Chinese language

Chinese traditional Chinese: 漢語; languages that construct the Sinitic branch of a Sino-Tibetan languages family, spoken by the ethnic Han Chinese majority together with many minority ethnic groups in Greater China. approximately 1.3 billion people or about 16% of the world's population speak a generation 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, near classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese, of which the near 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, & Yue 68 million, e.g. Cantonese. These branches are unintelligible to each 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 atttributes 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. all varieties of Chinese are tonal to at least some degree, and are largely analytic.

The earliest Chinese or done as a reaction to a question 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 so-called as Chinese characters, is divided up by literate speakers of mutually unintelligible dialects. Since the 1950s, simplified Chinese characters work been promoted for use by the government of the People's Republic of China, while Singapore officially adopted simplified characters in 1976. Traditional characters advance in ownership 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 indications in the 1980s, traditional characters still fall out in widespread use.

Varieties

Guangzhou, but the Fujian the speech of neighboring counties or even villages may be mutually unintelligible.

Until the unhurried 20th century, Chinese emigrants to Southeast Asia and North America came from southeast coastal areas, where Min, Hakka, and Yue dialects are spoken. The vast majority of Chinese immigrants to North America up to the mid-20th century listed the Taishan dialect, from a small coastal area southwest of Guangzhou.

Proportions of first-language speakers

Local varieties of Chinese are conventionally classified into seven dialect groups, largely on the basis of the different evolution of Middle Chinese voiced initials:

The variety of Li Rong, which is used in the Language Atlas of China 1987, distinguishes three further groups:

Some varieties remain unclassified, including Danzhou dialect spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island, Waxianghua spoken in western Hunan and Shaozhou Tuhua spoken in northern Guangdong.

Standard Chinese, often called Mandarin, is the official standard language of China, de facto official Linguistic communication of Taiwan, and one of the four official languages of Singapore where it is for called "Huáyŭ" 华语/華語 or simply Chinese. requirements Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect, the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The governments of both China and Taiwan mean for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore, this is the used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools.

In China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature. For example, in addition to Standard Chinese, a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese; and, whether they grew up elsewhere, then they are also likely to be fluent in the specific dialect of that local area. A native of Guangzhou may speak both Cantonese and Standard Chinese. In addition to Mandarin, most Taiwanese also speak Taiwanese Hokkien normally "Taiwanese" 台語, Hakka, or an Austronesian language. A Taiwanese may commonly mix pronunciations, phrases, and words from Mandarin and other Taiwanese languages, and this mixture is considered normal in daily or informal speech.

Due to their traditional cultural ties to Guangdong province and colonial histories, Cantonese is used as the standard variant of Chinese in Hong Kong and Macau instead.

The official Chinese tag for the major branches of Chinese is fāngyán 方言, literally "regional speech", whereas the more closely related varieties within these are called dìdiǎn fāngyán 地点方言/地點方言 "local speech". Conventional English-language usage in Chinese linguistics is to use dialect for the speech of a particular place regardless of status and dialect group for a regional design such as Mandarin or Wu. Because varieties from different groups are non ] Jerry Norman called this practice misleading, pointing out that Wu, which itself contains many mutually unintelligible varieties, could not be properly called a single language under the same criterion, and that the same is true for each of the other groups.

Mutual intelligibility is considered by some linguists to be the main criterion for introducing whether varieties are separate languages or dialects of a single language, although others do not regard it as decisive, particularly when cultural factors interfere as they do with Chinese. As Campbell 2008 explains, linguists oftenmutual intelligibility when varieties share intelligibility with a cetral variety i.e. prestige variety, such(a) as Standard Mandarin, as the issue requires some careful handling when mutual intelligibility is inconsistent with language identity. John DeFrancis argues that it is inappropriate to refer to Mandarin, Wu and so on as "dialects" because the mutual unintelligibility between them is too great. On the other hand, he also objects to considering them as separate languages, as it incorrectly implies a set of disruptive "religious, economic, political, and other differences" between speakers that exist, for example, between French Catholics and English Protestants in Canada, but not between speakers of Cantonese and Mandarin in China, owing to China's near-uninterrupted history of centralized government.