Asian Art

Chinese language

Chinese (spoken: simplified Chinese: 汉语; traditional Chinese: 漢語; pinyin: Hànyǔ, written: 中文; Zhōngwén) is a collection of language varieties containing almost all Sinitic languages except Macro-Bai languages, natively spoken by the Han Chinese and some ethnic minorities in Greater China, as well as by communities of the overseas Chinese. Approximately 1.39 billion people, or 17% of the global population, speak one of the varieties of Chinese as their first language. The different Chinese language varieties together form the largest branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages. While the Chinese government defines all spoken Chinese varieties as merely diverse dialects of a single language, the frequent lack of mutual intelligibility, especially among those outside of the dominant northern varieties, has led linguists to consider them as separate languages within a language family. Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese, of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin with 66%, or around 800 million speakers, followed by Min (75 million, e.g., Hokkien and Teochew), Wu (74 million, e.g., Shanghainese) and Yue (68 million, e.g., Cantonese). These groups are unintelligible to each other, and many of their subgroups are unintelligible with other subgroups within the same branch (e.g. Northern Min vs. Southern Min). There are, however, transitional areas where varieties from different branches share enough features for some limited intelligibility, including New Xiang with Southwestern Mandarin, Xuanzhou Wu Chinese with Lower Yangtze Mandarin, Jin with Central Plains Mandarin and certain divergent dialects of Hakka with Gan. All varieties of Chinese are tonal at least to some degree, and are largely analytic. The Chinese language is transcribed via a writing system consisting of logographic characters, historically in the grammatical form of Literary Chinese. The earliest attested written Chinese consists of the oracle bone inscriptions created during the Shang dynasty c. 1250 BCE. The phonetic categories of Old Chinese can be reconstructed from the rhymes of ancient Chinese poetry.

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See also

• ▸Historian
• ▸Apus
• ▸Cantonese

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