Chinese 汉语/漢語 Hànyǔ, 中文 Zhōngwén
Spoken in:	China, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and other regions with Chinese communities
Region:	(majorities): East Asia (minorities): Southeast Asia, and other regions with Chinese communities
Total speakers:	approx 1. China ( Wade-Giles ( Mandarin) Chung¹kuo² is a cultural region, an ancient Civilization, and depending on perspective a National Taiwan ( Taiwanese: Tâi-oân/Tāi-oân (historically 大灣/台員/大員/台圓/大圓/台窩灣 is an Island in East Asia. Singapore For the biogeographical region see Malesia Malaysia (məˈleɪʒə or /məˈleɪziə/ is a country that consists of thirteen states and The Philippines ( Filipino: Pilipinas, officially known as the Republic of the Philippines (fil ''Republika ng Pilipinas'' RP 176 billion
Ranking:	Chinese, all: 1 Mandarin: 1 Wu: 12 Cantonese: 18 Min: 22 Hakka: 33 Gan: 42
Language family:	Sino-Tibetan  Chinese
Writing system:	Chinese characters
Official status
Official language in:	People's Republic of China  Hong Kong  Macau  Republic of China (Taiwan)  Singapore  United Nations Recognized as a regional language in  Mauritius
Regulated by:	In the PRC: National Language Regulating Committee[1] In the ROC: Mandarin Promotion Council In Singapore: Promote Mandarin Council/Speak Mandarin Campaign[2]
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	zh
ISO 639-2:	chi (B)	zho (T)
ISO 639-3:	variously: zho – Chinese (generic) cdo – Min Dong cjy – Jinyu cmn – Mandarin cpx – Pu Xian czh – Huizhou czo – Min Zhong gan – Gan hak – Hakka hsn – Xiang mnp – Min Bei nan – Min Nan wuu – Wu yue – Cantonese
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. This is a list of languages, ordered by the number of native-language speakers, with some data for second-language use List of language familiesA language family is a group of Languages related by descent from a common ancestor called the Proto-language of that family The Sino-Tibetan languages form a Language family composed of at least the Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman languages, including some 250 languages of A writing system is a type of Symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in Language. A Chinese character, also known as a Han character ( is a Logogram used in writing Chinese (hanzi Japanese ( Talk People's Republic of China) PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA ARTICLE GUIDELINES Hong Kong ( officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, is a territory located on China 's south coast on the Pearl River Delta, and borders For a topic outline on this subject see List of basic Macau topics. REPUBLIC OF CHINA ARTICLE GUIDELINES Singapore The United Nations ( UN) is an International organization whose stated aims are to facilitate cooperation in International law, International security Mauritius (pronounced məˈrɪʃəs L’île Maurice /il mɔ'ʁis/ Mauritian Creole: Maurice) officially the Republic of Mauritius, République This is a list of bodies that regulate Standard languages Natural languages Auxiliary languages Interlingua The auxiliary language The National Languages Committee, formerly Mandarin Promotion Council ( was established by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China (Taiwan with the purpose The Speak Mandarin Campaign ( SMC;)is an initiative by the Government of Singapore to encourage Singapore 's Singaporean Chinese population to The Speak Mandarin Campaign ( SMC;)is an initiative by the Government of Singapore to encourage Singapore 's Singaporean Chinese population to ISO 639-1 is the first part of the ISO 639 international-standard language-code family ISO 639-2 is the second part of the ISO 639 standard, which lists codes for the representation of the names of languages ISO 639 -3 (ISO 639-32007 is an international standard for Language codes The standard describes three‐letter codes for identifying languages ISO 639-3 is an international standard for language codes In defining some of its language codes some are defined as macrolanguages covering either significantly The Eastern Min language or Min Dong ( Foochow Romanized: Mìng-dĕ̤ng-ngṳ̄ is the language mainly spoken in the eastern part of Fujian Province Puxian ( Simplified Chinese: 莆仙话; Traditional Chinese: 莆仙話; Hanyu pinyin: Púxiān huà is a subcategory of Min Chinese. The Central Min language or Min Zhong ( is a subcategory of Min, which is a Chinese language. The Northern Min language or Min Bei ( is a collection of mutually intelligible dialects of Min spoken in Nanping in northwestern Fujian The Southern Min language or Min Nan ( POJ: Bân-lâm-gú or "Southern Fujian" language refers to a family of Chinese languages Dialects In Computing, Unicode is an Industry standard allowing Computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's

Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) (汉语/漢語, pinyin: Hànyǔ; 华语/華語, Huáyǔ; or 中文, Zhōngwén) can be considered a language or language family^[3]. Pinyin, more formally Hanyu pinyin, is the most common Standard Mandarin Romanization system in use A language is a dynamic set of visual auditory or tactile Symbols of Communication and the elements used to manipulate them List of language familiesA language family is a group of Languages related by descent from a common ancestor called the Proto-language of that family Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Han Chinese ( are an Ethnic group native to China and by most modern definitions the largest single Ethnic group in the world. China ( Wade-Giles ( Mandarin) Chung¹kuo² is a cultural region, an ancient Civilization, and depending on perspective a National The Sino-Tibetan languages form a Language family composed of at least the Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman languages, including some 250 languages of About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over 1 billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "languages" or "dialects" is controversial ^[4]. According to news reports in March 2007, 86 percent of people in the People's Republic of China speak a variant of spoken Chinese. Spoken Chinese ( comprises many regional variants the largest of which are Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, and Min. ^[5] As a language family, the number of Chinese speakers is 1. 136 billion. The same news report indicate 53 percent^[6] of the population, or 700 million speakers, can effectively communicate in Putonghua (commonly called "Mandarin"), outnumbering any other language in the world. Standard Mandarin, also known as Standard Spoken Chinese, is the official modern Chinese spoken language used in mainland China and Taiwan

Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, though all spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. Spoken Chinese ( comprises many regional variants the largest of which are Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, and Min. Tone is the use of pitch in Language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is to distinguish or inflect words In morphological typology (in linguistics an isolating language (also analytic language) is any Language in which words are composed of There are between six and twelve main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most populous (by far) is Mandarin (c. 850 million), followed by Wu (c. 90 million), Min (c. 70 million) and Cantonese (c. 70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, though some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. In Linguistics, mutual intelligibility is recognized as a relationship between Languages in which speakers of different but related languages can readily understand Chinese is classified as a macrolanguage with 13 sub-languages in ISO 639-3, though the identification of the varieties of Chinese as multiple "languages" or as "dialects" of a single language is a contentious issue. ISO 639-3 is an international standard for language codes In defining some of its language codes some are defined as macrolanguages covering either significantly ISO 639 -3 (ISO 639-32007 is an international standard for Language codes The standard describes three‐letter codes for identifying languages A language is a dynamic set of visual auditory or tactile Symbols of Communication and the elements used to manipulate them A dialect (from the Greek word διάλεκτος dialektos) is a variety of a Language that is characteristic of a particular group of

The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin (Putonghua/Guoyu), based on the Beijing dialect. Standard Mandarin, also known as Standard Spoken Chinese, is the official modern Chinese spoken language used in mainland China and Taiwan Beijing dialect ( is the Dialect of Mandarin spoken in the urban area of Beijing, China. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Talk People's Republic of China) PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA ARTICLE GUIDELINES REPUBLIC OF CHINA ARTICLE GUIDELINES Taiwan ( Taiwanese: Tâi-oân/Tāi-oân (historically 大灣/台員/大員/台圓/大圓/台窩灣 is an Island in East Asia. Singapore Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. The United Nations ( UN) is an International organization whose stated aims are to facilitate cooperation in International law, International security Of the other varieties, Standard Cantonese is common and influential in Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Standard Cantonese is the standard variant of the Cantonese (Yuet language Hong Kong ( officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, is a territory located on China 's south coast on the Pearl River Delta, and borders English is a West Germanic language originating in England and is the First language for most people in the United Kingdom, the United States For a topic outline on this subject see List of basic Macau topics. Portuguese ( or língua portuguesa) is a Romance language that originated in what is now Galicia (Spain and northern Portugal. Min Nan, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (where it dominates in Singapore and Malaysia and is known as Hokkien). The Southern Min language or Min Nan ( POJ: Bân-lâm-gú or "Southern Fujian" language refers to a family of Chinese languages Dialects This article is about the People's Republic of China province Taiwan ( Taiwanese: Tâi-oân/Tāi-oân (historically 大灣/台員/大員/台圓/大圓/台窩灣 is an Island in East Asia. Singapore For the biogeographical region see Malesia Malaysia (məˈleɪʒə or /məˈleɪziə/ is a country that consists of thirteen states and

Contents 1 Spoken Chinese 1.1 Standard Mandarin and diglossia 1.2 Language or language family? 1.3 Language and nationality 2 Written Chinese 2.1 Chinese characters 3 History and evolution 4 Influences on other languages 5 Phonology 6 Phonetic transcriptions 6.1 Romanization 6.2 Other phonetic transcriptions 7 Grammar and morphology 7.1 Tones and homophones 8 Vocabulary 9 New words 9.1 Modern borrowings and loanwords 10 Learning Chinese 11 See also 12 References 13 Footnotes 14 External links 14.1 Dictionaries 14.2 Learning

Spoken Chinese

Main article: spoken Chinese

The map below depicts the linguistic subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within China itself. Spoken Chinese ( comprises many regional variants the largest of which are Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, and Min. The traditionally-recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are:

• Mandarin 北方话/北方話 or 官話/官话, (c. 850 million)，
• Wu 吳/吴 , which includes Shanghainese, (c. Shanghainese (上海閒話 in Shanghainese sometimes referred to as the Shanghai dialect, is a dialect of Wu Chinese spoken in the city of Shanghai 90 million)，
• Cantonese (Yue) 粵/粤, (c. 80 million)，
• Min 閩/闽, which includes Taiwanese, (c. 50 million),
• Xiang 湘, (c. 35 million),
• Hakka 客家 or 客, (c. 35 million)，
• Gan 贛/赣, (c. 20 million)

Chinese linguists have recently distinguished:

• Jin 晉/晋 from Mandarin
• Hui 徽 from Wu
• Ping 平話/平话 partly from Cantonese

There are also many smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect, spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡话), not to be confused with Xiang (湘), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua, spoken in northern Guangdong. Danzhou (儋州; Pinyin: Dānzhōu is a city in the northwest of the Chinese island province of Hainan ( POJ: Hai-lam Pinyin:, Jyutping: hoi2 naam4 literal meaning "South of the Sea" is the smallest province of the People's ( is a province of China, located in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River and south of Lake Dongting (hence the name Hunan, meaning Shaozhou Tuhua (traditional 韶州土話 simplified 韶州土话 is an unclassified Chinese dialect spoken in the border region of the provinces Guangdong Guangdong ( EFEO: Kouangtong; Pinyin Guǎngdōng; Postal map spelling: Kwangtung) is a province on the The Dungan language, spoken in Central Asia, is very closely related to Mandarin. The Dungan language is a Sinitic language spoken by the Dungan of Central Asia, an ethnic group related to the Hui people of China Central Asia is a region of Asia from the Caspian Sea in the west to central China in the east and from southern Russia in the north to northern Pakistan in the south However, it is not generally considered "Chinese" since it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by Dungan people outside China who are not considered ethnic Chinese. The Cyrillic alphabet (səˈrɪlɪk also called azbuka, from the old name of the first two letters is actually a family of Alphabets, subsets of which are used by Dungan (Дунгане is a term used in territories of the former Soviet Union to refer to a Muslim people of Chinese origin China ( Wade-Giles ( Mandarin) Chung¹kuo² is a cultural region, an ancient Civilization, and depending on perspective a National See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of individual dialects within these large, broad groupings. The following is a list of Chinese dialects and languages. Classification Linguists classify these languages as the

In general, the above language-dialect groups do not have sharp boundaries, though Mandarin is the pre-dominant Sinitic language in the North and the Southwest, and the rest are mostly spoken in Central or Southeastern China. China ( Wade-Giles ( Mandarin) Chung¹kuo² is a cultural region, an ancient Civilization, and depending on perspective a National Taiwan ( Taiwanese: Tâi-oân/Tāi-oân (historically 大灣/台員/大員/台圓/大圓/台窩灣 is an Island in East Asia. Frequently, as in the case of the Guangdong province, native speakers of major variants overlapped. Guangdong ( EFEO: Kouangtong; Pinyin Guǎngdōng; Postal map spelling: Kwangtung) is a province on the As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear how the speeches of various parts of China should be classified. The Ethnologue lists a total of 14, but the number varies between seven and seventeen depending on the classification scheme followed. Ethnologue Languages of the World is a web and print publication of SIL International (formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics a Christian For instance, the Min variety is often divided into Northern Min (Minbei, Fuchow) and Southern Min (Minnan, Amoy-Swatow); linguists have not determined whether their mutual intelligibility is large enough to sort them as separate languages.

In general, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may only be marginally intelligible to close neighbours. For instance, Wuzhou is about 120 miles upstream from Guangzhou, but its dialect is more like Standard Cantonese spoken in Guangzhou, than is that of Taishan, 60 miles southwest of Guangzhou and separated by several rivers from it (Ramsey, 1987). Wuzhou ( Simplified Chinese: 梧[[wikt 州|州]] Pinyin; (梧州市 Wúzhōu Shì Guangzhou ( Jyutping: Gwong²zau¹; Yale: Gwóngjàu) is the Capital and a Sub-provincial city Standard Cantonese is the standard variant of the Cantonese (Yuet language Taishan (Chinese 台[[wiktionary 山|山]] Mandarin: Táishān Cantonese: Toisan; Taishanese: Hoisan, Other Year 1987 ( MCMLXXXVII) was a Common year starting on Thursday (link displays 1987 Gregorian calendar)

Standard Mandarin and diglossia

Main article: Standard Mandarin

Putonghua / Guoyu, often called "Mandarin", is the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China (on Taiwan), and Singapore (where it is called "Huayu"). Standard Mandarin, also known as Standard Spoken Chinese, is the official modern Chinese spoken language used in mainland China and Taiwan Standard Mandarin, also known as Standard Spoken Chinese, is the official modern Chinese spoken language used in mainland China and Taiwan A standard language (also standard dialect, standardized dialect, or standardised dialect) is a particular variety of a Language that Talk People's Republic of China) PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA ARTICLE GUIDELINES REPUBLIC OF CHINA ARTICLE GUIDELINES Taiwan ( Taiwanese: Tâi-oân/Tāi-oân (historically 大灣/台員/大員/台圓/大圓/台窩灣 is an Island in East Asia. Singapore It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. Beijing dialect ( is the Dialect of Mandarin spoken in the urban area of Beijing, China. The governments intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools.

In both China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature: it is common for a Chinese to be able to speak two or even three varieties of the Sinitic languages (or “dialects”) together with Standard Mandarin. China ( Wade-Giles ( Mandarin) Chung¹kuo² is a cultural region, an ancient Civilization, and depending on perspective a National Taiwan ( Taiwanese: Tâi-oân/Tāi-oân (historically 大灣/台員/大員/台圓/大圓/台窩灣 is an Island in East Asia. In Linguistics, diglossia is a situation where in a given society there are two (often closely-related languages one of high prestige, which is generally used For example, in addition to putonghua a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese and, if they did not grow up there, his or her local dialect as well. Shanghai ( 上[[wikt 海|海]] is the largest city in China in terms of population and one of the largest urban areas in the world with over 20 million Shanghainese (上海閒話 in Shanghainese sometimes referred to as the Shanghai dialect, is a dialect of Wu Chinese spoken in the city of Shanghai A native of Guangzhou may speak Standard Cantonese and putonghua, a resident of Taiwan, both Taiwanese and putonghua/guoyu. Guangzhou ( Jyutping: Gwong²zau¹; Yale: Gwóngjàu) is the Capital and a Sub-provincial city A person living in Taiwan may commonly mix pronunciations, phrases, and words from Standard Mandarin and Taiwanese, and this mixture is considered socially appropriate under many circumstances. Taiwan ( Taiwanese: Tâi-oân/Tāi-oân (historically 大灣/台員/大員/台圓/大圓/台窩灣 is an Island in East Asia. Standard Mandarin, also known as Standard Spoken Chinese, is the official modern Chinese spoken language used in mainland China and Taiwan In Hong Kong, standard Mandarin is beginning to take its place beside English and Standard Cantonese, the official languages.

Language or language family?

Main article: Identification of the varieties of Chinese

Linguists often view Chinese as a language family, though owing to China's socio-political and cultural situation, and the fact that all spoken varieties use one common written system, it is customary to refer to these generally mutually unintelligible variants as “the Chinese language”. List of language familiesA language family is a group of Languages related by descent from a common ancestor called the Proto-language of that family The diversity of Sinitic variants is comparable to the Romance languages. The Romance languages (sometimes referred to as Romanic languages, or Neolatin languages) are a branch of the Indo-European language family comprising all

From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches technically. In Linguistics, prescription can refer both to the codification and the enforcement of rules governing how a language is to be used However, the idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and cultural self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. Most Chinese and Chinese linguists refer to Chinese as a single language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family.

Chinese itself has a term for its unified writing system, zhongwen (中文), while the closest equivalent used to described its spoken variants would be Hanyu (汉语,“spoken language[s] of the Han Chinese) – this term could be translated to either “language” or “languages” since Chinese possesses no grammatical numbers. Han Chinese ( are an Ethnic group native to China and by most modern definitions the largest single Ethnic group in the world. In linguistics grammatical number is a Grammatical category of nouns pronouns and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one" In the Chinese language, there is much less need for a uniform speech-and-writing continuum, as indicated by two separate character morphemes 语 yu and 文 wen. Ethnic Chinese often consider these spoken variations as one single language for reasons of nationality and as they inherit one common cultural and linguistic heritage in Classical Chinese. Nationality is a relationship between a Person and their State of Origin, Culture, association Affiliation and/or Loyalty Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese is a traditional style of Written Chinese based on the Grammar and Vocabulary of ancient Chinese Han native speakers of Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese, for instance, may consider their own linguistic varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese race as one – albeit internally very diverse – ethnicity. Han Chinese ( are an Ethnic group native to China and by most modern definitions the largest single Ethnic group in the world. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmentary and disunified than it actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. Additionally, in Taiwan, it is closely associated with Taiwanese independence, where some supporters of Taiwanese independence promote the local Taiwanese Minnan-based spoken language. Taiwan ( Taiwanese: Tâi-oân/Tāi-oân (historically 大灣/台員/大員/台圓/大圓/台窩灣 is an Island in East Asia. Taiwan independence ( Pe̍h-oē-jī: Tâi-oân To̍k-li̍p ūn-tōng abbreviated to 台獨 Táidú Tâi-to̍k is a The Southern Min language or Min Nan ( POJ: Bân-lâm-gú or "Southern Fujian" language refers to a family of Chinese languages Dialects

Within the People’s Republic of China and Singapore, it is common for the government to refer to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) beside standard Mandarin as fangyan (“regional tongues”, often translated as “dialects”). A dialect (from the Greek word διάλεκτος dialektos) is a variety of a Language that is characteristic of a particular group of Modern-day Chinese speakers of all kinds communicate using one formal standard written language, although this modern written standard is modeled after Mandarin, generally the modern Beijing substandard. Vernacular Chinese is a style or register of the Written Chinese Language essentially modeled after the spoken language and associated with

Language and nationality

The term sinophone, coined in analogy to anglophone and francophone, refers to those who speak the Chinese language natively, or prefer it as a medium of communication. An Anglophone (or anglophone) is someone who speaks the English language. The adjective francophone (alternately Francophone) means French -speaking typically as primary language whether referring to individuals groups or places

Written Chinese

Main article: Chinese written language

See also: Classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese

The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is a complex one. Written Chinese comprises the written symbols used to represent Spoken Chinese and the rules about how they are arranged and punctuated Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese is a traditional style of Written Chinese based on the Grammar and Vocabulary of ancient Chinese Vernacular Chinese is a style or register of the Written Chinese Language essentially modeled after the spoken language and associated with Its spoken variations evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period, although written records have been discovered as far back as the 14th to 11th centuries BC Shang dynasty oracle bones using the oracle bone scripts. Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese is a traditional style of Written Chinese based on the Grammar and Vocabulary of ancient Chinese Literature is the Art of written works Literally translated the word means "acquaintance with letters" (from Latin littera letter The Spring and Autumn Period ( was a period in Chinese history which roughly corresponds to the first half of the Eastern Zhou dynasty (from the second half of the 8th century BC The Shang Dynasty ( Chinese: 商[[wiktionary 朝|朝]] or Yin Dynasty ( 殷[[wiktionary 代|代]] was according to traditional sources the Oracle bones ( Chinese: 甲骨 Pinyin: jiǎgǔpiàn are pieces of Bone or turtle shell that were heated and cracked during divination Oracle bone script ( refers to incised (or rarely brush-written ancient Chinese characters found on Oracle bones which are animal bones or turtle shells used in

By the late Han dynasty however, standard written Chinese had already diverged from the contemporaneous vernacular. The Han Dynasty ( 206 BC–220 AD followed the Qin Dynasty and preceded the Three Kingdoms in China. By the end of the 19th century, only the educated class could write this formalized classical Chinese, known as wenyan, which was the language of Confucius and the early classics and very far from what was spoken more than two millennia later. Confucius ( lit " Master Kung " September 28, 551 BC - 479 BC) was a Chinese thinker and social philosopher During the Ming and Qing dynasty a stream of novels written in the vernacular medium began to gain prominence, and by the 20th century it was clear to many language reformists that the literary written standard should be discarded. Not to be confused with Qin Dynasty, the first dynasty of Imperial China A novel (from Italian novella, Spanish novela, French nouvelle for "new" "news" or "short story Vernacular refers to the Native language of a country or a locality The May Fourth Movement of 1919, headed by Hu Shih, advocated for a vernacular idiom; it slowly gained momentum and since the late 1920s, written standard has switched to the baihua vernacular (白話/白话 báihuà). The May Fourth Movement ( was an anti- imperialist, cultural and political movement in early modern China. Year 1919 ( MCMXIX) was a Common year starting on Wednesday (link will display the full calendar of the Gregorian calendar (or a Common Hu Shih ( 17 December 1891 — 24 February 1962 born Hu Hung-hsing (胡洪騂 Hu Hongxing was a Chinese philosopher and Essayist Vernacular Chinese is a style or register of the Written Chinese Language essentially modeled after the spoken language and associated with Today this standard, which is closely modeled after how Mandarin is spoken now, is used throughout China, overseas and in virtually all modern literature.

The Chinese orthography centers around Chinese characters, hanzi, which are logograms written within imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. The orthography of a language specifies the correct way of using a specific Writing system to write the language A logogram, or logograph, is a Grapheme which represents a word or a Morpheme (a meaningful unit of language Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. In Morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning. Thus the number "one", yi in Mandarin, yat in Cantonese and chi̍t in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("一"). The Southern Min language or Min Nan ( POJ: Bân-lâm-gú or "Southern Fujian" language refers to a family of Chinese languages Dialects Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as 冇 and 係 for Cantonese and Hakka, which are considered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. The Hakkas ( Hakka language: Hak-kâ; Mandarin Chinese: Kèjiā) are a subgroup of the Han Chinese people who live predominantly

Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere. The term chat room, or chatroom, is primarily used by Mass media to describe any form of Synchronous conferencing, occasionally even Asynchronous conferencing Use of it is considered highly informal, and does not extend to any formal occasion.

Also, in Hunan, some women write their local language in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. ( is a province of China, located in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River and south of Lake Dongting (hence the name Hunan, meaning Nü Shu ( is a Syllabary Writing system that was used exclusively among women in Jiangyong County in Hunan province of southern A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent (or approximate Syllables which make up Words A symbol in a syllabary typically represents an optional A Chinese character, also known as a Han character ( is a Logogram used in writing Chinese (hanzi Japanese ( The Dungan language, considered by some a dialect of Mandarin, is also nowadays written in Cyrillic, and was formerly written in the Arabic alphabet, although the Dungan people live outside China. The Dungan language is a Sinitic language spoken by the Dungan of Central Asia, an ethnic group related to the Hui people of China The Cyrillic alphabet (səˈrɪlɪk also called azbuka, from the old name of the first two letters is actually a family of Alphabets, subsets of which are used by The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing several languages of Asia and Africa such as Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. Dungan (Дунгане is a term used in territories of the former Soviet Union to refer to a Muslim people of Chinese origin China ( Wade-Giles ( Mandarin) Chung¹kuo² is a cultural region, an ancient Civilization, and depending on perspective a National

Chinese characters

Main article: Chinese character

The Chinese written language employs Chinese characters (漢字/汉字 pinyin: hànzì), which are logograms: each symbol represents a semanteme or morpheme (a meaningful unit of language), as well as one syllable; the written language can thus be termed a morphemo-syllabic script. A Chinese character, also known as a Han character ( is a Logogram used in writing Chinese (hanzi Japanese ( A Chinese character, also known as a Han character ( is a Logogram used in writing Chinese (hanzi Japanese ( Pinyin, more formally Hanyu pinyin, is the most common Standard Mandarin Romanization system in use A logogram, or logograph, is a Grapheme which represents a word or a Morpheme (a meaningful unit of language In Morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning. A syllable ( Greek:) is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds

Chinese characters evolved over time from earliest forms of hieroglyphs. Hieroglyph ( Greek grc-Grek ἱερογλύφος " sacred carving " or hieroglyphics ( = grc-Grek τὰ ἱερογλυφικά The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic Radicals. A pictogram ( also spelled pictogramme) or pictograph is a Symbol representing a Concept, object, activity place or event An ideogram or ideograph (from Greek idea "idea" + grafo "to write" is a Graphic symbol that represents an Idea This disambiguation page differentiates the various historical uses of the term radical in the context of Chinese characters Only the simplest characters, such as ren 人 (human), ri 日 (sun), shan 山 (mountain), shui 水 (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 AD, the famed scholar Xǚ Shèn in the Hàn Dynasty classified characters into 6 categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Xǔ Shèn ( ca 58 CE – ca 147 CE was a Chinese philologist of the Han Dynasty. The Han Dynasty ( 206 BC–220 AD followed the Qin Dynasty and preceded the Three Kingdoms in China. Of these, only 4% as pictographs, and 80-90% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that arguably once indicated the pronunciation. There are about 214 radicals recognized in the Kangxi Dictionary, which indicate what the character is about semantically. The Kangxi Dictionary was the standard Chinese dictionary during the 18th and 19th centuries

Modern characters are styled after the standard script (楷书/楷書 kǎishū) (see styles, below). The regular script or standard script, or in Chinese kaishu ( and Japanese kaisho, also commonly known as standard regular Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (篆书/篆書 zhuànshū), cursive script (草书/草書 cǎoshū) and clerical script (隶书/隸書 lìshū). The art of Calligraphy is widely practiced and revered in the East Asian Civilizations that use or used Chinese characters. Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but tend to use traditional characters for traditional art.

There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia) outside mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty. Hong Kong ( officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, is a territory located on China 's south coast on the Pearl River Delta, and borders Taiwan ( Taiwanese: Tâi-oân/Tāi-oân (historically 大灣/台員/大員/台圓/大圓/台窩灣 is an Island in East Asia. For a topic outline on this subject see List of basic Macau topics. Singapore For the biogeographical region see Malesia Malaysia (məˈleɪʒə or /məˈleɪziə/ is a country that consists of thirteen states and Mainland China, Continental China, the Chinese mainland or simply the mainland, is a geopolitical term synonymous with the area that is under the jurisdiction The Han Dynasty ( 206 BC–220 AD followed the Qin Dynasty and preceded the Three Kingdoms in China. The Simplified Chinese character system, developed by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common caoshu shorthand variants. Year 1954 ( MCMLIV) was a Common year starting on Friday (link will display full 1954 Gregorian calendar) traditional definition of literacy is considered to be the ability to read and write or the ability to use Language to read, write, listen, A glyph is an element of writing Two or more glyphs representing the same symbol whether interchangeable or context-dependent are called Allographs the abstract unit they It is undecided in the discussion on which one is simpler between the Traditional Chinese character and Simplified Chinese character.

Singapore, which has a large Chinese community, is the first – and at present the only – foreign nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. Singapore For the biogeographical region see Malesia Malaysia (məˈleɪʒə or /məˈleɪziə/ is a country that consists of thirteen states and The Internet provides the platform to practice reading the alternative system, be it traditional or simplified. The Internet is a global system of interconnected Computer networks

A well-educated Chinese today recognizes approximately 6,000-7,000 characters; some 3,000 of them are required to read a Mainland newspaper. A newspaper is a written Publication containing News, information and Advertising, usually printed on low-cost paper called Newsprint. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this literacy could be pretty functional. A large unabridged dictionary like the Kangxi Dictionary contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant and archaic characters; only a quarter are now commonly used. A dictionary is a book of alphabetically listed Words in a specific language with definitions etymologies pronunciations and other information or a book of alphabetically The Kangxi Dictionary was the standard Chinese dictionary during the 18th and 19th centuries

History and evolution

Most linguists classify all varieties of modern spoken Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, termed Proto-Sino-Tibetan, from which the Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman languages descended. List of language familiesA language family is a group of Languages related by descent from a common ancestor called the Proto-language of that family The relation between Chinese and other Sino-Tibetan languages is an area of active research, as is the attempt to reconstruct Proto-Sino-Tibetan. The main difficulty in this effort is that, while there is enough documentation to allow one to reconstruct the ancient Chinese sounds, there is no written documentation that records the division between proto-Sino-Tibetan and ancient Chinese. In addition, many of the older languages that would allow us to reconstruct Proto-Sino-Tibetan are very poorly understood.

Categorization of the development of Chinese is a subject of scholarly debate. One of the first systems was devised by the Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren in the early 1900s; most present systems rely heavily on Karlgren's insights and methods. "Sverige" redirects here For other uses see Sweden (disambiguation and Sverige (disambiguation. Bernhard Karlgren (1889 - 1978 was a Swedish sinologist, Philologist, and the founder of Swedish sinology as a scholarly discipline

Old Chinese (T:上古漢語; S:上古汉语; P:Shànggǔ Hànyǔ), sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese", was the language common during the early and middle Zhōu Dynasty (1122 BC - 256 BC), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shījīng, the history of the Shūjīng, and portions of the Yìjīng (I Ching). Old Chinese ( or Archaic Chinese as used by linguist Bernhard Karlgren, refers to the Chinese spoken from the Shang Dynasty ( Chinese Pinyin, more formally Hanyu pinyin, is the most common Standard Mandarin Romanization system in use The Zhou Dynasty ( POJ: Chiu Tiau 1122 BC to 256 BC was preceded by the Shang Dynasty and followed by the Qin Dynasty in China. Events By place Roman Republic Rome aims for a quick end to hostilities in the First Punic War and decides to invade the Shi Jing ( translated variously as the Classic of Poetry, the Book of Songs or the Book of Odes, is the earliest The Classic of History ( is a compilation of documentary records related to events in ancient history of China The I Ching ( Wade-Giles) or “Yì Jīng” ( Pinyin) also called “Classic of Changes” or “Book of Changes” is one of the oldest of the The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters provide hints to their Old Chinese pronunciations. The pronunciation of the borrowed Chinese characters in Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean also provide valuable insights. Old Chinese was not wholly uninflected. It possessed a rich sound system in which aspiration or rough breathing differentiated the consonants, but probably was still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qīng dynasty philologists. Not to be confused with Qin Dynasty, the first dynasty of Imperial China See Comparative linguistics for the narrower field of "comparative philology" Some early Indo-European loanwords in Chinese have been proposed, notably 蜜 mì "honey", 獅 shī "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mǎ "horse", 犬 quǎn "dog", and 鵝 gǔ "goose". ^[7]

Middle Chinese (T:中古漢語; S:中古汉语; P:Zhōnggǔ Hànyǔ) was the language used during the Suí, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries AD). Middle Chinese ( or Ancient Chinese as used by linguist Bernhard Karlgren, refers to the Chinese language spoken during Southern and Northern Pinyin, more formally Hanyu pinyin, is the most common Standard Mandarin Romanization system in use The Sui Dynasty ( 581 - 618 AD and in the undertaking of other construction projects including the reconstruction of the Great Wall. The Tang Dynasty ( Middle Chinese: dhɑng (June 18 618&ndashJune 4 907 was an imperial dynasty of China preceded by the Sui Dynasty and followed by The Song Dynasty ( Wade-Giles: Sung Ch'ao was a ruling dynasty in China between 960&ndash1279 CE it succeeded the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms The 6th century is the period from 501 to 600 in accordance with the Julian calendar in the Christian / Common Era. It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the 切韻 "Qièyùn" rhyme table (601 AD), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the 廣韻 "Guǎngyùn" rhyme table. The Qieyun ( is a Chinese Rime dictionary, published in 601 CE during the Sui Dynasty. This article is about a type of dictionary in ancient China For the type of Western reference work used in poetry see Rhyming dictionary. Events By Place Byzantine Empire Peter (Byzantine General defeats the Eurasian Avars. The Guangyun ( literally "Broad/Extensive Rimes" is a Chinese Rime dictionary that was compiled from 1007 to 1011 under This article is about a type of dictionary in ancient China For the type of Western reference work used in poetry see Rhyming dictionary. Linguists are more confident of having reconstructed how Middle Chinese sounded. The evidence for the pronunciation of Middle Chinese comes from several sources: modern dialect variations, rhyming dictionaries, foreign transliterations, "rhyming tables" constructed by ancient Chinese philologists to summarize the phonetic system, and Chinese phonetic translations of foreign words. However, all reconstructions are tentative; some scholars have argued that trying to reconstruct, say, modern Cantonese from modern Cantopop rhymes would give a fairly inaccurate picture of the present-day spoken language. Cantopop (Chinese 粵語流行曲 is a colloquial Portmanteau for " Cantonese popular music ".

The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. Most Chinese people, in Sìchuān and in a broad arc from the northeast (Manchuria) to the southwest (Yunnan), use various Mandarin dialects as their home language. ( Postal map spelling: Szechwan and Szechuan) is a province in western China with its capital in Chengdu. Manchuria ( Romanized Manchu: Manju,, Маньчжурия Mongolian: Манж is a historical name given to a vast geographic region in northeast Home language is a term widely used for a language spoken in the home that is different from the main language spoken in the society The prevalence of Mandarin throughout northern China is largely due to north China's plains. By contrast, the mountains and rivers of middle and southern China promoted linguistic diversity.

Until the mid-20th century, most southern Chinese only spoke their native local variety of Chinese. The twentieth century of the Common Era began on As Nanjing was the capital during the early Ming dynasty, Nanjing Mandarin became dominant at least until the later years of the officially Manchu-speaking Qing Empire. The Ming Dynasty ( or Empire of the Great Ming ( was the ruling dynasty of China from 1368 to 1644 following the collapse of the Mongol -led The Manchu people ( Manchu: Manju;, Mongolian: Манж Russian: Маньчжуры are a Tungusic people who originated in Not to be confused with Qin Dynasty, the first dynasty of Imperial China Since the 17th century, the Empire had set up orthoepy academies (T:正音書院; S:正音书院; P:Zhèngyīn Shūyuàn) to make pronunciation conform to the Qing capital Beijing's standard, but had little success. As a means of recording the passage of Time, the 17th Century was that Century which lasted from 1601 - 1700 in the Gregorian calendar Orthoepy (/'ɔːθəʊiːpɪ/ or /ɔː'θəʊɪpɪ/ means the correct use of words, from the Greek orth- + -epos correct + word speech Pinyin, more formally Hanyu pinyin, is the most common Standard Mandarin Romanization system in use During the Qing's last 50 years in the late 19th century, the Beijing Mandarin finally replaced Nanjing Mandarin in the imperial court. For the general population, though, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The new Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited.

This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching Standard Mandarin. Standard Mandarin, also known as Standard Spoken Chinese, is the official modern Chinese spoken language used in mainland China and Taiwan As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all young and middle-aged citizens of mainland China and on Taiwan. Mainland China, Continental China, the Chinese mainland or simply the mainland, is a geopolitical term synonymous with the area that is under the jurisdiction Taiwan ( Taiwanese: Tâi-oân/Tāi-oân (historically 大灣/台員/大員/台圓/大圓/台窩灣 is an Island in East Asia. Standard Cantonese, not Mandarin, was used in Hong Kong during its the time of its British colonial period (owing to its large Cantonese native and migrant populace) and remains today its official language of education, formal speech, and daily life, but Mandarin is becoming increasingly influential after the 1997 handover. Standard Cantonese is the standard variant of the Cantonese (Yuet language Hong Kong ( officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, is a territory located on China 's south coast on the Pearl River Delta, and borders The transfer of sovereignty of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to the People's Republic of China, often referred to as the Handover

Chinese was once the Lingua franca for East Asia countries for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. A lingua franca (from Italian, literally meaning Frankish language, see etymology under Sabir and Italian below is any Language widely

Influences on other languages

Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on unrelated languages such as Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese. The Culture of China (traditional Chinese 中國文化 simplified Chinese 中国文化 is home to one of the world's oldest and most complex Civilizations covering a history This article is mainly about the spoken Korean language See Hangul for details on the native Korean writing system Vietnamese ( tiếng Việt, or less commonly Việt ngữ) formerly known under French colonization as Annamese ( see Annam) is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities Korean and Japanese both have writing systems employing Chinese characters (Hanzi), which are called Hanja and Kanji, respectively. A Chinese character, also known as a Han character ( is a Logogram used in writing Chinese (hanzi Japanese ( Hanja is the Korean name for Chinese characters. More specifically it refers to those Chinese characters borrowed from Chinese and incorporated are the Chinese characters that are used in the modern Japanese logographic writing system along with Hiragana (ひらがな 平仮名 Katakana

The Vietnamese term for Chinese writing is Hán tự. Hán tự ( {{IPA|/han˦˥ tɯ˨/}}; 漢[[wikt 字|字]] meaning " Chinese character " or chữ Nho ( {{IPA|/tɕɯ˧˨˧ ɲɔ/}} It was the only available method for writing Vietnamese until the 14th century, used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese élites. From the 14th to the late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chữ nôm, a modified Chinese script incorporating sounds and syllables for native Vietnamese speakers. Chữ Nôm ( IPA: /cɨ3ˀ5 nom33/ chữ Nôm in Unicode: 字[[wikt 喃|喃]]/ 𡨸 喃/ 𡦂 喃 chữ Nôm in Unicode Chữ nôm was completely replaced by a modified Latin script created by the Jesuit missionary priest Alexander de Rhodes, which incorporates a system of diacritical marks to indicate tones, as well as modified consonants. The Vietnamese language exhibits multiple elements similar to Cantonese in regard to the specific intonations and sharp consonant endings. There is also a slight influence from Mandarin, including the sharper vowels and "kh" (IPA:x) sound missing from other Asiatic languages.

In South Korea, the Hangul alphabet is generally used, but Hanja is used as a sort of boldface. South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea and often referred to as Korea ( Korean: 대한민국 tɛː Hanja is the Korean name for Chinese characters. More specifically it refers to those Chinese characters borrowed from Chinese and incorporated In North Korea, Hanja has been discontinued. North Korea is the commonly used short form name for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (or DPRK) a State located in East Asia, Hanja is the Korean name for Chinese characters. More specifically it refers to those Chinese characters borrowed from Chinese and incorporated Since the modernization of Japan in the late 19th century, there has been debate about abandoning the use of Chinese characters, but the practical benefits of a radically new script have so far not been considered sufficient.

In Guangxi the Zhuang also had used derived Chinese characters or Zhuang logograms to write songs, even though Zhuang is not a Chinese dialect. Guangxi (or Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region;) is a Zhuang autonomous region of the People's Republic of China. Zhuang logograms or sawndip are Logograms created as a derivative characters of Han characters and used by Zhuang in Guangxi Since the 1950s, the Zhuang language has been written in a modified Latin alphabet. The Zhuang language ( autonym: Cuengh or Cueŋь) is used by the Zhuang people in the People's Republic of China. ^[8]

Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of loanwords from Chinese. A loanword (or loan word) is a word directly taken into one Language from another with little or no translation Fifty percent or more of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin and the influence on Japanese and Vietnamese has been considerable. Ten percent of Philippine language vocabularies are of Chinese origin. Chinese also shares a great many grammatical features with these and neighboring languages, notably the lack of gender and the use of classifiers. In Linguistics, grammatical genders, sometimes also called Noun classes are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words every noun must belong A classifier, in Linguistics, is a Word or Morpheme used in some languages to classify a Noun according to its meaning

Phonology

For more specific information on phonology of Chinese see the respective main articles of each spoken variety. Spoken Chinese ( comprises many regional variants the largest of which are Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, and Min.

The phonological structure of each syllable consists of a nucleus consisting of a vowel (which can be a monophthong, diphthong, or even a triphthong in certain varieties) with an optional onset or coda consonant as well as a tone. Phonology ( Greek φωνή (phōnē voice sound + λόγος (lógos word speech subject of discussion is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning In Phonetics, a vowel is a Sound in spoken Language, such as English ah! or oh!, pronounced with an open Vocal tract A monophthong ( Greek μονόφθογγος "monophthongos" = single note) is a "pure" Vowel sound one whose articulation at In Phonetics, a diphthong (also gliding vowel) (from Greek grc δίφθογγος "diphthongos" literally "with two sounds" or "with In Phonetics, a triphthong (from Greek τρίφθογγος, "triphthongos" literally "with three sounds" or "with three In Phonetics and Phonology, a syllable onset is the part of a Syllable that precedes the Syllable nucleus. In Phonology, a syllable coda comprises the Consonant sounds of a Syllable that follow the nucleus, which is usually a Vowel In Articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a Speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the upper Vocal tract, the upper vocal Tone is the use of pitch in Language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is to distinguish or inflect words There are some instances where a vowel is not used as a nucleus. An example of this is in Cantonese, where the nasal sonorant consonants /m/ and /ŋ/ can stand alone as their own syllable. A nasal consonant (also called nasal stop or nasal continuant) is produced with a lowered velum in the mouth allowing air to escape freely through the In Phonetics and Phonology, a sonorant is a Speech sound that is produced without turbulent airflow in the Vocal tract.

Across all the spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda, but syllables that do have codas are restricted to /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, /p/, /t/, /k/, or /ʔ/. Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Mandarin, are limited to only two, namely /n/ and /ŋ/. Consonant clusters do not generally occur in either the onset or coda. In Linguistics, a consonant cluster (or consonant blend) is a group of Consonants which have no intervening Vowel. The onset may be an affricate or a consonant followed by a semivowel, but these are not generally considered consonant clusters. Affricate Consonants begin as stops (most often an alveolar, such as or) but release as a fricative (such as or or occasionally into Semivowels — also known as glides or non-syllabic vowels —are Vowels that form Diphthongs with full syllabic vowels

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. Middle Chinese ( or Ancient Chinese as used by linguist Bernhard Karlgren, refers to the Chinese language spoken during Southern and Northern The Mandarin dialects in particular have experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds and so have far more multisyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. 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^[9].

All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones. Tone is the use of pitch in Language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is to distinguish or inflect words A few dialects of north China may have as few as three tones, while some dialects in south China have up to 6 or 10 tones, depending on how one counts. One exception from this is Shanghainese which has reduced the set of tones to a two-toned pitch accent system much like modern Japanese. Shanghainese (上海閒話 in Shanghainese sometimes referred to as the Shanghai dialect, is a dialect of Wu Chinese spoken in the city of Shanghai Pitch accent is a linguistic term of convenience for a variety of restricted tone systems that use variations in pitch to give prominence to a Syllable

A very common example used to illustrate the use of tones in Chinese are the four main tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable "ma. Standard Mandarin, also known as Standard Spoken Chinese, is the official modern Chinese spoken language used in mainland China and Taiwan " The tones correspond to these five characters:

• 媽/妈(mā) "mother" — high level
• 麻(má) "hemp" or "torpid" — high rising
• 馬/马(mǎ) "horse" — low falling-rising
• 罵/骂(mà) "scold" — high falling
• 嗎/吗(ma) "question particle" — neutral

Phonetic transcriptions

The Chinese have no uniform phonetic transcription system until the 20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. This article is about a type of dictionary in ancient China For the type of Western reference work used in poetry see Rhyming dictionary. Early Sanskrit and Pali Indian translators were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of the language in a foreign language. Sanskrit (sa संस्कृता वाक् saṃskṛtā vāk, for short sa संस्कृतम् saṃskṛtam) is a historical Pali ( ISO 15919 / ALA-LC: Pāḷi is a Middle Indo-Aryan language or Prakrit of India. India, officially the Republic of India (भारत गणराज्य inc-Latn Bhārat Gaṇarājya; see also other Indian languages) is a country After 15th century AD Jesuits and Western court missionaries’ efforts result in some rudimentary Latin transcription systems, based on the Nanjing Mandarin dialect.

Romanization

Main article: Romanization of Chinese

Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. The Romanization of Chinese is the use of the Latin alphabet to write Chinese In Linguistics, romanization (or latinization, also spelled romanisation or latinisation) is the representation of a Word or There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages due to the Chinese's own lack of phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century. Christianity in China is a growing minority religion that comprises Protestants (called 基督教 Jī dū jiào or Christ Religion) Catholics

Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin (漢語拼音/汉语拼音), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanization in Singapore). Pinyin, more formally Hanyu pinyin, is the most common Standard Mandarin Romanization system in use Talk People's Republic of China) PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA ARTICLE GUIDELINES Singapore The Romanisation of the Chinese language in Singapore is not dictated by a single policy nor is its policy implementation consistent as the local Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across North America, Australia and Europe. For a topic outline on this subject see List of basic Australia topics.

The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859, later modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. Wade-Giles (ˌweɪdˈʤaɪlz) sometimes abbreviated Wade, is a Romanization system (phonetic notation and Transcription) for the Mandarin As it approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels (hence an Anglicization), it may be particularly helpful for beginner speakers of native English background. Anglicisation or anglicization (see -ise vs -ize) is a process of conversion of verbal or written elements of any other language into a more comprehensible English Wade-Giles is found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan (Taipei city now officially uses Hanyu Pinyin and the rest of the island officially uses Tōngyòng Pinyin 通用拼音/通用拼音). The United States of America —commonly referred to as the Taipei ( Taiwanese Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Tâi-pak-chhī Jhuyin Fuhao: ㄊㄞˊ ㄅㄟˇ ㄕˋ Hakka: Thòi-pet-sṳ has been the capital of

When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade-Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade-Giles' extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Tone is the use of pitch in Language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is to distinguish or inflect words Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with ‘Beijing’ than they will be with ‘Běijīng’ (pinyin), and with ‘Taipei’ than ‘T'ai²-pei³’ (Wade-Giles).

Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison:

Mandarin Romanization Comparison

Characters	Wade-Giles	Hanyu Pinyin	Notes
中国/中國	Chung1-kuo²	Zhōngguó	"China"
北京	Pei³-ching1	Běijīng	Capital of the People's Republic of China
台北	T'ai²-pei³	Táiběi	Capital of the Republic of China (Taiwan)
毛泽东/毛澤東	Mao² Tse²-tung1	Máo Zédōng	Former Communist Chinese leader
蒋介石/蔣介石	Chiang³ Chieh4-shih²	Jiǎng Jièshí	Former Nationalist Chinese leader (better known to English speakers as Chiang Kai-shek, a romanisation from Cantonese)
孔子	K'ung³ Tsu³	Kǒng Zǐ	"Confucius"

Other systems of romanization for Chinese include the École française d'Extrême-Orient, the Yale (invented during WWII for US troops), as well as separate systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages or dialects. Chiang Kai-shek ( POJ: Chiúⁿ Kài-se̍k Jyutping: zoeng2gaai3sek6 GCB ( October 31, 1887 &ndash The École française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO is a French institute dedicated to the study of Asian societies The Southern Min language or Min Nan ( POJ: Bân-lâm-gú or "Southern Fujian" language refers to a family of Chinese languages Dialects The Hakkas ( Hakka language: Hak-kâ; Mandarin Chinese: Kèjiā) are a subgroup of the Han Chinese people who live predominantly

Other phonetic transcriptions

Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The phagspa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of pre-modern forms of Chinese. The ’Phagspa script (дөрвөлжин үсэг dörvöljin üseg "square script" Tibetan: hor gsar yig "new Mongolian script"

Zhuyin (注音, also known as bopomofo), a katakana-inspired syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools to aid standard pronunciation. is a Japanese Syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with Hiragana, Kanji, and in some cases the Latin alphabet A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent (or approximate Syllables which make up Words A symbol in a syllabary typically represents an optional See also Primary education An elementary school is an institution where children receive the first stage of Compulsory education known as elementary Although bopomofo characters are reminiscent of katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system. A comparison table of zhuyin to pinyin exists in the zhuyin article. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles:

• Pinyin table
• Zhuyin table

There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. This pinyin table is a complete listing of all Hanyu Pinyin syllables used in Standard Mandarin. This bopomofo table is a complete listing of all Zhuyin/Bopomofo syllables used in Standard Mandarin. A Cyrillization is a system for rendering words of a language that normally uses a writing system other than the Cyrillic alphabet into a (version of Cyrillic alphabet The most widespread is the Palladius system. This transcription is known as the Palladiy system and is the official Cyrillization of Chinese in Russia.

Grammar and morphology

Main article: Chinese grammar

Like Vietnamese, modern Chinese has often been erroneously classed as a "monosyllabic" language. This article describes the grammar of Standard Mandarin. For the grammars of other forms of Chinese see their respective articles via links on Chinese language While most of her morphemes are single syllable, Modern Chinese today is much less a monosyllabic language in that her nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely di-syllabic. In Morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning. A syllable ( Greek:) is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds In Grammar, an adjective is a word whose main syntactic role is to modify a Noun or Pronoun, giving more information about the For English usage of verbs see the wiki article English verbs. The tendency to create disyllabic words in the modern Chinese languages, particularly in Mandarin, has been particularly pronounced when compared to Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese is a traditional style of Written Chinese based on the Grammar and Vocabulary of ancient Chinese Classical Chinese is a highly isolating language, with each idea (morpheme) generally corresponding to a single syllable and a single character; Modern Chinese though, have the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character agglutination. In morphological typology (in linguistics an isolating language (also analytic language) is any Language in which words are composed of In Linguistics, agglutination is the morphological process ofadding Affixes to the base of a Word. In fact, some linguists argue that classifying modern Chinese as an isolating language is misleading, for this reason alone.

Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest blocks of the language. Morphology is the field of Linguistics that studies the internal structure of words A syllable ( Greek:) is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds In Morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning. While many of these single-syllable morphemes ( zì, 字 in Chinese) 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. A word is a unit of Language that carries meaning and consists of one or more Morphemes which are linked more or less tightly together and has a Phonetic A Chinese cí (“word”) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.

For example:

• Yun 云 -“cloud”
• Jiguang 激光 –“laser”
• Hanbaobao 汉堡包 –“hamburger”

All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology, changes in form of a word, to indicate changes in meaning. In morphological typology (in linguistics an isolating language (also analytic language) is any Language in which words are composed of In Linguistics, syntax (from Ancient Greek grc συν- syn-, "together" and grc τάξις táxis, "arrangement" is the Morphology is the field of Linguistics that studies the internal structure of words In other words, Chinese has next to no grammatical inflections – it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers), only a few articles (ie. In Grammar, inflection or inflexion is the way language handles grammatical relations and relational categories such as tense, mood, voice In Grammar, the voice (also called gender or diathesis of a verb describes the relationship between the action (or state that the verb expresses and the participants identified A number is an Abstract object, tokens of which are Symbols used in Counting and measuring. equivalents to "the, a, an" in English), and no gender. Gender comprises a range of differences between men and women extending from the biological to the social

They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Linguistics, the term particle is a word lacking a strict definition but has the function of changing the relation of the parts of the sentence to one another and is therefore In Linguistics, the grammatical aspect of a Verb defines the temporal flow (or lack thereof in the described event or state Grammatical mood is one of a set of distinctive Verb forms that are used to signal modality. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le 了, hai 还, yijing 已经, etc.

Chinese features Subject Verb Object word order, and like many other languages in East Asia, makes frequent use of the topic-comment construction to form sentences. In Linguistic typology, subject-verb-object ( SVO) is a sentence structure where the subject comes first the Verb second and the object In Linguistics, word order typology refers to the study of the different ways in which languages arrange the constituents of their sentences relative to each other and the systematic In Linguistics, the topic (or theme) is informally what is being talked about and the comment ( rheme or focus) is what is being Chinese also has an extensive system of measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. In Linguistics, measure words, known more formally as numeral classifiers and also called counters, count words, counter words, or is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities This article is mainly about the spoken Korean language See Hangul for details on the native Korean writing system See Chinese measure words for an extensive coverage of this subject. In the modern Chinese languages measure words or classifiers ( Cantonese (Yale: leung4 chi4) are used along with numerals to define the quantity

Other notable grammatical features common to all the spoken varieties of Chinese include the use of serial verb construction, pronoun dropping and the related subject dropping. The serial verb construction is a syntactic phenomenon common to many African and Asian languages A pro-drop language (from "pronoun-dropping" is a Language in which certain classes of Pronouns may be omitted when they are in some sense pragmatically In Linguistic typology, a null subject language is a Language whose Grammar permits an Independent clause to lack an explicit subject

Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess differences. See Chinese grammar for the grammar of Standard Mandarin (the standardized Chinese spoken language), and the articles on other varieties of Chinese for their respective grammars. This article describes the grammar of Standard Mandarin. For the grammars of other forms of Chinese see their respective articles via links on Chinese language Standard Mandarin, also known as Standard Spoken Chinese, is the official modern Chinese spoken language used in mainland China and Taiwan

Tones and homophones

Official modern Mandarin has only 400 spoken monosyllables but over 10,000 written characters, so there are many homophones only distinguishable by the four tones. A homophone is a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning Even this is often not enough unless the context and exact phrase or cí is identified.

The mono-syllable jī, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: 雞/鸡 chicken, 機/机 machine, 基 basic, 擊/击 (to) hit, 饑/饥 hunger, and 積/积 sum. Standard Mandarin, also known as Standard Spoken Chinese, is the official modern Chinese spoken language used in mainland China and Taiwan In speech, the glyphing of a monosyllable to its meaning must be determined by context or by relation to other morphemes (e. g. "some" as in the opposite of "none"). Native speakers may state which words or phrases their names are found in, for convenience of writing: 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyīng, Jiālíng Jiāng de jiā, Yīngguó de yīng "My name is Jiāyīng, the Jia for Jialing Jiang and the ying for Yingguo. "

Southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Hakka preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese and have more tones. In the study of Phonology in Linguistics, the rime or rhyme of a Syllable consists of a nucleus and an optional coda The previous examples of jī, for instance, for "stimulated", "chicken", and "machine", have distinct pronunciations in Cantonese (romanized using jyutping): gik1, gai1, and gei1, respectively. Jyutping (sometimes spelled Jyutpin) is a Romanization system for Standard Cantonese developed by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong (LSHK For this reason, southern varieties tend to employ fewer multi-syllabic words.

Vocabulary

The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words, there are many times more Chinese words than there are characters as most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters.

Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, an all-inclusive compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including bone oracle versions. The Hanyu Da Zidian ( is one of the best available reference works on Chinese characters. Oracle bones ( Chinese: 甲骨 Pinyin: jiǎgǔpiàn are pieces of Bone or turtle shell that were heated and cracked during divination The Zhonghua Zihai 中华字海 (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants.

The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumed Hanyu Da Cidian 汉语大词典, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters, and gives over 370,000 definitions. The Hanyu Da Cidian ( is the most inclusive available Chinese dictionary. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms.

The latest 2007 5th edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian 现代汉语词典, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 65,000 entries and defines 11,000 head characters. Mainland China, Continental China, the Chinese mainland or simply the mainland, is a geopolitical term synonymous with the area that is under the jurisdiction

New words

Like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizeable amount of loanwords from other cultures. Most Chinese words are formed out of native Chinese morphemes, including words describing imported objects and ideas. However, direct phonetic borrowing of foreign words has gone on since ancient times. Words borrowed from along the Silk Road since Old Chinese include 葡萄 "grape," 石榴 "pomegranate" and 狮子/獅子 "lion. The Silk Road, or Silk Routes, are an extensive interconnected network of Trade routes across the Asian continent connecting East South and Western Asia with the Old Chinese ( or Archaic Chinese as used by linguist Bernhard Karlgren, refers to the Chinese spoken from the Shang Dynasty ( Chinese For the Tokyo University supercomputer see Gravity Pipe. GRAPE, or GRA phics P rogramming E nvironment is The pomegranate ( Punica granatum) is a Fruit -bearing Deciduous Shrub or small Tree growing to between five and eight metres tall The lion ( Panthera leo) is a member of the family Felidae and one of four Big cats in the Genus Panthera. " Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩萨/菩薩 "bodhisattva. " Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 胡同 "hutong. Hutongs ( are narrow streets or Alleys most commonly associated with Beijing, China. " Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄 "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. The Persian Empire was a series of Iranian empires that ruled over the Iranian plateau, the original Persian homeland and beyond in Western Asia Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of North India. Sanskrit (sa संस्कृता वाक् saṃskṛtā vāk, for short sa संस्कृतम् saṃskṛtam) is a historical Pali ( ISO 15919 / ALA-LC: Pāḷi is a Middle Indo-Aryan language or Prakrit of India. A sacred language, or liturgical language, is a Language that is cultivated for religious reasons by people who speak another language in their daily life Geography Northern India lies mainly on continental India and a very small part of it lies on the Indian peninsula Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as 琵笆 or 酪 "cheese" or "yoghurt", but from exactly which Altaic source is not always entirely clear. The Gobi (Говь Govi or Gov', "gravel-covered plain" Chinese: zh-t 戈壁(沙漠 Gēbì (Shāmò)

Modern borrowings and loanwords

Foreign words continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, "Israel" becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè), Paris 巴黎. A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including 沙發 shāfā "sofa," 马达/馬達 mǎdá "motor," 幽默 yōumò "humour," 逻辑/邏輯 luójí "logic," 时髦/時髦 shímáo "smart, fashionable" and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ "hysterics. " The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghainese dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. Shanghainese (上海閒話 in Shanghainese sometimes referred to as the Shanghai dialect, is a dialect of Wu Chinese spoken in the city of Shanghai For example, 沙发/沙發 and 马达/馬達 in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor. "

Today, it is much more common to use existing Chinese morphemes to coin new words in order to represent imported concepts, such as technical expressions. Any Latin or Greek etymologies are dropped, making them more comprehensible for Chinese but introducing more difficulties in understanding foreign texts. Latin ( lingua Latīna, laˈtiːna is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Greek (el ελληνική γλώσσα or simply el ελληνικά — "Hellenic" is an Indo-European language, spoken today by 15-22 million people mainly For example, the word telephone was loaned phonetically as 德律风/德律風 ( Shanghainese: télífon [təlɪfoŋ], Standard Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese 电话/電話 (diànhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Shanghainese (上海閒話 in Shanghainese sometimes referred to as the Shanghai dialect, is a dialect of Wu Chinese spoken in the city of Shanghai Standard Mandarin, also known as Standard Spoken Chinese, is the official modern Chinese spoken language used in mainland China and Taiwan The 1920s is sometimes referred to as the " Jazz Age " or the " Roaring Twenties " when speaking about the United States and Canada Other examples include 电视/電視 (diànshì "electric vision") for television, 电脑/電腦 (diànnǎo "electric brain") for computer; 手机/手機 (shǒujī "hand machine") for cellphone, and 蓝牙/藍牙 (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. Bluetooth is a wireless protocol utilizing short-range communications technology facilitating data transmission over short distances from fixed and/or mobile devices creating wireless Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 汉堡包/漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as 拖拉机/拖拉機 (tuōlājī, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马力/馬力 (mǎlìōu, "horse strength") for the video game character Mario. is a Fictional character created by game designer Shigeru Miyamoto. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾/奔騰 (bēnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and 赛百味/賽百味 (Sàibǎiwèi "better-than hundred tastes") for Subway restaurants. The Pentium brand refers to Intel 's single-core x86 Microprocessor based on the P5 fifth-generation Microarchitecture. Subway Restaurants, commonly known as Subway, is a Fast food restaurant franchise that primarily sells Sandwiches and Salads called

Since the 20th century, another source has been Japan. For a topic outline on this subject see List of basic Japan topics. Using existing kanji, which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language, the Japanese re-moulded European concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. are the Chinese characters that are used in the modern Japanese logographic writing system along with Hiragana (ひらがな 平仮名 Katakana is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities Sino-Japanese or Kango (ja [[wikt漢語 漢語]] in Japanese, refers to that portion of the Japanese vocabulary that originated in the Examples include diànhuà (電話, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社会, shakai, "society"), kēxué (科學, kagaku, "science") and chōuxiàng (抽象, chūshō, "abstract"). 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. For example, jīngjì (經濟, keizai), 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. 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. As a result of this toing-and-froing process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese share a corpus linguistics of terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European languages. Taiwanese and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. Taiwanese Mandarin ( also 台灣華語 Táiwān Huáyǔ is the dialect of Mandarin Chinese spoken in Taiwan. 便当 “lunchbox or boxed lunch” and 料理 “prepared cuisine”, have passed into common currency.

Western foreign words have great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. Transliteration is the practice of Transcribing a Word or text written in one Writing system into another writing system or system of rules for such practice From French came 芭蕾 (bāléi, "ballet"), 香槟 (xiāngbīn, "champagne"), via Italian 咖啡 (kāfēi, "caffè"). French ( français,) is a Romance language spoken around the world by 118 million people as a native language and by about 180 to 260 million people Italian ( or lingua italiana) is a Romance language spoken by about 63 million people as a First language, primarily in Italy. The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed . Shanghainese (上海閒話 in Shanghainese sometimes referred to as the Shanghai dialect, is a dialect of Wu Chinese spoken in the city of Shanghai eg. the above-mentioned 沙發 (shāfā "sofa"), 幽默 (yōumò "humour"), and 高尔夫 (gāoěrfū, "golf"). Later US soft influences gave rise to 迪斯科 (dísīkè, "disco"), 可乐 (kělè, "cola") and 迷你 (mínǐ, "mini(skirt)"). The United States of America —commonly referred to as the Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon 卡通 (cartoon), 基佬 (gay people), 的士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. 粉丝 (fěnsī, "fans"), 黑客 (hēikè, "hacker"), 博客 (bókè, "blog"). In common usage hacker is generic term for a computer criminal often with a specific specialty in computer intrusion A blog (a contraction of the term " Web log " is a Web site, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary descriptions of

Learning Chinese

See also: Chinese as a foreign language

Since China’s economic and political rise in recent years, standard Chinese has become an increasingly popular subject of study amongst the young in the Western world, as in the UK. [2]

In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test (comparable to English's Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660. The University of Cambridge ESOL examinations are Examinations in English language ability for non-native speakers of English

Chinese is a popular language; the approximate number of learners all around the world is predicted to be 100 million in 2010.

See also

References

• DeFrancis, John (1984). A Chinese character, also known as a Han character ( is a Logogram used in writing Chinese (hanzi Japanese ( Class consciousness and Confucian principles of order and respect helped promote the development of an elaborate system of Honorific language in Ancient and Imperial In the modern Chinese languages measure words or classifiers ( Cantonese (Yale: leung4 chi4) are used along with numerals to define the quantity Chinese number gestures are a method of using one hand to signify the Natural numbers one through ten Chinese numerals are characters for writing Numbers in Chinese. The Han'er language ( is a pre-modern Sino-Korean term used to denote a medieval Chinese language heavily influenced by non-Han Chinese languages especially China's many different ethnic groups speak many different Languages collectively called Zhōngguó Yǔwén (中国语文 literally " speech and writing Nü Shu ( is a Syllabary Writing system that was used exclusively among women in Jiangyong County in Hunan province of southern John DeFrancis (born 1911 is a Chinese language professor emeritus and researcher at the University of Hawaii who wrote a number of Chinese instructional texts (his The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0-8248-1068-6.  
• Hannas, William C. (1997). Asia's Orthographic Dilemma. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0-8248-1892-X.  
• Norman, Jerry (1988). Chinese. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-29653-6.  
• Qiu, Xigui (2000). Chinese Writing. Society for the Study of Early China and Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. ISBN 1-55729-071-7.  
• Ramsey, S. Robert (1987). The Languages of China. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01468-X.  

Footnotes

External links

Dictionaries

• Grand dictionnaire Ricci de la langue chinoise. 7 volumes. Instituts Ricci (Paris – Taipei). Desclée de Brouwer. 2001. ISBN 2-220-04667-2. Chinese to French (by far the largest dictionary of Chinese in a European language).
• ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawai’i Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X. Excellent Chinese to English dictionary arranged according to pinyin romanisation.
• ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-08248-2975-9.

• CHINGLISH online Chinese <-> English Dictionary
• nciku free online Chinese dictionary with handwriting recognition, pinyin, sound clips, etc.
• MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary
• Chinese Characters Dictionary: supports Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Hakka etc.
• Chinese - English Dictionary: from Webster's Online Dictionary - the Rosetta Edition
• CEDICT Chinese-English Dictionary Project
• Stardict free (GPL) multilanguage dictionary including simplified/traditional Chinese for Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, etc. ) and win32
• English-Chinese Translation Dictionary: Chinese-English-Chinese Online Dictionary (Taiwan-based; simplified characters not recognised)
• CantoDict: Cantonese-English Dictionary Project
• Chinese Pronunciation Dictionary Input Chinese words or sentences, get audio file of Mandarin pronunciation. Web-based tool.
• Pinyin Annotator Add pinyin on top of any Chinese text. Mouse over any word to see English translation. Save output to OpenOffice Writer format. Prints nicely. Also adds pinyin to any Chinese web page.
• Firefox users can install Add-ons for a pinyin annotator
• Multimedia Dictionary of Chinese Characters Language Tool, Offline Chinese Dictionary.

Learning

• Chinese Language Information Page A collection of Chinese language learning resources.
• Learn Chinese - One At A Time
• Oneaday.org One Chinese idiom a day (simplified and traditional characters) with pinyin transliteration and English translation.
• Mandarin Tone Drill Testing your knowledge of Mandarin tones.
• Pinyin Practice Pinyin practice for Mandarin learners in all levels
• Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks: A large collection of Web resources by a professor of linguistics at Ohio State University
• Learning Chinese One Idiom at a Time: Chinese idioms in Simplified Chinese and Hanyu Pinyin
• Sinoling.com: Chinese language resources
• 4 words of Chinese every day
• Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard
• Chinese Character of the Day Learn to Read Chinese one word at a time.
• Audio files with basic Chinese words
• General Introduction of Chinese Language
• Free Chinese Character Input Software Google Pinyin Input Software
• Chinese Level Chinese Language Level System & Assessment
• Chinese tutorials and literature Chinese Scholar- The Free Chinese Class

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