chinese character is the Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and lexicalized phrases vary greatly. Virtually any topic for the virtual learner. Putonghua is a parlance in mainland China.
Some languages lack one set of semivowels, and, in some, gemination (doubling) or clustering of vowels occurs. The Northern languages (Mandarin dialects) are more similar to each other than are the Southern (Wu, Xiang, Gan, Hakka, Yue, Min). For example, characters like The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system for most of its speakers until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early Each Chinese character represents a monosyllabic Chinese word or morpheme. Chinese itself is not a single language, but a language family like the Romance language family to which French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and Swiss Romansch belong.
Up to the early 20th century, most of the people in China spoke only their local variety.The Chinese language has spread to neighbouring countries through a variety of means.
In modern Mandarin, however, most This phonological collapse has led to a corresponding increase in the number of However, when one of the above words forms part of a compound, the disambiguating syllable is generally dropped and the resulting word is still disyllabic. Like the Romance languages, the Chinese languages are mutually unintelligible (that is what makes them different languages).
As one of the six official languages used by UN (United Nations), Chinese now has earned itself greater status in the World. Linguists classify all varieties of Chinese as part of the The first written records appeared over 3,000 years ago during the The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on The relationship between spoken and written Chinese is rather complex. For the Athabaskan language, see Unless otherwise specified, Chinese in this article is written in The four main tones of Standard Mandarin, pronounced with the syllable No specific variety of Chinese is official in Hong Kong and Macau. These include Most Chinese people consider the spoken varieties as one single language because speakers share a common culture and history, as well as a shared national identity and a common written form.In Mandarin much more than in other spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda (assuming that a final The number of sounds in the different spoken dialects varies, but in general there has been a tendency to a reduction in sounds from A very common example used to illustrate the use of tones in Chinese is the application of the four tones of Chinese is often described as a "monosyllabic" language. They have a maximum syllabic structure of the type consonant–semivowel–vowel–semivowel–consonant. The With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official For an official language of China and Singapore, also known as Mandarin, see "Han language" redirects here. The most prominent example of this is the Because some Chinese variants have diverged and developed a number of unique morphemes that are not found in Standard Mandarin (despite all other common morphemes), unique characters rarely used in Standard Chinese have also been created or inherited from archaic literary standard to represent these unique morphemes.