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Chinese ( simplified Chinese: 汉语; traditional Chinese: 漢語; pinyin: Hànyǔ; lit. ' Han language' or 中文; Zhōngwén; 'Chinese writing') is a group of languages [e] spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China. Approximately 1.35 billion people, or around 16% of the global population ...
The earliest historical linguistic evidence of the spoken Chinese language dates back approximately 4,500 years, while examples of the writing system that would become written Chinese are attested in a body of inscriptions made on bronze vessels and oracle bones during the Late Shang period (c. 1250 – 1050 BCE), with the very oldest dated to c. 1200 BCE.
There are several hundred languages in China. The predominant language is Standard Chinese, which is based on Beijingese, but there are hundreds of related Chinese languages, collectively known as Hanyu ( simplified Chinese: 汉语; traditional Chinese: 漢語; pinyin: Hànyǔ, 'Han language'), that are spoken by 92% of the population.
Chinese eventually replaced many of the languages previously dominant in these areas, and forms of the language spoken in different regions began to diverge. During periods of political unity there was a tendency for states to promote the use of a standard language across the territory they controlled, in order to facilitate communication ...
The Language Atlas of China ( simplified Chinese: 中国语言地图集; traditional Chinese: 中國語言地圖集; pinyin: Zhōngguó yǔyán dìtú jí ), published by Hong Kong Longman Publishing Company in two parts in 1987 and 1989, maps the distribution of both the varieties of Chinese and minority languages of China . It was a ...
A speaker from Tanghe ( Central Plains Mandarin) Mandarin ( / ˈmændərɪn / ⓘ MAN-dər-in; simplified Chinese : 官话; traditional Chinese : 官話; pinyin : Guānhuà; lit. 'officials' speech') is a group of Chinese language dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing ...
Historical Chinese phonology deals with reconstructing the sounds of Chinese from the past. As Chinese is written with logographic characters, not alphabetic or syllabary, the methods employed in Historical Chinese phonology differ considerably from those employed in, for example, Indo-European linguistics; reconstruction is more difficult because, unlike Indo-European languages, no phonetic ...
Classical Chinese [a] is the language in which the classics of Chinese literature were written, from c. the 5th century BCE. [2] For millennia thereafter, the written Chinese used in these works was imitated and iterated upon by scholars in a form now called Literary Chinese, which was used for almost all formal writing in China until the early ...