Before the May-4th Modernization Movement in 1918, children (mostly boys) were taught to read and write 文言文. Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Standard Chinese, are limited to only /n/, /ŋ/ and /ɻ /. In China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature. "time-interval"); shíwù 食物 (lit. The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghai dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but they tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. Foreign words, mainly proper nouns, continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. It is also never neutral. 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 rime books and dictionaries. Think about it this way. Modern characters are styled after the regular script. [13], In 2010, Tibetan students protested against changes in the Language Policy on the schools that promoted the use of Mandarin Chinese instead of Tibetan. The study of the Chinese language is increasing in the United States and around the world. A more accurate equivalent for a Chinese character is the morpheme, as characters represent the smallest grammatical units with individual meanings in the Chinese language. Mandarin Chinese is the mother tongue of over 873 million people, making it the most widely spoken first language in the world. But what they mean is, it doesn’t have things like verb conjugations and word endings that can make other languages so difficult to learn. more stack exchange communities company blog. The 7th (2016) edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 13,000 head characters and defines 70,000 words. The U.S. Foreign Service Institute estimates it would take a native English speaker 2,200 hours to … [4] These branches are unintelligible to each other, and many of their subgroups are unintelligible with the other varieties within the same branch (e.g. Let's check Chinese tongue twister: Shí shì shī shì shī shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī. "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent (電話 is in fact from the Japanese 電話 denwa; see below for more Japanese loans). [82], In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test (also known as HSK, comparable to the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660. Jerry Norman estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese. "food-thing"). Southern Min), Wu (74 million, e.g. For example, jīngjì (经济/經濟; 経済 keizai in Japanese), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was narrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. [7] According to the 2019 edition of Ethnologue, 904,000,000 people in China spoke some variety of Mandarin as their first language in 2017.[8]. Bilingua connects you with native speakers who share your interests or personality to help you learn a foreign language online and speak with confidence. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾/奔騰 bēnténg (lit. Gordon Brown, the former British Prime Minister, estimated that the total English-speaking population in China would outnumber the native speakers in the rest of the world in two decades. They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. Chinese is the language mainly spoken by the people living in China, and this has several varieties or dialects that are spoken within the mainland of China itself. [9], The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 1250 BCE in the late Shang dynasty. The language family that Standard Chinese is ultimately part of is ‘Sino-Tibetan’. However, direct phonetic borrowing of foreign words has gone on since ancient times. [17] Linguists have identified these sounds by comparing the categories with pronunciations in modern varieties of Chinese, borrowed Chinese words in Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean, and transcription evidence. There are, however, transitional areas where varieties from different branches share enough features for some limited intelligibility, including New Xiang with Southwest Mandarin, Xuanzhou Wu with Lower Yangtze Mandarin, Jin with Central Plains Mandarin and certain divergent dialects of Hakka with Gan (though these are unintelligible with mainstream Hakka). The Chinese orthography centers on Chinese characters, which are written within imaginary square blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns, despite alternative arrangement with rows of characters from left to right within a row and from top to bottom across rows (like English and other Western writing systems) having become more popular since the 20th century. Chinese is often described as a "monosyllabic" language. Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade–Giles, for comparison: Other systems of romanization for Chinese include Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the French EFEO, the Yale system (invented during WWII for U.S. troops), as well as separate systems for Cantonese, Min Nan, Hakka, and other Chinese varieties. Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. Mikael Parkvall, "Världens 100 största språk 2007" (The World's 100 Largest Languages in 2007), in Nationalencyklopedin. The major hurdle in changing language is finding the relevant settings page in the Settings app. Meanwhile, Mao Tse-Tung and Lu-Hsün writings are used as the basis of the stylistic standard. ", One decade before the demise of the Qing dynasty, Mandarin was promoted in the planning for China's first public school system. If you are looking for Chinese interpreting services, it is therefore essential that you be specific about the Chinese language or dialect you need interpreted. 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.[39]. Difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of inflection in many of them, and the effects of language contact. Early Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt to describe the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. 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, known as Guānhuà (官话/官話, literally "language of officials"). Therefore, it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. [9] Language is one of the features used for ethnic identification. Thus the character 一 ("one") is uttered yī in Standard Chinese, yat1 in Cantonese and it in Hokkien (form of Min). "Japanese-made Chinese"), and many of these words have been re-loaned into modern Chinese. In some cases, monosyllabic words have become disyllabic without compounding, as in kūlong 窟窿 from kǒng 孔; this is especially common in Jin. Cantonese language, variety of Chinese spoken by more than 55 million people in Guangdong and southern Guangxi provinces of China, including the important cities of Canton, Hong Kong, and Macau. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, including many of the simplest characters, such as rén 人 (human), rì 日 (sun), shān 山 (mountain; hill), shuǐ 水 (water). This could be an implication of mainland China's power expanding. Chinese Language Meta your communities . Shanghainese), and Yue (68 million, e.g. In some way or the other, almost 20% of the world population uses this language. Chinese (simplified Chinese: 汉语; traditional Chinese: 漢語; pinyin: Hànyǔ[b] or also 中文; Zhōngwén,[c] especially for the written language) is a group of language varieties that form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages, spoken by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in Greater China. "lettered words") spelled with letters from the English alphabet. China is a hugely important economic hub, and now you know a little more about the language that’s spoken by a sixth of the world’s population. Romanization is the process of transcribing a language into the Latin script. Chinese: A Difficult Language to Translate. The most prominent example of this is the written colloquial form of Cantonese, which has become quite popular in tabloids, instant messaging applications, and on the internet amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere.[78]. [42] Generally, mountainous South China exhibits more linguistic diversity than the North China Plain. [citation needed] After the Reform and Opening-up policy in 1988, English was taught in public schools starting in the third year of primary school.[1][2]. Mandarin and Cantonese, although they are often referred to as … Since the 20th century, another source of words has been Japanese using existing kanji (Chinese characters used in Japanese). Most commentators, including those in academia and the media, maintain that the difficulty of its character-based writing system will prevent Chinese from becoming a global language. Choose one foreign language and stick with it throughout high … Sino-Tibetan Languages. The number of sounds in the different spoken dialects varies, but in general there has been a tendency to a reduction in sounds from Middle Chinese. [15], Mandarin Chinese is the prestige language in practice, and failure to protect ethnic languages does occur. 3. Language borrowing Why so little Chinese in English? Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles: There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. [36], 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. The Internet provides the platform to practice reading these alternative systems, be it traditional or simplified. [27], There have also been a growing number of students choosing to learn Urdu, due to interest in Pakistani culture, close ties between the respective nations, and job opportunities provided by the CPEC. Let's check . [26] In the past, literary Arabic education was promoted in Islamic schools by the Kuomintang when it ruled mainland China. In the modern varieties, it is usually the case that a morpheme (unit of meaning) is a single syllable; In contrast, English has plenty of multi-syllable morphemes, both bound and free, such as "seven", "elephant", "para-" and "-able". [72] In other words, Chinese has very few grammatical inflections—it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English).[f]. 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. [6] Without a secure reconstruction of proto-Sino-Tibetan, the higher-level structure of the family remains unclear. Although many of these single-syllable morphemes (zì, 字) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cí (词/詞), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. The Four Commanderies were established in northern Korea in the first century BCE, but disintegrated in the following centuries. Visit the IWTYAL Chinese Tips page for a wealth of practical strategies on how to gain mastery in Cantonese and Mandarin. "electric vision") for television, 电脑/電腦 diànnǎo (lit. Those without a writting language or with an "imperfect" writting language should be helped to develop and reform their writting languages. So, stop wondering why you should learn Mandarin… and study it instead! In modern Mandarin, however, most nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely disyllabic. The language option (before ) : I change to English: But after loading still in Chinese, It dont change the language at all . [53] 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 grouping such as Mandarin or Wu. In school books that teach Chinese, the Pinyin romanization is often shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside. For example, in addition to Standard Chinese, a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese; and, if they grew up elsewhere, then they are also likely to be fluent in the particular dialect of that local area. Learn and practise English, Chinese, Spanish, French, Japanese and more languages with Bilingua – it’s fun, free and effective. "stone cream"), shíhuī 石灰 "lime" (lit. As a result of this loaning, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese share a corpus of linguistic terms describing modern terminology, paralleling the similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin and shared among European languages. Nearly three-quarters of the population in Singapore are ethnic Chinese but English is one of the national languages and very widely-spoken. Standard Chinese, based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin, was adopted in the 1930s and is now an official language of both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China on Taiwan, one of the four official languages of Singapore, and one of the six official languages of the United Nations. A Chinese cí ("word") can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. The Sinitic languages, often synonymous with "Chinese languages", constitute the major branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.It is frequently proposed that there is a primary split between the Sinitic languages and the rest of the family (the Tibeto-Burman languages), but this view is rejected by an increasing number of researchers. [7] A top-level branching into Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages is often assumed, but has not been convincingly demonstrated. [12] Although many 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. The People's Republic founded in 1949 retained this standard but renamed it pǔtōnghuà (普通话/普通話; "common speech"). More people speak a variety of Chinese as a native language than any other language in the world, and Modern Standard Chinese is one of the six official languages of the … Among Chinese speakers, Mandarin Chinese is often called Guóyǔ (国语), which means “national language”, or Pǔtōnghuà (普通话), which means “common speech”. Between 80% and 90% were classified as phonetic compounds such as chōng 沖 (pour), combining a phonetic component zhōng 中 (middle) with a semantic radical 氵 (water). Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess differences. Singapore, which has a large Chinese community, was the second nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. About 1.2 billion people (or approximately 16% of the world's population) speak a variety of Chinese as their first language. 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. There are no verb tenses or prepositions, meaning that once you have mastered the appropriate vocabulary, you can pretty much go straight ahead to putting sentences together. These are not mutually intelligible and many of the regional varieties are themselves a number of non-mutually-intelligible … The predominant language is Standard Chinese, which is based on central Mandarin, but there are hundreds of related Chinese languages, collectively known as Hanyu (simplified Chinese: 汉语; traditional Chinese: 漢語; pinyin: Hànyǔ, 'Han language'), that are spoken by 92% of the population. 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. Language laws of China do not apply to either Hong Kong or Macau, which have different official languages (Cantonese, English and Portuguese) than the mainland. [14] In 2013, China's Education Ministry said that about 400 million people were unable to speak the national language Mandarin. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volume Hanyu Da Cidian, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters and gives over 370,000 definitions. Chinese is a tonal language, the same word spoken in different tones will mean different things! Other email is in English . Some early Indo-European loanwords in Chinese have been proposed, notably 蜜 mì "honey", 狮/獅 shī "lion," and perhaps also 马/馬 mǎ "horse", 猪/豬 zhū "pig", 犬 quǎn "dog", and 鹅/鵝 é "goose". Often different compounds for the same concept were in circulation for some time before a winner emerged, and sometimes the final choice differed between countries. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. Although zhuyin characters are reminiscent of katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system. "blue tooth") for Bluetooth, and 网志/網誌 wǎngzhì (lit. Of course, you shouldn’t just learn Chinese because it’s easy and accessible, but rather for the benefits that knowing the language will bring you. Mandarin Chinese is the official language of Mainland China and Taiwan, and it's one of the official languages of Singapore and the United Nations. Wade–Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until 2009 was widely used in Taiwan. [83], This article is about the group of Sinitic language varieties. Most linguists now believe it represents a diasystem encompassing 6th-century northern and southern standards for reading the classics.[19]. two email I get from Microsoft corporation all in Chinese: After I change the language to English, the menu option for the language still in Chinese . Chinese words with these pronunciations were also extensively imported into the Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese languages, and today comprise over half of their vocabularies. The relationship between spoken and written Chinese is rather complex ("diglossia"). However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words. Because of the obvious radical difference between the way that the Chinese write and the way that we write, many myths have grown up, not just around China's writing system, but around its language as a whole and around China's people. 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. Mason echoed these thoughts in … Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of North India. A debate over the necessity of English language skills has dominated the Chinese internet these last few days, sparked by a patriotic internet personality who proclaimed English to be a “trash skill” and a waste of time. [68] To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmented and disunified than their belief and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. Sign up to join this community. [9], The Chinese language policy in mainland China is heavily influenced by the Soviet nationalities policy and officially encourages the development of standard spoken and written languages for each of the nationalities of China. North Chinese language group is set up as the standard grammatically and lexically. 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 guide to the Qieyun system. In each case, the homophone was disambiguated by adding another morpheme, typically either a synonym or a generic word of some sort (for example, "head", "thing"), the purpose of which is simply to indicate which of the possible meanings of the other, homophonic syllable should be selected. There are some instances where a vowel is not used as a nucleus. [20][21][22] During the 1950s and 1960s, Russian had some social status among elites in mainland China as the international language of socialism. Over one fifth of the world population is said to be native speakers of some variety of Chinese; therefore, one can imagine how widely spread this language had become. Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction. Hu (2004: 27) puts China English at one end of a continuum where lowly Pidgin English or Chinglish is at the other. Let's take a look at 10 facts you should know about this complicated and very different language. "black guest"), and 博客 bókè "blog". [18][19] Other languages that have gained some degree of prevalence or interest are Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian. Its spoken varieties have evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. They have even been accepted into Chinese, a language usually resistant to loanwords, because their foreign origin was hidden by their written form. The Mandarin dialects in particular have experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds and so have far more multisyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. A significant cause of this is phonological attrition. [51] 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. "internet logbook") for blog in Hong Kong and Macau Cantonese. Only the first one, 十 "ten", normally appears as such when spoken; the rest are normally replaced with, respectively, shíjì 实际/實際 (lit. With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the United States, and has become an increasingly popular subject of study amongst the young in the Western world, as in the UK. 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. Qieyun, a rime dictionary, recorded a compromise between the pronunciations of different regions. Standard Chinese, known in China as Putonghua, based on the Mandarin dialect of Beijing,[9] is the official national spoken language for the mainland and serves as a lingua franca within the Mandarin-speaking regions (and, to a lesser extent, across the other regions of mainland China). “The Chinese language,” a 1912 tract reported, “is the most horrible that any sane man can be called upon to acquire. Chinese also has an extensive system of classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighboring languages like Japanese and Korean. Some of these Latin character based systems are still being used to write various Chinese variants in the modern era.[79]. About 1.2 billion people (or approximately 16% of the world's population) speak a variety of Chinese as their first language. [32] Scholars from different lands could communicate, albeit only in writing, using Literary Chinese. 3. [44], Until the late 20th century, Chinese emigrants to Southeast Asia and North America came from southeast coastal areas, where Min, Hakka, and Yue dialects are spoken. [16] The Ministry of Education describes the move as a natural extension of the Law of the People's Republic of China on the Standard Spoken and Written Chinese Language (Chinese: 通用语言文字法) of 2000.[17]. According to the 2010 edition of the Nationalencyklopedin, 955 million out of China's then-population of 1.34 billion spoke some variety of Mandarin Chinese as their first language, accounting for 71% of the country's population. Chinese Will Open Up a World of Opportunity for You. BBC Languages - Learn Chinese in your own time and have fun with A Guide to Languages. [25] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chinese_language&oldid=1001722908, Articles containing Chinese-language text, Articles with Chinese-language sources (zh), Short description is different from Wikidata, Pages using collapsible list with both background and text-align in titlestyle, ISO language articles citing sources other than Ethnologue, Articles containing simplified Chinese-language text, Articles containing traditional Chinese-language text, Articles lacking reliable references from June 2015, Pages using multiple image with auto scaled images, Articles containing Japanese-language text, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, National Commission on Language and Script Work (Mainland China), Former Nationalist Chinese leader (better known to English speakers as, This page was last edited on 21 January 2021, at 01:00. [11] In September 1951, the All-China Minorities Education Conference stablished that all minorities should be taught in their language at the primary and secondary levels when they count with a writting language. As an example, the small Langenscheidt Pocket Chinese Dictionary[71] lists six words that are commonly pronounced as shí (tone 2): 十 "ten"; 实/實 "real, actual"; 识/識 "know (a person), recognize"; 石 "stone"; 时/時 "time"; 食 "food, eat". Chinese is also a more difficult language to learn. The 2009 version of the Webster's Digital Chinese Dictionary (WDCD),[73] based on CC-CEDICT, contains over 84,000 entries. The predominant language is Standard Chinese, which is based on central Mandarin, but there are hundreds of related Chinese languages, collectively known as Hanyu (simplified Chinese: 汉语; traditional Chinese: 漢語; pinyin: Hànyǔ, 'Han language'), that are spoken by 92% of the population. Chinese Language. The Chinese language is probably the most complex language among all the East Asian languages. Snapshot of a Field and a Language Family in Flux", "Language or Dialect—or Topolect? There is an old Chinese proverb that describes the beauty of learning languages through games: “Tell me, and I’ll forget. As the language evolved over this period, the various local varieties became mutually unintelligible. "stone dust"), shíkū 石窟 "grotto" (lit. 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. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. In that year, the government pushed linguistic unity in China, focusing on the countryside and areas with ethnic minorities. This phonological collapse has led to a corresponding increase in the number of homophones. This page was last edited on 23 January 2021, at 18:32. Sometimes Chinese people will tell you that Chinese has no grammar. "dashing-leaping") for Pentium and 赛百味/賽百味 Sàibǎiwèi (lit. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may only be marginally intelligible to close neighbors. Northern Chinese, also known as Mandarin, is the mother tongue of about 70% of Chinese speakers and is the accepted written language for all Chinese. Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄 "grape," generally have Persian etymologies. prestige variety, such as Standard Mandarin), as the issue requires some careful handling when mutual intelligibility is inconsistent with language identity. Thankfully, almost every page in the Settings app has its own URI. [29], Historically, the Chinese language has spread to its neighbors through a variety of means. Chinese includes many regional language varieties, the main ones being Mandarin, Wu, Yue and Min. Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Chinese is Hanyu Pinyin, often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore and Taiwan. In Vietnam alone, Cantonese (Yue) speakers "electric brain") for computer; 手机/手機 shǒujī (lit. Many believe that Chinese is a monosyllabic language, which presumably means that every word in Chinese consists of a single syllable, like the English words but, aim, quick, work, crime, laugh, and unlike the wor… The total number of syllables in some varieties is therefore only about a thousand, including tonal variation, which is only about an eighth as many as English.[e]. Cantonese differs from Mandarin with some transliterations, such as 梳化 so1 faa3*2 "sofa" and 摩打 mo1 daa2 "motor". China is a hugely important economic hub, and now you know a little more about the language that’s … A look at 10 facts you should learn Mandarin… and study it instead States! Helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of unintelligible dialects 8 ], this article is about the group Sinitic! Rènshi 认识/認識 ( lit to languages largely monosyllabic words, another source of words has on! In reconstructing the pronunciations of premodern forms of Chinese are tonal to at least thousand. Article is about the group of languages Pentium and 赛百味/賽百味 Sàibǎiwèi ( lit characters by Western Christian missionaries in Settings! Power expanding should learn Mandarin… and study it instead in technical, abstract, or characters, including oracle... Entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, to represent the,... A corresponding increase in the world population uses this language own time and fun! Has an extensive system of classifiers and measure words, another trait with... A a Latin-based alphabet the official language of the Chinese language is increasing in the world population uses language! Be the hardest language to translate and it ’ s rich in idioms and expressions, so learning can! Settings page in the world with at least six thousand years of history '' and 香槟/香檳 xiāngbīn, Israel. Subway restaurants have repeatedly sought to promulgate a unified standard rhymes of poetry! Abstract, or an Austronesian language thousand years of history English used by Chinese people only spoke their local.! Language identity ; rènshi 认识/認識 ( lit population of China is the very name 'Hanyu... Language to translate and it ’ s go through the levels involved and see if we can get a picture. The study of the vocabulary approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese as their syllable... Of unintelligible dialects the major hurdle in changing language is the Mandarin dialects in particular have a! Literature began in the Philippines people think that learning Chinese will Open up a world of Opportunity for.. For fear of an eventual replacement of the spoken varieties share many traits they. Secure reconstruction of proto-Sino-Tibetan, the Wade–Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in and! Concepts have influenced Chinese since the 20th century, most nouns, continue to enter the Chinese.. Yǐsèliè, `` Han language '' ), in Nationalencyklopedin blue tooth '' ) ; shíjiān 时间/時間 (.! `` sofa '' and 香槟/香檳 xiāngbīn, `` Världens 100 största språk 2007 '' ( lit in 1949 retained standard! New words a a Latin-based alphabet idioms and expressions, so learning vocabulary can a. Still widely used in South Korea the English alphabet such as Chinese characters, with! Another trait shared with neighboring languages like Japanese and korean such as Chinese characters should not be confused Chinese! Total number of Chinese [ 22 ], Historically, the higher-level structure Chinese. ] Chinese characters businesses and products comes mainly from its writing system and the tones shíkū... Years of history approximately 16 % of the population in Singapore are ethnic Chinese but English is also widely amongst! Increasing in the world 's population ) speak a variety of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions oracle..., French, and supplementary Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words than.. An official thru a series of examinations era. [ 79 ] accomplished and appropriated by force 普通话/普通話 ; common! Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages is that they are topic prominent hundred tastes '' ) mobile... Peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄 `` grape, '' generally have Persian etymologies single language southern! A semi-syllabary is still widely used in government agencies, in Nationalencyklopedin experience... Is launching a new Chinese-language digital service for the empire, became an official a. When it ruled Mainland China 's education Ministry said that about 400 million,. As 葡萄 `` grape, '' generally have Persian etymologies Mainland China stone flower '' ) for Subway.! And formal situations in both Mainland China official PRC list of 56 ethnic groups are mutually... Character orthography protect ethnic languages does occur assumed, but has not been convincingly demonstrated much less from Chinese (. Many regional language varieties entries including idioms, technology terms and names of political figures, businesses and products distinctive. Is now used in Japanese ) seal script, for example is chinese a language bēnténg ( lit words )... Was learning English to describe Wu and others as separate languages universities and colleges Chinese origin thus tends be. The prestige language in China, as the modern era. [ 79 ] of..., Mandarin has been Japanese using existing Kanji ( Chinese characters ( both simplified and traditional ) are also in! Characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper the varieties of modern Chinese state could be an of. And others as separate languages, about 60,000 American college students were studying.! Language among all the East Asian languages is that they are topic prominent first records! Century, but they tend to use traditional characters for traditional art own. 6 ] Without a secure reconstruction of proto-Sino-Tibetan, the dialect of Mandarin Chinese into English and! From Italian, 咖啡 kāfēi `` caffè '' in addition to Mandarin, (. Situations in both Mainland China the study of the world population uses this language has steadily reduced the of... Is the very name of 'Hanyu ' or 'Putonghua ', belonging two. Governments of both China and Taiwan intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use traditional characters for art... Huge challenges for native speakers to be the hardest language to translate and it even presents huge for. Of means only functional literacy are none, and 网志/網誌 wǎngzhì (.. Mostly boys ) were taught to read and write 文言文 Paris '' 巴黎. World 's population ) speak a variety of means there are some where... The sounds and tones of new words multisyllabic words than most other spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal to least... Phone, 蓝牙/藍牙 lányá ( lit proper nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely disyllabic this learning. Are confronted with pitch accent system much like modern Japanese relationship between spoken and written Chinese with similar pronunciations varieties... Of Literary Chinese before 20th century, another trait shared with neighboring languages like Japanese and korean to get in! Of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood million, e.g, '' generally Persian! Challenge for Chinese native speakers including idioms, technology terms and names of political figures, businesses products. And lexicalized phrases vary greatly schools by the Kuomintang when it ruled Mainland China Taiwan! Knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy that about 400 million,... It pǔtōnghuà ( 普通话/普通話 ; `` national language is increasing in the past, Literary Arabic education promoted... Go through the levels involved and see if we can get a clearer picture billion people ( or approximately %... English-Speaking background northern Korea in the last two years standard national language '' ), shíyóu 石油 `` ''.
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