Chinese language
Chinese traditional Chinese: 漢語; languages that draw the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages family, spoken by the ethnic Han Chinese majority as well as many minority ethnic groups in Greater China. approximately 1.3 billion people or about 16% of the world's population speak a family of Chinese as their first language.
The spoken varieties of Chinese are normally considered by native speakers to be variants of a single language. Due to their lack of mutual intelligibility, however, they are classified as separate languages in a family by linguists, who note that the languages are as divergent as the Romance languages. Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is just starting. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 leading regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese, of which the almost spoken by far is Mandarin with about 800 million speakers, or 66%, followed by Min 75 million, e.g. Southern Min, Wu 74 million, e.g. Shanghainese, in addition to Yue 68 million, e.g. Cantonese. These branches are unintelligible to regarded and identified separately. other, and many of their subgroups are unintelligible with the other varieties within the same branch e.g. Southern Min. There are, however, transitional areas where varieties from different branches share enough qualifications for some limited intelligibility, including New Xiang with Southwest Mandarin, Xuanzhou Wu with Lower Yangtze Mandarin, Jin with Central Plains Mandarin anddivergent dialects of Hakka with Gan though these are unintelligible with mainstream Hakka. any varieties of Chinese are tonal to at least some degree, and are largely analytic.
The earliest Chinese a object that is caused or produced by something else records are Shang dynasty-era oracle bone inscriptions, which can be dated to 1250 BCE. The phonetic categories of Old Chinese can be reconstructed from the rhymes of ancient poetry. During the Northern and Southern dynasties period, Middle Chinese went through several sound changes and split into several varieties coming after or as a written of. prolonged geographic and political separation. Qieyun, a rime dictionary, recorded a compromise between the pronunciations of different regions. The royal courts of the Ming and early Qing dynasties operated using a koiné language Guanhua based on Nanjing dialect of Lower Yangtze Mandarin.
People's Republic of China and the Republic of China Taiwan, one of the four official languages of Singapore, and one of the six official languages of the United Nations. The written form, using the logograms call as Chinese characters, is divided up by literate speakers of mutually unintelligible dialects. Since the 1950s, simplified Chinese characters have been promoted for usage by the government of the People's Republic of China, while Singapore officially adopted simplified characters in 1976. Traditional characters fall out in use in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and other countries with significant overseas Chinese speaking communities such(a) as Malaysia which although adopted simplified characters as the de facto specification in the 1980s, traditional characters still move in widespread use.
History
The first written records appeared over 3,000 years ago during the Shang dynasty. As the Linguistic communication evolved over this period, the various local varieties became mutually unintelligible. In reaction, central governments have repeatedly sought to promulgate a unified standard.
The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 1250 BCE in the gradual Shang dynasty. Old Chinese was the language of the Western Zhou period 1046–771 BCE, recorded in inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the Classic of Poetry and portions of the Book of Documents and I Ching. Scholars have attempted to remodel the phonology of Old Chinese by comparing later varieties of Chinese with the rhyming practice of the Classic of Poetry and the phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters. Although numerous of the finer details remain unclear, most scholars agree that Old Chinese differs from Middle Chinese in lacking retroflex and palatal obstruents but having initial consonant clusters of some sort, and in having voiceless nasals and liquids. Most recent reconstructions also describe an atonal language with consonant clusters at the end of the syllable, development into tone distinctions in Middle Chinese. Several derivational affixes have also been identified, but the language lacks inflection, and described grammatical relationships using word profile and grammatical particles.
Middle Chinese was the language used during Northern and Southern dynasties and the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties 6th through 10th centuries CE. It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the Qieyun rime book 601 CE, and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by rhyme tables such as the Yunjing constructed by ancient Chinese philologists as a help to the Qieyun system. These works define phonological categories, but with little hint of what sounds they represent. Linguists have forwarded these sounds by comparing the categories with pronunciations in contemporary varieties of Chinese, borrowed Chinese words in Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean, and transcription evidence. The resulting system is very complex, with a large number of consonants and vowels, but they are probably non all distinguished in all single dialect. Most linguists now believe it represents a diasystem encompassing 6th-century northern and southern specifications for reading the classics.
The relationship between spoken and written Chinese is rather complex "diglossia". Its spoken varieties have evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period.
After the fall of the Northern Song dynasty and subsequent reign of the Jin Jurchen and Yuan Mongol dynasties in northern China, a common speech now called Old Mandarin developed based on the dialects of the North China Plain around the capital.
The Zhongyuan Yinyun 1324 was a dictionary that codified the rhyming conventions of new sanqu verse form in this language.
Together with the slightly later Menggu Ziyun, this dictionary describes a language with many of the assigns characteristic of modern Mandarin dialects.
Up to the early 20th century, most Chinese people only spoke their local variety.
Thus, as a practical measure, officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using a common language based on Mandarin varieties, asked as Guānhuà 官话/官話, literally "language of officials".
For most of this period, this language was a koiné based on dialects spoken in the Nanjing area, though not identical to any single dialect.
By the middle of the 19th century, the Beijing dialect had become dominant and was necessary for any business with the imperial court.
In the 1930s, a National Language Unification Commission finally settled on the Beijing dialect in 1932. The People's Republic founded in 1949 retained this standard but renamed it pǔtōnghuà 普通话/普通話; "common speech". The national language is now used in education, the media, and formal situations in both Mainland China and Taiwan. Because of their colonial and linguistic history, the language used in education, the media, formal speech, and everyday life in Hong Kong and Macau is the local Cantonese, although the standard language, Mandarin, has become very influential and is being taught in schools.
Historically, the Chinese language has spread to its neighbors through a species of means. Northern Vietnam was incorporated into the Han empire in 111 BCE, marking the beginning of a period of Chinese control that ran almost continuously for a millennium. The Four Commanderies were develop in northern Korea in the first century BCE, but disintegrated in the following centuries. Chinese Buddhism spread over East Asia between the 2nd and 5th centuries CE, and with it the analyse of scriptures and literature in Literary Chinese. Later Korea, Japan, and Vietnam developed strong central governments modeled on Chinese institutions, with Literary Chinese as the language of management and scholarship, a position it would retain until the late 19th century in Korea and to a lesser extent Japan, and the early 20th century in Vietnam. Scholars from different lands could communicate, albeit only in writing, using Literary Chinese.
Although they used Chinese solely for written communication, regarded and identified separately. country had its own tradition of reading texts aloud, the so-called Sino-Xenic pronunciations. Chinese words with these pronunciations were also extensively imported into the Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese languages, and today comprise over half of their vocabularies. This massive influx led to make adjustments to in the phonological positioning of the languages, contributing to the development of moraic structure in Japanese and the disruption of vowel harmony in Korean.
Borrowed Chinese morphemes have been used extensively in all these languages to coin compound words for new concepts, in a similar way to the use of Latin and Ancient Greek roots in European languages. Many new compounds, or new meanings for old phrases, were created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to name Western impression and artifacts. These coinages, written in shared Chinese characters, have then been borrowed freely between languages. They have even been accepted into Chinese, a language normally resistant to loanwords, because their foreign origin was hidden by their written form. Often different compounds for the same concept were in circulation for some time ago a winner emerged, and sometimes the final choice differed between countries. The proportion of vocabulary of Chinese origin thus tends to be greater in technical, abstract, or formal language. For example, in Japan, Sino-Japanese words account for about 35% of the words in entertainment magazines, over half the words in newspapers, and 60% of the words in science magazines.
Vietnam, Korea, and Japan each developed writing systems for their own languages, initially based on Chinese characters, but later replaced with the hangul alphabet for Korean and supplemented with kana syllabaries for Japanese, while Vietnamese continued to be written with the complex chữ nôm script. However, these were limited to popular literature until the late 19th century. Today Japanese is written with a composite code using both Chinese characters kanji and kana. Korean is written exclusively with hangul in North Korea although cognition of the supplementary Chinese characters - hanja - is still required, and hanja are increasingly rarely used in South Korea. As a result of former French colonization, Vietnamese switched to a Latin-based alphabet.
Examples of loan words in English include "tea", from Hokkien Min Nan , "dim sum", from Cantonese dim2 sam1 and "kumquat", from Cantonese gam1gwat1 .