Chinese language
language group of the Sinitic languages From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The Chinese language is the group of languages used by Chinese people in China and elsewhere. It forms part of a language family called the Sino-Tibetan family of languages.
Chinese includes many regional language varieties, the main ones being Mandarin, Wu, Yue and Min, and are not mutually intelligible[4] Many of the regional varieties are themselves a number of non-mutually-intelligible subvarieties.[5] As a result, many linguists refer to these varieties as separate languages.[6]
"Chinese" can refer to the written or the spoken languages. Although there are many spoken Chinese languages, they use the same writing system.[7] Differences in speaking are reflected in differences in writing. China has a similar official policy to the one in the Soviet Union: one official language is used so that people can understand one another. Standard Chinese is referred to as Mandarin in English, "Pǔtōnghuà" or "common to everybody speech" in Mainland China, and "Guóyǔ" or "language of the whole country" in Taiwan. All official documents in Pinyin are written in Mandarin, which is taught all over China. It is also a standard for language teaching in some other countries.
Chinese is used by the Han people in China and other ethnic groups in China that are declared Chinese by the Chinese government. Many people in autonomous regions of China speak other languages. Chinese is almost always written in Chinese characters, which are symbols, called logograms, that have meaning. They also give some indication of pronunciation, but the same character can get very different pronunciations among the different kinds of Chinese. Since characters have been around for at least 3500 years, people in places far from each other say them differently, just as "1, 2, 3" can be read differently in different languages.
Chinese people needed to write down pronunciations in dictionaries. Chinese does not have an alphabet and so writing down sounds was a major problem in the beginning. Mandarin now uses Hanyu Pinyin to represent the sounds in the Roman alphabet.
All Chinese languages (or dialects) use tones. That means that they use high and low pitches to make differences in meaning clear.
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Different languages or dialects of Chinese
The Chinese language is like a large tree. The base of the tree started thousands of years ago. The tree now has several main limbs. Some people call "just a branch" what other people call a main limb and so there are six or seven main limbs.
Each of the main limbs splits off into branches like the branches of English spoken in Britain, the United States, Australia, India, Canada, and so forth. Just as all of the Romance languages come from the area around Rome and are based on Latin, the Chinese languages all have some common source, and all have kept many common things.
Here are the main seven main groups of languages/dialects of Chinese by size:
- Guan ("Northern" or Mandarin), 北方話/北方话 or 官話/官话 (about 850 million speakers),
- Wu, 吳/吴, which includes Shanghainese (about 90 million speakers),
- Yue (Cantonese), 粵/粤 (about 80 million speakers),
- Min (Hokkien, which includes Taiwanese), 閩/闽 (about 50 million speakers),
- Xiang, 湘 (about 35 million speakers),
- Hakka, 客家 or 客 or "guest family" speech (about 35 million speakers),
- Gan, 贛/赣 (about 20 million speakers)
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Traditional and simplified characters
In 1956, the government of the People's Republic of China made public a set of simplified Chinese characters to make learning, reading and writing the Chinese language easier. In Mainland China and Singapore, people use these simpler characters. In Hong Kong, Taiwan and other places that speak Chinese, people still use the traditional characters. Korean also uses Chinese characters to represent certain words. Japanese uses them even more often. Those characters are known in Korean as hanja and in Japanese as kanji. Vietnamese once used Chinese characters, called Chữ Nôm, but they have been discareded.
A Chinese person with a good education today knows 6,000-7,000 characters. About 3,000 Chinese characters are needed to read a Mainland Chinese newspaper. However, people who have learned only the 400 most frequently used characters can read a newspaper but have to guess some less common words.
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Samples
Here are some samples of some words and sentences in Mandarin Chinese. Simplified characters are on the left, and traditional characters are on the right. The pronunciation is given in Pinyin, a system may not always be as simple as it seems for those who have not studied it.
Traditional characters are now used in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Mainland China uses simplified characters, but people may recognize traditional characters.
Before 1956, Chinese was written with only traditional characters. Most Chinese people then could not read or write at all. The government of the People's Republic of China thought that the traditional characters were very hard to learn. It also thought that the characters were simplified, more people could learn how to read and write. Today, many people in China can read and write with the new simplified characters.
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