View source for Social:Chinese language

{{Short description|National language of China}}
<!-- Please use capitalized letters for Standard Chinese, used as a proper noun here. -->
{{Infobox language
| name             = Chinese
| nativename       = {{zhi|s=汉语|t=漢語|p=Hànyǔ}} or {{zhi|c=中文|p=Zhōngwén}}
| states           = {{cslist|Mainland China|Taiwan|[[Place:Singapore|Singapore]]|throughout the Sinophone world}}
| speakers         = {{sigfig|1.350323050|3}} billion
| date             = 2017–2022
| ref              = e26
| familycolor      = Sino-Tibetan
| fam2             = Sinitic
| ancestor         = [[Social:Proto-Sino-Tibetan language|Proto-Sino-Tibetan]]
| ancestor2        = [[Social:Old Chinese|Old Chinese]]
| ancestor3        = Eastern Han Chinese
| ancestor4        = Middle Chinese{{efn|The colloquial layers of many varieties, particularly Min varieties, reflect features that predate Middle Chinese.{{sfnp|Norman|1988|pp=211–214}}{{sfnp|Pulleyblank|1984|p=3}}}}
| dia1             = [[Social:Mandarin Chinese|Mandarin]]
| dia2             = [[Social:Jin Chinese|Jin]]
| dia3             = [[Social:Wu Chinese|Wu]]
| dia4             = Gan
| dia5             = [[Social:Xiang Chinese|Xiang]]
| dia6             = [[Social:Min Chinese|Min]]
| dia7             = [[Social:Hakka Chinese|Hakka]]
| dia8             = [[Social:Yue Chinese|Yue]]
| dia9             = [[Social:Pinghua|Ping]]
| dia10            = [[Social:Huizhou Chinese|Huizhou]]
| stand1           = [[Social:Standard Chinese|Standard Mandarin]]
| stand2           = Standard [[Social:Cantonese|Cantonese]]
| script           = {{hlist|[[Social:Chinese characters|Chinese characters]]|[[Social:Bopomofo|Zhuyin]]|[[Pinyin]]|Xiao'erjing|[[Social:Dungan language#Writing system|Dungan]]|Chinese Braille|[[Social:ʼPhags-pa script|ʼPhags-pa script]]}}
| nation           = {{ubl|'''Mandarin'''{{Indented plainlist|
*{{flag|Mainland China}}
*{{flag|Taiwan}}
*{{flag|Singapore}}}}|'''Cantonese'''{{efn|De facto—while no specific variety of Chinese is official in Hong Kong and Macau, Cantonese is the predominant spoken form and the de facto regional standard, written in Traditional characters. [[Social:Standard Chinese|Standard Chinese]] and Simplified characters are only occasionally used in some official and educational settings. The Hong Kong government promotes biliteracy in Chinese and English, and trilingualism between Cantonese, Mandarin, and English; while the Macau government promotes triliteracy between Chinese, Portuguese, and English, and quadrilingualism between Cantonese, Mandarin, Portuguese, and English, especially in public education.}}{{Indented plainlist|* {{flag|Hong Kong}}
* {{flag|Macau}}}}
}}
| minority         = 
| agency           = {{ubl|Ministry of Education{{efn|{{ill|National Commission on Language and Script Work|zh|国家语言文字工作委员会}}}} (mainland China)|[[Organization:National Languages Committee|National Languages Committee]] (Taiwan)|Civil Service Bureau (Hong Kong)|Education and Youth Affairs Bureau (Macau)|[[Organization:Chinese Language Standardisation Council of Malaysia|Chinese Language Standardisation Council]] (Malaysia)|Promote Mandarin Council (Singapore)}}
| iso1             = zh
| iso2b            = chi
| iso2t            = zho
| iso3             = zho
| lc1              = cdo
| ld1              = [[Social:Eastern Min|Eastern Min]]
| lc2              = cjy
| ld2              = [[Social:Jin Chinese|Jinyu]]
| lc3              = cmn
| ld3              = [[Social:Mandarin Chinese|Mandarin]]
| lc4              = cpx
| ld4              = [[Social:Pu-Xian Min|Pu-Xian Min]]
| lc5              = czh
| ld5              = [[Social:Huizhou Chinese|Huizhou]]
| lc6              = czo
| ld6              = [[Social:Central Min|Central Min]]
| lc7              = gan
| ld7              = Gan
| lc8              = hak
| ld8              = [[Social:Hakka Chinese|Hakka]]
| lc9              = hsn
| ld9              = [[Social:Xiang Chinese|Xiang]]
| lc10             = mnp
| ld10             = Northern Min
| lc11             = nan
| ld11             = [[Social:Southern Min|Southern Min]]
| lc12             = wuu
| ld12             = [[Social:Wu Chinese|Wu]]
| lc13             = yue
| ld13             = [[Social:Yue Chinese|Yue]]
| lc14             = csp
| ld14             = Southern [[Social:Pinghua|Pinghua]]
| lc15             = cnp
| ld15             = Northern Pinghua
| lc16             = och
| ld16             = [[Social:Old Chinese|Old Chinese]]<!-- This and the following codes aren't part of the macrolanguage per SIL. -->
| lc17             = ltc
| ld17             = Late Middle Chinese
| lc18             = lzh
| ld18             = Classical Chinese
| lingua           = 79-AAA
| image            = Chineselanguage.svg
| imagescale       = 0.6
| imagecaption     = {{transliteration|zh|Hànyǔ}} written in [[Social:Traditional Chinese characters|traditional]] (top) and simplified (middle) forms, {{transliteration|zh|Zhōngwén}} (bottom)
| notice           = IPA
| listclass        = hlist
| glotto           = sini1245
| glottorefname    = Sinitic
| glottofoot       = no
| map              = Map-Sinophone World.png
| mapscale         = 1.2
| mapcaption       = Map of the Chinese-speaking world
{{legend|#00A800|Regions with a native Chinese-speaking majority.}}
{{legend|#80C534|Regions where Chinese is not native but an official or educational language.}}
{{legend|#b1ff72|Regions with significant Chinese-speaking minorities.}}
}}
{{Infobox Chinese
| order = st
| title = Han language
| l = Han language
| p = Hànyǔ
| w = Han4-yu3
| mi = {{IPAc-cmn|h|an|4|.|yu|3}}
| myr = Hàn-yǔ
| tp = Hàn-yǔ
| h = Hon Ngi
| j = Hon<sup>3</sup> jyu<sup>5</sup>
| y = hon yúh
| gd = hon<sup>3</sup> yü<sup>5</sup>
| ci = {{IPA-yue|hɔ̄ːn.jy̬ː}}
| buc = Háng-ngṳ̄
| poj = Hàn-gí, Hàn-gú
| wuu = hoe3 nyiu2
| altname = Chinese writing
| l2 = Chinese writing
| p2 = Zhōngwén
| h2 = Chung-Vun
| w2 = Chung1-wên2
| mi2 = {{IPAc-cmn|zh|ong|1|.|wen|2}}
| myr2 = jūng-wén
| tp2 = jhong-wún
| buc2 = Dṳng-ùng
| poj2 = Tiong-bûn
| wuu2 = tson1 ven1
| j2 = Zung<sup>1</sup> man<sup>4</sup>*<sup>2</sup>
| y2 = Jūng mán
| gd2 = Zung<sup>1</sup> men<sup>4</sup>*<sup>2</sup>
| altname3 = Han writing (esp. when distinguished from other [[Social:Languages of China|languages of China]])
| l3 = Han writing
| p3 = Hànwén
}}

'''Chinese''' ({{zh|s=汉语|t= 漢語|p=Hànyǔ|l=Han language}} or {{zhi|c=中文|p=Zhōngwén|l=Chinese writing}}) is a group of [[Social:Language|language]]s{{efn|name="dialect-perspective"|"Chinese" refers collectively to the various language varieties that have descended from Old Chinese: native speakers often consider these to be "dialects" of a single language—though the Chinese term {{zhi|c=方言|p=fāngyán|l=dialect}} does not carry the precise connotations of "dialect" in English—while linguists typically analyze them as separate languages. See Dialect continuum and Varieties of Chinese for details.}} spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in {{wipe|China}}. Approximately 1.3 billion people, or around 16% of the global population, speak a variety of Chinese as their [[Social:First language|first language]].<ref>{{cite web |url = https://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size |title = Summary by language size |website = Ethnologue |date = 3 October 2018 |language = en |access-date = 2021-03-07 }}</ref>

[[File:WIKITONGUES- Ying speaking Henan Chinese.webm|thumb|Ying, a speaker of Henan Chinese]]

Chinese languages form the Sinitic branch of the [[Social:Sino-Tibetan languages|Sino-Tibetan language]] family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be [[Social:Dialect|dialect]]s of a single language. However, their lack of [[Social:Mutual intelligibility|mutual intelligibility]] means they are sometimes considered to be separate languages in a [[Social:Language family|family]].{{efn|Various examples include:{{blist|David Crystal, ''The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 312. "The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages."
|Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. ''Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar'' (1989), p.&nbsp;2. "The Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family."
|{{harvp|Norman|1988|p=1}}. "[...] the modern Chinese dialects are really more like a family of languages [...]"
|{{harvp|DeFrancis|1984|p=56}}. "To call Chinese a single language composed of dialects with varying degrees of difference is to mislead by minimizing disparities that according to Chao are as great as those between English and Dutch. To call Chinese a family of languages is to suggest extralinguistic differences that in fact do not exist and to overlook the unique linguistic situation that exists in China."}}
Linguists in China often use a formulation introduced by Fu Maoji in the ''Encyclopedia of China'': {{zhi|c=《汉语在语言系属分类中相当于一个语族的地位。》|tr=In language classification, Chinese has a status equivalent to a language family.}}{{sfnp|Mair|1991|pp=10, 21}}
}} 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 [[Social:Mandarin Chinese|Mandarin]] with 66%, or around 800 million speakers, followed by [[Social:Min Chinese|Min]] (75 million, e.g. [[Social:Southern Min|Southern Min]]), [[Social:Wu Chinese|Wu]] (74 million, e.g. [[Social:Shanghainese|Shanghainese]]), and [[Social:Yue Chinese|Yue]] (68 million, e.g. [[Social:Cantonese|Cantonese]]).{{sfnp|Chinese Academy of Social Sciences|2012|pp=3, 125}} These branches are unintelligible to each other, and many of their subgroups are unintelligible with the other varieties within the same branch (e.g. Southern Min). There are, however, transitional areas where varieties from different branches share enough features for some limited intelligibility, including New Xiang with Southwestern Mandarin, Xuanzhou Wu Chinese with Lower Yangtze Mandarin, [[Social:Jin Chinese|Jin]] with Central Plains Mandarin and certain divergent dialects of [[Social:Hakka Chinese|Hakka]] with Gan (though these are unintelligible with mainstream Hakka). All varieties of Chinese are [[Social:Tone (linguistics)|tonal]] to at least some degree, and are largely [[Social:Analytic language|analytic]].

The earliest Chinese written records are [[Social:Oracle bone script|oracle bone inscriptions]] dating from the Shang dynasty {{circa|1250 BCE}}. The phonetic categories of [[Social:Old Chinese|Old Chinese]] can be reconstructed from the rhymes of ancient poetry. During the Northern and Southern period, Middle Chinese went through several sound changes and split into several varieties following prolonged geographic and political separation. The ''Qieyun'', a rime dictionary, recorded a compromise between the pronunciations of different regions. The royal courts of the Ming and early Qing dynasties operated using a [[Social:Koiné language|koiné language]] known as ''Guanhua'', based on the Nanjing dialect of Mandarin.

[[Social:Standard Chinese|Standard Chinese]] is an official language of both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan), one of the four official languages of Singapore, and one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin, and was first officially adopted in the 1930s. The language is written primarily using a logography of [[Social:Chinese characters|Chinese characters]], largely shared by readers who may otherwise speak mutually unintelligible varieties. Since the 1950s, the use of Simplified characters has been promoted by the government of the People's Republic of China, with Singapore officially adopting them in 1976. [[Social:Traditional Chinese characters|Traditional characters]] are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and among Chinese-speaking communities overseas. Traditional characters are also in use in mainland China, despite them not being the first choice in daily use. For example, practising [[Social:Chinese calligraphy|Chinese calligraphy]] requires the knowledge of traditional Chinese characters.

==Classification==
Linguists classify all varieties of Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family, together with [[Social:Burmese language|Burmese]], [[Social:Tibetic languages|Tibetan]] and many other languages spoken in the Himalayas and the Southeast Asian Massif.{{sfnp|Norman|1988|pp=12–13}} Although the relationship was first proposed in the early 19th century and is now broadly accepted, reconstruction of Sino-Tibetan is much less developed than that of families such as [[Social:Indo-European languages|Indo-European]] or [[Social:Austroasiatic languages|Austroasiatic]]. Difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of [[Social:Inflection|inflection]] in many of them, and the effects of language contact. In addition, many of the smaller languages are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to reach and are often also sensitive border zones.{{sfnp|Handel|2008|pp=422, 434–436}} Without a secure reconstruction of proto-Sino-Tibetan, the higher-level structure of the family remains unclear.{{sfnp|Handel|2008|p=426}} A top-level branching into Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages is often assumed, but has not been convincingly demonstrated.{{sfnp|Handel|2008|p=431}}

==History==
The first written records appeared over 3,000 years ago during the Shang dynasty. As the language evolved over this period, the various local varieties became mutually unintelligible. In reaction, central governments have repeatedly sought to promulgate a unified standard.{{sfnp|Norman|1988|pp=183–185}}

===Old and Middle Chinese===

The earliest examples of Old Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones dated to {{circa|1250 BCE}}, during the late Shang.{{sfnp|Schüssler|2007|p=1}} The next attested stage came from [[Social:Chinese bronze inscriptions|inscriptions on bronze artifacts]] of the Western Zhou period (1046–771 BCE), the ''Classic of Poetry'' and portions of the ''Book of Documents'' and ''[[Philosophy:I Ching|I Ching]]''.{{sfnp|Baxter|1992|pp=2–3}} Scholars have attempted to reconstruct the phonology of Old Chinese by comparing later varieties of Chinese with the rhyming practice of the ''Classic of Poetry'' and the phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters.{{sfnp|Norman|1988|pp=42–45}} Although many of the finer details remain unclear, most scholars agree that Old Chinese differs from Middle Chinese in lacking retroflex and palatal obstruents but having initial consonant clusters of some sort, and in having voiceless nasals and liquids.{{sfnp|Baxter|1992|p=177}} Most recent reconstructions also describe an atonal language with consonant clusters at the end of the syllable, developing into [[Social:Tone (linguistics)|tone]] distinctions in Middle Chinese.{{sfnp|Baxter|1992|pp=181–183}} Several derivational affixes have also been identified, but the language lacks [[Social:Inflection|inflection]], and indicated grammatical relationships using word order and grammatical particles.{{sfnp|Schüssler|2007|p=12}}

Middle Chinese was the language used during Northern and Southern dynasties and the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties (6th–10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the ''Qieyun'' rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by rhyme tables such as the {{Lang|zh-latn|Yunjing}} constructed by ancient Chinese philologists as a guide to the ''Qieyun'' system.{{sfnp|Baxter|1992|pp=14–15}} These works define phonological categories, but with little hint of what sounds they represent.{{sfnp|Ramsey|1987|p=125}} Linguists have identified these sounds by comparing the categories with pronunciations in modern varieties of Chinese, borrowed Chinese words in Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean, and transcription evidence.{{sfnp|Norman|1988|pp=34–42}} The resulting system is very complex, with a large number of consonants and vowels, but they are probably not all distinguished in any single dialect. Most linguists now believe it represents a [[Social:Diasystem|diasystem]] encompassing 6th-century northern and southern standards for reading the classics.{{sfnp|Norman|1988|p=24}}

===Classical and vernacular written forms===
The complex relationship between spoken and written Chinese is an example of [[Social:Diglossia|diglossia]]: as spoken, Chinese varieties have evolved at different rates, while the written language used throughout China changed comparatively little, crystallizing into a prestige form known as Classical or Literary Chinese. Literature written distinctly in the Classical form began to emerge during the Spring and Autumn period. Its use in writing remained nearly universal until the late 19th century, culminating with the widespread adoption of written vernacular Chinese with the May Fourth Movement beginning in 1919.

===Rise of northern dialects===
After the fall of the Northern Song dynasty and subsequent reign of the Jurchen Jin and Mongol Yuan dynasties in northern China, a common speech (now called Old Mandarin) developed based on the dialects of the North China Plain around the capital.{{sfnp|Norman|1988|p=48}}
The 1324 ''Zhongyuan Yinyun'' was a dictionary that codified the rhyming conventions of new ''sanqu'' verse form in this language.{{sfnp|Norman|1988|pp=48–49}}
Together with the slightly later ''Menggu Ziyun'', this dictionary describes a language with many of the features characteristic of modern Mandarin dialects.{{sfnp|Norman|1988|pp=49–51}}

Up to the early 20th century, most Chinese people only spoke their local variety.{{sfnp|Norman|1988|pp=133, 247}}
Thus, as a practical measure, officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using a common language based on Mandarin varieties, known as {{zhi|s=官话|t=官話|p=Guānhuà|l=language of officials}}.{{sfnp|Norman|1988|p=136}}
For most of this period, this language was a koiné based on dialects spoken in the Nanjing area, though not identical to any single dialect.{{sfnp|Coblin|2000|pp=549–550}}
By the middle of the 19th century, the Beijing dialect had become dominant and was essential for any business with the imperial court.{{sfnp|Coblin|2000|pp=540–541}}

In the 1930s, a [[Social:Standard Chinese|standard national language]], {{zhi|s=国语|t=國語|p=Guóyǔ|l=national language}}, was adopted. After much dispute between proponents of northern and southern dialects and an abortive attempt at an artificial pronunciation, the [[Organization:National Languages Committee|National Language Unification Commission]] finally settled on the Beijing dialect in 1932. The People's Republic founded in 1949 retained this standard but renamed it {{zhi|s=普通话|t=普通話|p=pǔtōnghuà|l=common speech}}.{{sfnp|Ramsey|1987|pp=3–15}} The national language is now used in education, the media, and formal situations in both mainland China and Taiwan.{{sfnp|Norman|1988|p=133}} Because of their colonial and linguistic history, the language used in education, the media, formal speech, and everyday life in [[Place:Hong Kong|Hong Kong]] and [[Place:Macau|Macau]] is the local Cantonese, although the standard language, Mandarin, has become very influential and is being taught in schools.{{sfnp|Zhang|Yang|2004}}

===Influence===
[[File:Tripitaka Koreana.jpg|thumb|right|The ''Tripitaka Koreana'', a Korean collection of the Chinese Buddhist canon]]

Historically, the Chinese language has spread to its neighbors through a variety of means. Northern Vietnam was incorporated into the Han empire in 111 BCE, marking the beginning of a period of Chinese control that ran almost continuously for a millennium. The Four Commanderies were established in northern Korea in the first century BCE, but disintegrated in the following centuries.{{sfnp|Sohn|Lee|2003|p=23}} Chinese Buddhism spread over East Asia between the 2nd and 5th centuries CE, and with it the study of scriptures and literature in Literary Chinese.{{sfnp|Miller|1967|pp=29–30}} Later, strong central governments modeled on Chinese institutions were established in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, with Literary Chinese serving as the language of administration and scholarship, a position it would retain until the late 19th century in Korea and (to a lesser extent) Japan, and the early 20th century in Vietnam.{{sfnp|Kornicki|2011|pp=75–77}} Scholars from different lands could communicate, albeit only in writing, using Literary Chinese.{{sfnp|Kornicki|2011|p=67}}

Although they used Chinese solely for written communication, each country had its own tradition of reading texts aloud, the so-called [[Social:Sino-Xenic pronunciations|Sino-Xenic pronunciations]]. Chinese words with these pronunciations were also extensively imported into the [[Social:Korean language|Korean]], [[Social:Japanese language|Japanese]] and [[Social:Vietnamese language|Vietnamese]] languages, and today comprise over half of their vocabularies.{{sfnp|Miyake|2004|pp=98–99}} This massive influx led to changes in the phonological structure of the languages, contributing to the development of moraic structure in Japanese{{sfnp|Shibatani|1990|pp=120–121}} and the disruption of [[Social:Vowel harmony|vowel harmony]] in Korean.{{sfnp|Sohn|2001|p=89}}

Borrowed Chinese morphemes have been used extensively in all these languages to coin compound words for new concepts, in a similar way to the use of [[Social:Latin|Latin]] and [[Social:Ancient Greek|Ancient Greek]] roots in European languages.{{sfnp|Shibatani|1990|p=146}} Many new compounds, or new meanings for old phrases, were created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to name Western concepts and artifacts. These coinages, written in shared Chinese characters, have then been borrowed freely between languages. They have even been accepted into Chinese, a language usually resistant to loanwords, because their foreign origin was hidden by their written form. Often different compounds for the same concept were in circulation for some time before a winner emerged, and sometimes the final choice differed between countries.{{sfnp|Wilkinson|2000|p=43}} The proportion of vocabulary of Chinese origin thus tends to be greater in technical, abstract, or formal language. For example, in Japan, Sino-Japanese words account for about 35% of the words in entertainment magazines, over half the words in newspapers, and 60% of the words in science magazines.{{sfnp|Shibatani|1990|p=143}}

Vietnam, Korea, and Japan each developed writing systems for their own languages, initially based on [[Social:Chinese characters|Chinese characters]], but later replaced with the ''hangul'' alphabet for Korean and supplemented with ''kana'' syllabaries for Japanese, while Vietnamese continued to be written with the complex ''[[Social:Chữ Nôm|chữ Nôm]]'' script. However, these were limited to popular literature until the late 19th century. Today Japanese is written with a composite script using both Chinese characters called [[Social:Kanji|kanji]], and kana. Korean is written exclusively with hangul in North Korea (although knowledge of the supplementary Chinese characters (called [[Social:Hanja|hanja]]) is still required), and hanja are increasingly rarely used in South Korea. As a result of former French colonization, Vietnamese switched to a Latin-based alphabet.

Examples of loan words in English include 'tea' from [[Social:Hokkien|Hokkien]] {{zhi|c=茶|poj=tê}}, 'dim sum' from Cantonese {{zhi|c=點心|j=dim<sup>2</sup> sam<sup>1</sup>}}, and '[[Biology:Kumquat|kumquat]]' from Cantonese {{zhi|c=金橘|j=gam<sup>1</sup>gwat<sup>1</sup>}}.

==Varieties==
[[File:Map_of_sinitic_languages_cropped-en.svg|upright=1.15|thumb|right|Range of dialect groups in [[Place:China proper|China proper]] and Taiwan according to the ''Language Atlas of China''{{sfnp|Wurm|Li|Baumann|Lee|1987}}]]
<!--This is a summary. Please add new information to Varieties of Chinese.-->
Jerry Norman estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese.{{sfnp|Norman|2003|p=72}} These varieties form a dialect continuum, in which differences in speech generally become more pronounced as distances increase, though the rate of change varies immensely.{{sfnp|Norman|1988|pp=189–190}} Generally, mountainous South China exhibits more linguistic diversity than the North China Plain. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may only be marginally intelligible to close neighbours. For instance, Wuzhou is about {{convert|120|mi|km|order=flip}} upstream from Guangzhou, but the Yue variety spoken there is more like that of Guangzhou than is that of Taishan, {{convert|60|mi|km|round=5|order=flip}} southwest of Guangzhou and separated from it by several rivers.{{sfnp|Ramsey|1987|p=23}} In parts of Fujian the speech of neighbouring counties or even villages may be mutually unintelligible.{{sfnp|Norman|1988|p=188}}

Until the late 20th century, Chinese emigrants to Southeast Asia and North America came from southeast coastal areas, where Min, Hakka, and Yue dialects are spoken.{{sfnp|Norman|1988|p=191}}
The vast majority of Chinese immigrants to North America up to the mid-20th century spoke the [[Social:Taishanese|Taishan dialect]], from a small coastal area southwest of Guangzhou.{{sfnp|Ramsey|1987|p=98}}

===Grouping===
{{pie chart
| caption = Proportions of first-language speakers{{sfnp|Chinese Academy of Social Sciences|2012|pp=3, 125}}
| label1 = [[Social:Mandarin Chinese|Mandarin]] | color1 = #ac8761 | value1 = 65.7 <!-- 798.585 million -->
| label2 = [[Social:Min Chinese|Min]] | color2 = #b1bab6 | value2 = 6.2 <!-- 75 million -->
| label3 = [[Social:Wu Chinese|Wu]] | color3 = #c8c8a8 | value3 = 6.1 <!-- 73.79 million -->
| label4 = [[Social:Yue Chinese|Yue]] | color4 = #bf6e7b | value4 = 5.6 <!-- 68 million -->
| label5 = [[Social:Jin Chinese|Jin]] | color5 = #96642c | value5 = 5.2 <!-- 63.05 million -->
| label6 = Gan | color6 = #fbd98d | value6 = 3.9 <!-- 48 million -->
| label7 = [[Social:Hakka Chinese|Hakka]] | color7 = #eeb36a | value7 = 3.5 <!-- 42.2 million -->
| label8 = [[Social:Xiang Chinese|Xiang]] | color8 = #a5ae87 | value8 = 3.0 <!-- 36.37 million -->
| label9 = [[Social:Huizhou Chinese|Huizhou]] | color9 = #9b987f | value9 = 0.3 <!-- 3.3 million -->
| label10 = [[Social:Pinghua|Pinghua]], others | color10 = #946565 | value10 = 0.6 <!-- 7.78 million -->
| others = yes
}}
Local varieties of Chinese are conventionally classified into seven dialect groups, largely based on the different evolution of Middle Chinese voiced initials:{{sfnp|Norman|1988|p=181}}{{sfnp|Kurpaska|2010|pp=53–55}}
* [[Social:Mandarin Chinese|Mandarin]], including [[Social:Standard Chinese|Standard Chinese]], the Beijing dialect, Sichuanese, and also the [[Social:Dungan language|Dungan language]] spoken in [[Place:Central Asia|Central Asia]]
* [[Social:Wu Chinese|Wu]], including [[Social:Shanghainese|Shanghainese]], [[Social:Suzhou dialect|Suzhounese]], and [[Social:Wenzhounese|Wenzhounese]]
* Gan
* [[Social:Xiang Chinese|Xiang]]
* [[Social:Min Chinese|Min]], including [[Social:Fuzhou dialect|Fuzhounese]], Hainanese, [[Social:Hokkien|Hokkien]] and [[Social:Teochew dialect|Teochew]]
* [[Social:Hakka Chinese|Hakka]]
* [[Social:Yue Chinese|Yue]], including Cantonese and [[Social:Taishanese|Taishanese]]

The classification of Li Rong, which is used in the ''[[Social:Language Atlas of China|Language Atlas of China]]'' (1987), distinguishes three further groups:{{sfnp|Wurm|Li|Baumann|Lee|1987}}{{sfnp|Kurpaska|2010|pp=55–56}}
* [[Social:Jin Chinese|Jin]], previously included in Mandarin.
* [[Social:Huizhou Chinese|Huizhou]], previously included in Wu.
* Pinghua, previously included in Yue.

Some varieties remain unclassified, including the Danzhou dialect on Hainan, Waxianghua spoken in western Hunan, and Shaozhou Tuhua spoken in northern Guangdong.{{sfnp|Kurpaska|2010|pp=72–73}}

===Standard Chinese===
{{Main|Social:Standard Chinese}}
<!-- This is a SUMMARY. Please add new information to [[Social:Standard Chinese|Standard Chinese]]. -->
Standard Chinese is the official [[Social:Standard language|standard language]] of China (where it is called {{zhi|s=普通话|p=pǔtōnghuà}}) and Taiwan, and one of the four official languages of Singapore (where it is called either {{zhi|s=华语|t=華語|p=Huáyŭ}} or {{zhi|s=汉语|t=漢語|p=Hànyǔ}}). Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. The governments of both China and Taiwan 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 China, [[Social:Diglossia|diglossia]] has been a common feature. For example, in addition to Standard Chinese, a resident of Shanghai may speak Shanghainese; if they grew up elsewhere, then they are also likely to be fluent in the particular dialect of that local area. A native of Guangzhou may speak both Cantonese and Standard Chinese. In addition to Mandarin, most Taiwanese people also speak Taiwanese Hokkien (commonly {{zhi|t=台語|l=Taiwanese}}<ref>{{cite news |last1=何 |first1=信翰 |title=自由廣場》Taigi與台語 |url=https://talk.ltn.com.tw/amp/article/paper/1309601 |access-date=11 July 2021 |agency=自由時報 |date=2019-08-10}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=李 |first1=淑鳳 |title=台、華語接觸所引起的台語語音的變化趨勢 |journal=台語研究 |date=2010-03-01 |volume=2 |issue=1 |pages=56–71 |url=https://www.airitilibrary.com/Publication/alDetailedMesh?docid=20763611-201003-201004230089-201004230089-56-71 |access-date=11 July 2021}}</ref>), Hakka, or an [[Social:Austronesian languages|Austronesian language]].<ref>{{cite journal |last=Klöter |first=Henning |date=2004 |journal=China Perspectives |volume=56 |issn=1996-4617 |url=http://chinaperspectives.revues.org/442 |title=Language Policy in the KMT and DPP eras |access-date=30 May 2015}}</ref> A Taiwanese may commonly mix pronunciations, phrases, and words from Mandarin and other languages of Taiwan, and this mixture is considered normal in daily or informal speech.<ref>{{cite thesis |last=Kuo |first=Yun-Hsuan |date=2005 |title=New dialect formation: the case of Taiwanese Mandarin |type=PhD |publisher=University of Essex |url=https://www.researchgate.net/profile/YUN-HSUAN_KUO |access-date=26 June 2015}}</ref>

Due to their traditional cultural ties to Guangdong amid a history of outside colonization, Cantonese is used as a standard language in Hong Kong and Macau.

===Nomenclature===
The designation of various Chinese branches remains controversial. Some linguists and most ordinary Chinese people consider all the spoken varieties as one single language, as speakers share a common national identity and a common written form.{{sfnp|Baxter|1992|pp=7–8}} Others instead argue that it is inappropriate to refer to major branches of Chinese such as Mandarin, Wu and so on as "dialects" because the mutual unintelligibility between them is too great.{{sfnp|DeFrancis|1984|pp=55–57}}{{sfnp|Thomason|1988|pp=27–28}} However, calling major Chinese branches "languages" would also be wrong under the same criterion, since a branch such as Wu, itself contains many mutually unintelligible varieties, and could not be properly called a single language.{{sfnp|Norman|2003|p=72}}

There are also viewpoints pointing out that linguists often ignore mutual intelligibility when varieties share intelligibility with a central variety (i.e. prestige variety, such as Standard Mandarin), as the issue requires some careful handling when mutual intelligibility is inconsistent with language identity.{{sfnp|Campbell|2008}}

The Chinese government's official Chinese designation for the major branches of Chinese is {{zhi|c=方言|p=fāngyán|l=regional speech}}, whereas the more closely related varieties within these are called {{zhi|s=地点方言|t=地點方言|p=dìdiǎn fāngyán|l=local speech}}.{{sfnp|DeFrancis|1984|p=57}}

Because of the difficulties involved in determining the difference between language and dialect, other terms have been proposed. These include ''topolect'',{{sfnp|Mair|1991|p=7}} ''lect'',<ref>{{Harvcoltxt|Bailey|1973|p=11}}, cited in {{Harvcoltxt|Groves|2010|p=531}}</ref> ''vernacular'',{{sfnp|Haugen|1966|p=927}} ''regional'',{{sfnp|DeFrancis|1984|p=57}} and ''variety''.{{sfnp|Hudson|1996|p=22}}{{sfnp|Mair|1991|p=17}}

==Phonology==

[[File:Edmund Yeo - voice - ch 150127 1828.wav|thumb|A man speaking Mandarin with a Malaysian accent]]

Syllables in the Chinese languages have some unique characteristics. They are tightly related to the [[Social:Morphology (linguistics)|morphology]] and also to the characters of the writing system; and [[Social:Phonology|phonologically]] they are structured according to fixed rules.

The structure of each syllable consists of a nucleus that has a vowel (which can be a monophthong, diphthong, or even a triphthong in certain varieties), preceded by an onset (a single consonant, or consonant + glide; a zero onset is also possible), and followed (optionally) by a coda consonant; a syllable also carries a [[Social:Tone (linguistics)|tone]]. 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 {{IPA|/m/}} and {{IPA|/ŋ/}} can stand alone as their own syllable.

In Mandarin much more than in other spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda (assuming that a final glide is not analyzed as a coda), but syllables that do have codas are restricted to nasals {{IPA|/m/}}, {{IPA|/n/}}, {{IPA|/ŋ/}}, the retroflex approximant {{IPA|/ɻ/}}, and voiceless stops {{IPA|/p/}}, {{IPA|/t/}}, {{IPA|/k/}}, or {{IPA|/ʔ/}}. Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Standard Chinese, are limited to only {{IPA|/n/}}, {{IPA|/ŋ/}}, and {{IPA|/ɻ/}}.

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. The Mandarin dialects in particular have experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds and so have far more polysyllabic 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.{{efn|{{harvp|DeFrancis|1984|p=42}} counts Chinese as having 1,277 tonal syllables, and about 398 to 418 if tones are disregarded; he cites Jespersen, Otto (1928) ''Monosyllabism in English''; London, p.&nbsp;15 for a count of over 8000 syllables for English.|name=DeFrancis p42}}

===Tones===
All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones to distinguish words.{{sfnp|Norman|1988|p=52}} A few dialects of north China may have as few as three tones, while some dialects in south China have up to 6 or 12 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.

A very common example used to illustrate the use of tones in Chinese is the application of the four tones of Standard Chinese, along with the neutral tone, to the syllable {{transliteration|cmn|ma}}. The tones are exemplified by the following five Chinese words:
{| class="wikitable"
|+ Examples of the Standard Mandarin tones
! scope=col | Character !! scope=col | Gloss !! scope=col | Pinyin !! scope=col | Pitch contour
|-
| 'mother' || {{transliteration|cmn|mā}} || high, level
|-
| 'hemp' || {{transliteration|cmn|má}} || high, rising
|-
| 'horse' || {{transliteration|cmn|mǎ}} || low falling, then rising
|-
| 'scold' || {{transliteration|cmn|mà}} || high falling
|-
| {{gcl|INTR|interrogative}}.{{gcl|PTC}} || {{transliteration|cmn|ma}} || {{midsize|''(varies)''{{efn|See neutral tone.}}}}
|}

In contrast, Standard Cantonese has six tones. Historically, finals that end in a stop consonant were considered to be "checked tones" and thus counted separately for a total of nine tones. However, they are considered to be duplicates in modern linguistics and are no longer counted as such:{{sfnp|Matthews|Yip|1994|pp=20–22}}
{| class="wikitable"
|+ Examples of the Standard Cantonese tones
! scope=col | Character !! scope=col | Gloss !! scope=col | [[Social:Jyutping|Jyutping]] !! scope=col | Yale !! scope=col | Pitch contour
|-
| {{zhi|s=诗|t=詩}} || 'poem' || {{transliteration|yue|si<sup>1</sup>}} || {{transliteration|yue|sī}} || high, level; high, falling
|-
| {{zhi|c=史}} || 'history' || {{transliteration|yue|si<sup>2</sup>}} || {{transliteration|yue|sí}} || high, rising
|-
| {{zhi|c=弒}} || 'assassinate' || {{transliteration|yue|si<sup>3</sup>}} || {{transliteration|yue|si}} || mid, level
|-
| {{zhi|s=时|t=時}} || 'time' || {{transliteration|yue|si<sup>4</sup>}} || {{transliteration|yue|sìh}} || low, falling
|-
| {{zhi|c=市}} || 'market' || {{transliteration|yue|si<sup>5</sup>}} || {{transliteration|yue|síh}} || low, rising
|-
| {{zhi|c=是}} || 'yes' || {{transliteration|yue|si<sup>6</sup>}} || {{transliteration|yue|sih}} || low, level
|}

==Grammar==

Chinese is often described as a 'monosyllabic' language. However, this is only partially correct. It is largely accurate when describing Old and Middle Chinese; in Classical Chinese, around 90% of words consist of a single character that corresponds one-to-one with a ''[[Social:Morpheme|morpheme]]'', the smallest unit of meaning in a language. In modern varieties, it usually remains the case that a morphemes are monosyllabic—in contrast, English has many multi-syllable morphemes, both bound and free, such as 'seven', 'elephant', 'para-' and '-able'. Some of the more conservative modern varieties, usually found in the south, have largely monosyllabic {{em|words}}, especially with basic vocabulary. However, most nouns, adjectives and verbs in modern Mandarin are disyllabic. A significant cause of this is phonological attrition: sound changes over time have steadily reduced the number of possible syllables in the language's inventory. In modern Mandarin, there are only around 1,200 possible syllables, including the tonal distinctions, compared with about 5,000 in Vietnamese (still a largely monosyllabic language), and over 8,000 in English.{{efn|name=DeFrancis p42}}

Most modern varieties have the tendency to form new words through polysyllabic compounds. In some cases, monosyllabic words have become disyllabic formed from different characters without the use of compounding, as in {{zhi|c=窟窿|p=kūlong}} from {{zhi|c=孔|p=kǒng}}; this is especially common in Jin varieties. This phonological collapse has led to a corresponding increase in the number of [[Philosophy:Homophone|homophone]]s. As an example, the small ''Langenscheidt Pocket Chinese Dictionary''<ref>{{cite book |title= Langenscheidt Pocket Chinese Dictionary |editor-first= Peter |editor-last= Terrell |publisher= Langenscheidt KG |location= Berlin and Munich |year= 2005 |isbn= 978-1-58573-057-5 |url-access= registration |url= https://archive.org/details/langenscheidtpoc00lang }}</ref> lists six words that are commonly pronounced as {{transliteration|zh|shí}} in Standard Chinese:
{| cellpadding=5
! Character !! Gloss !! {{abbr|MC|Middle Chinese}}{{efn|Using Baxter's transcription for Middle Chinese}} !! Cantonese
|-
| 'ten' || {{transliteration|ltc|dzyip}} || {{transliteration|yue|sap<sup>6</sup>}}
|-
| 'actual' || {{transliteration|ltc|zyit}} || {{transliteration|yue|sat<sup>6</sup>}}
|- 
| 'recognize' || {{transliteration|ltc|syik}} | {{transliteration|lmc|dzyek}} || {{transliteration|yue|sik<sup>1</sup>}}
|-
| 'stone' || {{transliteration|ltc|dzyi}} || {{transliteration|yue|sek<sup>6</sup>}}
|-
| 'time' || {{transliteration|ltc|dzyi}} || {{transliteration|yue|si<sup>4</sup>}}
|- 
| 'food' || {{transliteration|ltc|zyik}} || {{transliteration|yue|sik<sup>6</sup>}}
|}

In modern spoken Mandarin, however, tremendous ambiguity would result if all of these words could be used as-is. The 20th century Yuen Ren Chao poem ''[[Social:Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den|Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den]]'' exploits this, consisting of 92 characters all pronounced {{transliteration|cmn|shi}}. As such, most of these words have been replaced in speech, if not in writing, with less ambiguous disyllabic compounds. Only the first one, {{zhi|c=十}}, normally appears in monosyllabic form in spoken Mandarin; the rest are normally used in the polysyllabic forms of
{| cellpadding=5
! Word !! Pinyin !! Gloss
|-
| {{transliteration|cmn|shíjì}} || 'actual-connection'
|-
| {{transliteration|cmn|rènshi}} || 'recognize-know'
|-
| {{transliteration|cmn|shítou}} || 'stone-head'
|-
| {{transliteration|cmn|shíjiān}} || 'time-interval'
|-
| {{transliteration|cmn|shíwù}} || 'foodstuff'
|}
respectively. In each, the homophone was disambiguated by addition of another morpheme, typically either a near-synonym or some sort of generic word (e.g. 'head', 'thing'), the purpose of which is to indicate which of the possible meanings of the other, homophonic syllable is specifically meant.

However, when one of the above words forms part of a compound, the disambiguating syllable is generally dropped and the resulting word is still disyllabic. For example, {{zhi|c=石|p=shí}} alone, and not {{zhi|s=石头|t=石頭|p=shítou}}, appears in compounds as meaning 'stone' such as {{zhi|c=石膏|p=shígāo|l=plaster}}, {{zhi|c=石灰|p=shíhuī|l=lime}}, {{zhi|c=石窟|p=shíkū|l=grotto}}, {{zhi|c=石英|l=quartz}}, and {{zhi|c=石油|p=shíyóu|l=petroleum}}. Although many single-syllable morphemes ({{zhi|c=字|p=zì}}) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllable compounds known as {{zhi|s=词|t=詞|p=cí}}, which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese {{transliteration|zh|cí}} can consist of more than one character–morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.

Examples of Chinese words of more than two syllables include {{zhi|s=汉堡包|t=漢堡包|p=hànbǎobāo|l=hamburger}}, {{zhi|s=守门员|t=守門員|p=shǒuményuán|l=goalkeeper}}, and {{zhi|s=电子邮件|t=電子郵件|p=diànzǐyóujiàn|l=e-mail}}.

All varieties of modern Chinese are [[Social:Analytic language|analytic language]]s: they depend on [[Philosophy:Syntax|syntax]] (word order and sentence structure), rather than inflectional morphology (changes in the <em>form</em> of a word), to indicate a word's function within a sentence.{{sfnp|Norman|1988|p=10}} In other words, Chinese has very few grammatical inflections—it possesses no [[Social:Grammatical tense|tenses]], no voices, no grammatical number,{{efn|There are plural markers in the language, such as {{zhi|s=们|t=們|p=men}}, used with personal pronouns.}} and only a few articles.{{efn|A distinction is made between {{zhi|c=他|l=he}} and {{zhi|c=她|l=she}} in writing, but this was only introduced in the 20th century—both characters remain exactly homophonous.}} They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin, this involves the use of particles such as {{zhi|c=了|p=le|labels=no|l={{gcl|PFV}}}}, {{zhi|s=还|t=還|p=hái|l=still}}, and {{zhi|s=已经|t=已經|p=yǐjīng|l=already}}.

Chinese has a [[Social:Subject–verb–object word order|subject–verb–object word order]], and like many other languages of East Asia, makes frequent use of the topic–comment construction to form sentences. Chinese also has an extensive system of classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighboring languages such as Japanese and Korean. 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. Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess differences.

==Vocabulary==
The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 50,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are in use and only about 3,000 are frequently used in Chinese media and newspapers.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/chinese/real_chinese/mini_guides/characters/characters_howmany.shtml|title= Languages - Real Chinese - Mini-guides - Chinese characters|website=BBC }}</ref> However, Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words. Because most Chinese words are made up of two or more characters, there are many more Chinese words than characters. A more accurate equivalent for a Chinese character is the morpheme, as characters represent the smallest grammatical units with individual meanings in the Chinese language.

Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and lexicalized phrases vary greatly. The ''Hanyu Da Zidian'', a compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including oracle bone versions. The ''Zhonghua Zihai'' (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The CC-CEDICT project (2010) contains 97,404 contemporary entries including idioms, technology terms and names of political figures, businesses and products. The 2009 version of the Webster's Digital Chinese Dictionary (WDCD),<ref>Timothy Uy and Jim Hsia, Editors, ''Webster's Digital Chinese Dictionary – Advanced Reference Edition'', July 2009</ref> based on CC-CEDICT, contains over 84,000 entries.

The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volume ''Hanyu Da Cidian'', records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters and gives over 370,000 definitions. 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 2016 edition of ''Xiandai Hanyu Cidian'', an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 13,000 head characters and defines 70,000 words.

===Loanwords===
Like many other languages, Chinese has absorbed a sizable number 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.

Some early Indo-European loanwords in Chinese have been proposed, notably {{zhi|c=蜜|p=mì|l=honey}}, {{zhi|s=狮|t=獅|p=shī|l=lion}}, and perhaps also {{zhi|s=马|t=馬|p=mǎ|l=horse}}, {{zhi|s=猪|t=豬|p=zhū|l=pig}}, {{zhi|c=犬|p=quǎn|l=dog}}, and {{zhi|s=鹅|t=鵝|p=é|l=goose}}.{{Efn|''[[Encyclopædia Britannica]]'' s.v. "[https://www.britannica.com/eb/article-75039/Chinese-languages Chinese languages]": "Old Chinese vocabulary already contained many words not generally occurring in the other Sino-Tibetan languages. The words for 'honey' and 'lion', and probably also 'horse', 'dog', and 'goose', are connected with Indo-European and were acquired through trade and early contacts. (The nearest known Indo-European languages were Tocharian and Sogdian, a middle Iranian language.) A number of words have Austroasiatic cognates and point to early contacts with the ancestral language of Muong–Vietnamese and Mon–Khmer."; Jan Ulenbrook, ''Einige Übereinstimmungen zwischen dem Chinesischen und dem Indogermanischen'' (1967) proposes 57 items; see also Tsung-tung Chang, 1988 [http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp007_old_chinese.pdf Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese].}}
Ancient words borrowed from along the Silk Road during the Old Chinese period include {{zhi|c=葡萄|p=pútáo|l=grape}}, {{zhi|c=石榴|p=shíliu, shíliú|l=pomegranate}}, and {{zhi|s=狮子|t=獅子|p=shīzi|l=lion}}. Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including {{zhi|c=佛|p=Fó|l=Buddha}} and {{zhi|s=菩萨|t=菩薩|p=Púsà|l=bodhisattva}}. Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as {{zhi|c=胡同|p=hútòng|l=hutong}}. Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as {{zhi|c=葡萄|l=grape}}, generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from [[Social:Sanskrit|Sanskrit]] or Pāli, the liturgical languages of northern India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have [[Social:Altaic languages|Altaic]] etymologies, such as {{zhi|c=琵琶|p=pípá}}, the Chinese lute, or {{zhi|c=酪|p=lào, luò|l=cheese or yogurt}}, but from exactly which source is not always clear.{{sfnp|Kane|2006|p=161}}

===Modern borrowings===
Modern neologisms are primarily translated into Chinese in one of three ways: free translation ([[Social:Calque|calque]]s), phonetic translation (by sound), or [[Social:Phono-semantic matching|a combination of the two]]. Today, it is much more common to use existing Chinese morphemes to coin new words to represent imported concepts, such as technical expressions and international scientific vocabulary, wherein the Latin and Greek components usually converted one-for-one into the corresponding Chinese characters.{{efn|For example, 'anti-' typically becomes {{zhi|c=反|l=opposite}}, arguably making them more comprehensible for Chinese speakers, at the cost of introducing more difficulties in understanding foreign texts.}} The word 'telephone' was initially loaned phonetically as {{zhi|s=德律风|t=德律風|p=délǜfēng}} (Shanghainese {{transliteration|wuu|télífon}} {{IPA|[təlɪfoŋ]}})—this word was widely used in Shanghai during the 1920s, but the later {{zhi|s=电话|t=電話|p=diànhuà|l=electric speech}}, built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent.{{efn|{{zhi|c=電話}} is in fact from the Japanese {{lang-ja|電話|denwa|label=none}}; see below for more Japanese loans.}} Other examples include
{| cellpadding=5
| {{zhi|s=电视|t=電視|p=diànshì|l=electric vision}} || 'television'
|- 
| {{zhi|s=电脑|t=電腦|p=diànnǎo|l=electric brain}} || 'computer'
|-
| {{zhi|s=手机|t=手機|p=shǒujī|l=hand machine}} || 'mobile phone'
|-
| {{zhi|s=蓝牙|t=藍牙|p=lányá|l=blue tooth}} || '[[Bluetooth]]'
|-
| {{zhi|s=网志|t=網誌|p=wǎngzhì|l=internet logbook}}{{efn|Hong Kong and Macau Cantonese.}} || 'blog'
|}

Occasionally, compromises between the transliteration and translation approaches become accepted, such as {{zhi|s=汉堡包|t=漢堡包|p=hànbǎobāo|l=hamburger}} from {{zhi|s=汉堡|l=Hamburg}} + {{zhi|c=包|l=bun}}. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes ([[Social:Phono-semantic matching|phono-semantic matching]]), such as {{zhi|s=马利奥|t=馬利奧|p=Mǎlì'ào}} for the video game character 'Mario'. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example {{zhi|s=奔腾|t=奔騰|p=bēnténg|l=dashing-leaping}} for '[[Engineering:Pentium|Pentium]]' and {{zhi|s=赛百味|t=賽百味|p=Sàibǎiwèi|l=better-than hundred tastes}} for 'Subway'.

Foreign words, mainly proper nouns, 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 {{zhi|c=以色列|p=Yǐsèliè}}, and 'Paris' becomes {{zhi|c=巴黎|p=Bālí}}. A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including {{zhi|s=沙发|t=沙發|p=shāfā|l=sofa}}, {{zhi|s=马达|t=馬達|p=mǎdá|l=motor}}, {{zhi|c=幽默|p=yōumò|l=humor}}, {{zhi|s=逻辑|t=邏輯|p=luóji, luójí|l=logic}}, {{zhi|s=时髦|t=時髦|p=shímáo|l=smart', 'fashionable}}, and {{zhi|c=歇斯底里|p=xiēsīdǐlǐ|l=hysterics}}. The bulk of these words were originally coined in Shanghai during the early 20th century, and later loaned from there into Mandarin, hence their Mandarin pronunciations occasionally being quite divergent from the English. For example, in Shanghainese {{zhi|s=沙发|t=沙發|p=sofa}} and {{zhi|s=马达|t=馬達|l=motor}} sound more like their English counterparts. Cantonese differs from Mandarin with some transliterations, such as {{zhi|c=梳化|j=so<sup>1</sup> faa<sup>3,2</sup>|l=sofa}} and {{zhi|c=摩打|j=mo<sup>1</sup> daa<sup>2</sup>|l=motor}}.

Western foreign words representing Western concepts have influenced Chinese since the 20th century through transcription. From French, {{zhi|c=芭蕾|p=bālěi}} and {{zhi|s=香槟|t=香檳|p=xiāngbīn}} were borrowed for 'ballet' and 'champagne' respectively; {{zhi|c=咖啡|p=kāfēi}} was borrowed from Italian {{lang|it|caffè}}; 'coffee'. The influence of English is particularly pronounced: from the early 20th century, many English words were borrowed into Shanghainese, such as {{zhi|s=高尔夫|t=高爾夫|p=gāo'ěrfū|l=golf}} and the aforementioned {{zhi|s=沙发|t=沙發|p=shāfā|l=sofa}}. Later, American [[Social:Soft power|soft power]] gave rise to {{zhi|c=迪斯科|p=dísīkē|l=disco}}, {{zhi|s=可乐|t=可樂|p=kělè|l=cola}}, and {{zhi|迷你|p=mínǐ|l=miniskirt}}. Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English, such as {{zhi|c=卡通|j=kaa<sup>1</sup> tung<small>1</small>|l=cartoon}}, {{zhi|c=基佬|j=gei<sup>1</sup> lou<sup>2</sup>|l=gay people}}, {{zhi|c=的士|j=dik<sup>1</sup> si<sup>6,2</sup>|l=taxi}}, and {{zhi|c=巴士|j=baa<sup>1</sup> si<sup>6,2</sup>|l=bus}}. With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, for example, {{zhi|s=粉丝|t=粉絲|p=fěnsī|l=fans}}, {{zhi|c=黑客|p=hēikè|l=hacker}}, and {{zhi|c=博客|p=bókè|l=blog}}. In Taiwan, some of these transliterations are different, such as {{zhi|c=駭客|p=hàikè|l=hacker}} and {{zhi|c=部落格|p=bùluògé|l=interconnected tribes}} for 'blog'.

Another result of English influence on Chinese is the appearance in of so-called {{zhi|s=字母词|t=字母詞|p=zìmǔcí|l=lettered words}} spelled with letters from the English alphabet. These have appeared in colloquial usage, as well as in magazines and newspapers, and on websites and television:
{| cellpadding=5
|{{zhi|s=三G手机}}<br>'third generation of cell phones' || ← || {{zhi|c=三|p=sān|l=three}} || + || ''G''; 'generation' || + || {{zhi|s=手机|p=shǒujī|l=cell phone}}
|-
|{{zhi|IT界}}<br>'IT circles' || ← || ''IT'' ||+|| {{zhi|c=界|p=jiè|l=industry}}
|-
| {{zhi|s=CIF价}}<br>'Cost, Insurance, Freight' || ← || ''CIF'' || + || {{zhi|s=价|p=jià|l=price}}
|-
| {{zhi|c=e家庭}}<br>'e-home' || ← || ''e''; 'electronic' || + || {{zhi|c=家庭|p=jiātíng|l=home}}
|-
| {{zhi|s=W时代}}<br>'wireless era' || ← || ''W''; 'wireless' || + || {{zhi|s=时代|p=shídài|l=era}}
|-
| {{zhi|c=TV族}}<br>'TV-watchers' || ← || ''TV''; 'television' || + || {{zhi|c=族|p=TV zú|l=clan}}
|}

Since the 20th century, another source of words has been kanji: Japan re-molded European concepts and inventions into {{lang-ja|和製漢語|wasei-kango|lit=Japanese-made Chinese|label=none}}, and many of these words have been re-loaned into modern Chinese. 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, {{zhi|s=经济|t=經濟|p=jīngjì}}; {{lang-ja|経済|keizai|label=none}} in Japanese, which in the original Chinese meant 'the workings of the state', 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 loaning, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese share a corpus of linguistic terms describing modern terminology, paralleling the similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin and shared among European languages.

==Writing system==
[[File:XingshuLantingxv.jpg|thumb|right|"Preface to the Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavilion" by Wang Xizhi, written in semi-cursive style]]
<!--This is a SUMMARY.-->

The Chinese [[Social:Orthography|orthography]] centers on [[Social:Chinese characters|Chinese characters]], which are written within imaginary square blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns, despite alternative arrangement with rows of characters from left to right within a row and from top to bottom across rows (like English and other Western writing systems) having become more popular since the 20th century.<ref>{{Cite web | url=https://www.w3.org/TR/clreq/ |script-title=zh:Requirements for Chinese Text Layout 中文排版需求}}</ref> Chinese characters denote [[Social:Morpheme|morpheme]]s independent of phonetic variation in different languages. Thus the character {{zhi|c=一|l=one}} is pronounced as {{transliteration|cmn|yī}} in Standard Chinese, {{transliteration|yue|yat<sup>1</sup>}} in Cantonese and {{transliteration|nan|it}} in Hokkien, a form of Min.

Most written Chinese documents in the modern time, especially the more formal ones, are created using the grammar and syntax of the Standard Chinese variants, regardless of dialectical background of the author or targeted audience. This replaced the old writing language standard of Literary Chinese before the 20th century.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/ics/21c/media/articles/c142-201309003.pdf |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20221010/http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/ics/21c/media/articles/c142-201309003.pdf |archive-date=2022-10-10 |url-status=live|website=Chinese University of Hong Kong|title=白話為何在五四時期「活」起來了？|author=黃華}}</ref> However, vocabularies from different Chinese-speaking areas have diverged, and the divergence can be observed in written Chinese.<ref>{{Cite web | url=https://stedu.stheadline.com/sec/article/628/%E7%B2%B5%E6%99%AE%E4%B9%8B%E7%88%AD-%E7%82%BA%E4%BD%A0%E4%B8%AD%E6%96%87%E8%A7%A3%E6%AF%92 |script-title=zh:粵普之爭 為你中文解毒}}</ref>

Meanwhile, colloquial forms of various Chinese language variants have also been written down by their users, especially in less formal settings. The most prominent example of this is Written Cantonese, which has become quite popular in tabloids, instant messaging applications, and on the internet amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere.<ref>{{Cite news| url=http://m.thepaper.cn/wifiKey_detail.jsp?contid=1298257&from=wifiKey |script-title=zh:粤语：中国最强方言是如何炼成的_私家历史_澎湃新闻-The Paper |work=The Paper}}</ref>

Because some Chinese variants have diverged and developed a number of unique morphemes that are not found in Standard Mandarin (despite all other common morphemes), unique characters rarely used in Standard Chinese have also been created or inherited from archaic literary standard to represent these unique morphemes. For example, characters like {{zhi|c=冇}} and {{zhi|c=係}} are actively used in Cantonese and Hakka, while being archaic or unused in standard written Chinese.

The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system for most of its speakers until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. Early Indian translators, working in [[Social:Sanskrit|Sanskrit]] and [[Social:Pali|Pali]], were the first to attempt to describe the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted in some Latin character transcription/writing systems, based on various variants of Chinese languages. Some of these Latin character based systems are still being used to write various Chinese variants in the modern era.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://newmsgr.pct.org.tw/Magazine.aspx?strTID=1&strISID=125&strMagID=M2011081602899|title=白話字滄桑 - 陳宇碩 - 新使者雜誌 The New Messenger 125期 母語的將來|website=newmsgr.pct.org.tw}}</ref>

In Hunan, women in certain areas write their local Chinese language variant in [[Social:Nüshu|Nüshu]], a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The [[Social:Dungan language|Dungan language]], considered by many a dialect of Mandarin, is nowadays written in Cyrillic, and was previously written in the Arabic script. The Dungan people are primarily Muslim and live mainly in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia; many Hui people, living mainly in China, also speak the language.

===Chinese characters===
{{Main|Social:Chinese characters|Modern Social:Chinese characters}}
[[File:8 strokes of 永-zh.svg|thumb|{{zhi|c=永}} is often used to illustrate the eight basic types of strokes of Chinese characters]]
<!--This is a SUMMARY. Please add new information to [[Social:Chinese characters|Chinese characters]].-->

Each Chinese character represents a monosyllabic Chinese word or morpheme. In 100 CE, the famed Han dynasty scholar Xu Shen classified characters into six categories: pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Only 4% were categorized as pictographs, including many of the simplest characters, such as {{zhi|c=人|p=rén|l=human}}, {{zhi|c=日|p=rì|l=the Sun}}, {{zhi|c=山|p=shān|l=mountain}}, and {{zhi|c=水|p=shuǐ|l=water}}. Between 80% and 90% were classified as phonetic compounds such as {{zhi|c=沖|p=chōng|l=pour}}, combining a phonetic component {{zhi|c=中|p=zhōng}} with a semantic component of the radical {{zhi|c=氵}}, a reduced form of {{zhi|c=水|l=water}}. Almost all characters created since have been made using this format. The 18th-century ''Kangxi Dictionary'' classified characters under a now-common set of 214 radicals.

Modern characters are styled after the regular script. Various other written styles are also used in [[Social:Chinese calligraphy|Chinese calligraphy]], including [[Social:Seal script|seal script]], [[Social:Cursive script (East Asia)|cursive script]] and [[Social:Clerical script|clerical script]]. Calligraphy artists can write in Traditional and Simplified characters, but they tend to use Traditional characters for traditional art.

There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. Traditional characters, used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau, and many overseas Chinese speaking communities, largely takes their form from received character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty and standardized during the Ming. Simplified characters, introduced by the PRC in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional [[Glyph|glyph]]s to fewer strokes, many to common cursive shorthand variants. Singapore, which has a large Chinese community, was the second nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia.

The Internet provides practice reading each of these systems, and most Chinese readers are capable of, if not necessarily comfortable with, reading the alternative system through experience and guesswork.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://edu.ocac.gov.tw/compete/writing/big5event_winner2-2.htm|title = 全球華文網-華文世界，數位之最}}</ref>

A well-educated Chinese reader today recognizes approximately 4,000 to 6,000 characters; approximately 3,000 characters are required to read a mainland newspaper. The PRC defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. School-children typically learn around 2,000 characters whereas scholars may memorize up to 10,000.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Zimmermann|first=Basile|year=2010|title=Redesigning Culture: Chinese Characters in Alphabet-Encoded Networks|journal=Design and Culture|volume=2|issue=1|pages=27–43|doi=10.2752/175470710X12593419555126|s2cid=53981784|url=https://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:87901}}</ref> A large unabridged dictionary like the ''Kangxi'' dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; fewer than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.

===Romanization===
{{Main|Social:Romanization of Chinese}}
[[File:Gwoyu.svg|thumb|right|upright=0.6|{{zhi|t=國語|s=国语|p=Guóyǔ|l=National language}} written in traditional and simplified forms, followed by various romanizations]]

[[Social:Romanization|Romanization]] is the process of transcribing a language into the Latin script. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese varieties, due to the lack of a native phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century.

Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin is ''Hanyu Pinyin'', introduced in 1956 by the PRC, and later adopted by Singapore and Taiwan. Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across the Americas, Australia, and Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones of new words. In school books that teach Chinese, the pinyin romanization is often shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.

The second-most common romanization system, the [[Social:Wade–Giles|Wade–Giles]], was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels–it is largely an anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade–Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and [[Social:Chinese language romanization in Taiwan|until 2009]] was widely used in Taiwan.

When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade–Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade–Giles's extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with ''Beijing'' than they will be with {{transliteration|zh|Běijīng}} (pinyin), and with {{transliteration|zh|Taipei}} than {{transliteration|zh|T'ai<sup>2</sup>-pei<sup>3</sup>}} (Wade–Giles). This simplification presents syllables as homophones which really are none, and therefore exaggerates the number of homophones almost by a factor of four.

For comparison:<!-- Please feel free to add Yale, Postal or whatever other examples you know, but I don't know those systems. Jiawen 07:27, 3 June 2005 (UTC) -->
{| class="wikitable"
|+ Comparison of Mandarin romanizations
|-
! Characters !! Wade–Giles !! Pinyin !! Meaning
|-
| {{transliteration|zh|Chung<sup>1</sup>-kuo<sup>2</sup>}} || {{lang|zh-Latn|Zhōngguó}} || {{wipe|China}}
|-
| {{transliteration|zh|T'ai<sup>2</sup>-wan<sup>1</sup>}} || {{lang|zh-Latn|Táiwān}} || Taiwan
|-
| {{transliteration|zh|Pei<sup>3</sup>-ching<sup>1</sup>}} || {{lang|zh-Latn|Běijīng}} || [[Place:Beijing|Beijing]]
|-
| {{transliteration|zh|T'ai<sup>2</sup>-pei<sup>3</sup>}} || {{lang|zh-Latn|Táiběi}} || [[Place:Taipei|Taipei]]
|-
| {{transliteration|zh|Sun<sup>1</sup>-wên<sup>2</sup>}} || {{lang|zh-Latn|Sūn Wén}} || Sun Yat-sen
|-
| {{transliteration|zh|Mao<sup>2</sup> Tse<sup>2</sup>-tung<sup>1</sup>}} || {{lang|zh-Latn|Máo Zédōng}} || [[Biography:Mao Zedong|Mao Zedong]]
|-
| nowrap | {{transliteration|zh|Chiang<sup>3</sup> Chieh<sup>4</sup>-shih<sup>2</sup>}} || {{lang|zh-Latn|Jiǎng Jièshí}} || Chiang Kai-shek
|-
| {{transliteration|zh|K'ung<sup>3</sup> Tsu<sup>3</sup>}} || {{lang|zh-Latn|Kǒngzǐ}} || [[Biography:Confucius|Confucius]]
|}

Other systems include [[Social:Gwoyeu Romatzyh|Gwoyeu Romatzyh]], the French [[Social:EFEO Chinese transcription|EFEO]], the [[Social:Yale romanization of Mandarin|Yale system]] (invented for use by US troops during World War II), as well as distinct systems for the phonetic requirements of Cantonese, Min Nan, Hakka, and other varieties.

===Other phonetic transcriptions===
Chinese varieties have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The [[Social:'Phags-pa script|'Phags-pa script]], for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of premodern forms of Chinese.

Zhuyin (colloquially ''bopomofo''), a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools to aid standard pronunciation. Although zhuyin characters are reminiscent of katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system. A comparison table of zhuyin to pinyin exists in the [[Social:Bopomofo#Comparison|zhuyin article]]. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles:
* [[Social:Pinyin table|Pinyin table]]
* Zhuyin table

There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system.

==As a foreign language==
[[File:Chinese Language Training at CASA.PNG|thumb|upright=1.35|Yang Lingfu, former curator of the National Museum of China, giving Chinese language instruction at the Civil Affairs Staging Area in 1945]]

With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Standard Chinese instruction has been gaining popularity in schools throughout East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Western world.<ref>{{cite news |url = http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4617646.stm |work = BBC News |title = How hard is it to learn Chinese? |date = 17 January 2006 |access-date = 28 April 2010 }}</ref>

Besides Mandarin, Cantonese is the only other Chinese language that is widely taught as a foreign language, largely due to the economic and cultural influence of Hong Kong and its widespread usage among significant Overseas Chinese communities.<ref>Wakefield, John C., ''Cantonese as a Second Language: Issues, Experiences and Suggestions for Teaching and Learning (Routledge Studies in Applied Linguistics)'', Routledge, New York City, 2019., p.45</ref>

In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test, called Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK), comparable to the English Cambridge Certificate, but by 2005 the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660<ref>{{in lang|zh}} "汉语水平考试中心：2005年外国考生总人数近12万",<sup>[http://www.gov.cn/jrzg/2006-01/16/content_160707.htm Gov.cn]</sup> Xinhua News Agency, 16 January 2006.</ref> and in 2010 to 750,000.<ref>{{cite web|title=Chinese language proficiency test becoming popular in Mexico|url=http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2011-06/27/c_13951048.htm|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110629055803/http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2011-06/27/c_13951048.htm|url-status=dead|archive-date=June 29, 2011|access-date=12 September 2013|author=Liu lili|date=27 June 2011}}</ref> 

The current iteration of the HSK exams is termed HSK 2.0, with the release of HSK 3.0 still undefined despite being announced by the Chinese Ministry of Education in March 2021.<ref>{{Cite web |title=HSK Test - New HSK Test 3.0 |url=https://www.chinaeducenter.com/en/hsk/newhsk3.php |access-date=2023-11-05 |website=www.chinaeducenter.com}}</ref> The new HSK system is thought to be in response to criticism of the current HSK levels not matching with the CEFR levels (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages), contrary to the Chinese Ministry of Education's claims.<ref>{{Cite web |date=2023-09-30 |title=Why the HSK exams are Critical - Explore Chinese |url=https://explore-chinese.com/2023/09/30/the-importance-of-hsk-exams/ |access-date=2023-11-05 |website=explore-chinese.com |language=en-US}}</ref>

== See also ==
* [[Social:Chinese characters|Chinese characters]]
* [[Chinese computational linguistics]]
* [[Social:Chinese exclamative particles|Chinese exclamative particles]]
* Chinese honorifics
* [[Chinese numerals]]
* Chinese punctuation
* Classical Chinese grammar
* ''Chengyu''
* [[Han unification]]
* [[Social:Languages of China|Languages of China]]
* North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
* Protection of the Varieties of Chinese
* Chinese language law
* [[Social:Chinese word-segmented writing|Chinese word-segmented writing]]

== Notes ==
{{notelist}}

== References ==
=== Citations ===
{{Reflist|23em}}

=== Sources ===
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* {{Cite book |last=Kornicki |first=P.F. |title=New Word Order: Transnational Themes in Book History |publisher=Worldview Publications |year=2011 |isbn=978-81-920651-1-3 |editor-last=Chakravorty |editor-first=Swapan |pages=65–79 |chapter=A transnational approach to East Asian book history |editor-last2=Gupta |editor-first2=Abhijit}}
* {{Cite book |last=Kurpaska |first=Maria |title=Chinese language(s): a look through the prism of the Great dictionary of modern Chinese dialects |date=2010 |publisher=Mouton de Gruyter |isbn=978-3-11-021914-2 |series=Trends in linguistics |location=Berlin}}
* {{Citation |title=Ethnologue: Languages of the World |url=http://www.ethnologue.com |year=2015 |editor-last=Lewis |editor-first=M. Paul |edition=Eighteenth |place=Dallas, Texas |publisher=SIL International |editor-given2=Gary F. |editor-surname2=Simons |editor-given3=Charles D. |editor-surname3=Fennig}}
* {{Cite book |last=Liang |first=Sihua |title=Language attitudes and identities in multilingual China: a linguistic ethnography |date=2015 |publisher=Springer |isbn=978-3-319-12619-7 |location=Cham}}
* {{Cite journal |last=Mair |first=Victor H. |year=1991 |title=What Is a Chinese "Dialect/Topolect"? Reflections on Some Key Sino-English Linguistic terms |url=https://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp029_chinese_dialect.pdf |journal=Sino-Platonic Papers |volume=29 |pages=1–31 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180510155608/http://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp029_chinese_dialect.pdf |archive-date=10 May 2018 |access-date=2023-11-17}}
* {{Cite book |last1=Matthews |first1=Stephen |title=Cantonese: A Comprehensive Grammar |last2=Yip |first2=Virginia |publisher=Routledge |year=1994 |isbn=978-0-415-08945-6 |author-link2=Virginia Yip}}
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** {{Cite press release |title=Origin of Sino-Tibetan language family revealed by new research |date=May 6, 2019 |url=https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190506151822.htm |website=ScienceDaily}}
{{refend}}

== Further reading ==
* {{Cite web |last1=Arablouei |first1=Ramtin |author2=Rund Abdelfatah |date=26 May 2022 |title=The Characters That Built China |url=https://www.npr.org/2022/05/25/1101378470/the-characters-that-built-china |work=Throughline |publisher=NPR |access-date=27 August 2023}} On the history of the standardization of Mandarin as the Chiense primary national dialect.
* {{Citation |last=Hannas |first=William C. |year=1997 |title=Asia's Orthographic Dilemma |publisher=University of Hawaii Press |isbn=978-0-8248-1892-0 |postscript=.|ref=none}}
* {{Citation
| last1       = Huang
| first1      = Cheng-Teh James
| last2       = Li
| first2      = Yen-Hui Audrey
| last3       = Li
| first3      = Yafei
| year        = 2009
| title       = The Syntax of Chinese
| series      = Cambridge Syntax Guides
| publisher   = Cambridge University Press
| location    = Cambridge
| isbn        = 978-0-521-59958-0
| doi         = 10.1017/CBO9781139166935
| s2cid = 209828119
| postscript  = .
| ref         = none
}}
* {{citation |last=Qiu |first=Xigui |year=2000 |title=Chinese Writing |translator=Gilbert Louis Mattos and Jerry Norman |publisher=Society for the Study of Early China and Institute of East Asian Studies, [[Organization:University of California|University of California]], Berkeley |isbn=978-1-55729-071-7 |postscript=.|ref=none}}
* {{Cite magazine |author=R. L. G. |date=6 June 2013 |title=Why So Little Chinese in English? |url=http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2013/06/language-borrowing |url-access=subscription |archive-url=https://archive.today/20130620054846/http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2013/06/language-borrowing |archive-date=20 June 2013 |url-status=live |department=''Johnson'' (blog): Language Borrowing (topic) |magazine=[[Finance:The Economist|The Economist]] |access-date=27 August 2023}}
* {{Cite book |last=Tsu |first=Jing |year=2022 |title=Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern |location=New York |publisher=Riverhead Books |isbn=9780735214729 |oclc=1246726702}}

== External links ==
{{InterWiki |code = zh }}
{{Wikivoyage|Chinese phrasebook|Chinese|a phrasebook}}
* [http://ctext.org/ Classical Chinese texts] – Chinese Text Project
* [http://chinalinks.osu.edu/ Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks]; {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110720030244/http://chinalinks.osu.edu/ |date=20 July 2011 }} at the Ohio State University with hundreds of links to Chinese related web pages

{{Navboxes
|list =
{{Languages of China}}
}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Chinese Language}}
[[Category:Analytic languages]]
[[Category:Isolating languages]]
[[Category:Languages of China]]

{{Sourceattribution|Chinese language}}