In addition, many of the smaller languages are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to reach and are often also sensitive border zones. Difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of inflection in many of them, and the effects of language contact. 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 Indo-European or Austroasiatic.
Linguists classify all varieties of Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family, together with Burmese, Tibetan and many other languages spoken in the Himalayas and the Southeast Asian Massif. Traditional characters remain in use in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and other countries with significant overseas Chinese speaking communities such as Malaysia (where, although simplified characters were adopted as the de facto standard in the 1980s, traditional characters remain in widespread use).Ĭlassification After applying the linguistic comparative method to the database of comparative linguistic data developed by Laurent Sagart in 2019 to identify sound correspondences and establish cognates, phylogenetic methods are used to infer relationships among these languages and estimate the age of their origin and homeland. Since the 1950s, simplified Chinese characters have been promoted for use by the government of the People's Republic of China, while Singapore officially adopted simplified characters in 1976. The written form, using the logograms known as Chinese characters, is shared by literate speakers of mutually unintelligible dialects. Standard Chinese (Standard Mandarin), based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin, was adopted in the 1930s and is now an official language of both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan), one of the four official languages of Singapore, and one of the six official languages of the United Nations. The royal courts of the Ming and early Qing dynasties operated using a koiné language ( Guanhua) based on Nanjing dialect of Lower Yangtze Mandarin. Qieyun, a rime dictionary, recorded a compromise between the pronunciations of different regions. During the Northern and Southern dynasties period, Middle Chinese went through several sound changes and split into several varieties following prolonged geographic and political separation. The phonetic categories of Old Chinese can be reconstructed from the rhymes of ancient poetry. The earliest Chinese written records are Shang dynasty-era oracle bone inscriptions, which can be dated to 1250 BCE. All varieties of Chinese are tonal to at least some degree, and are largely analytic. There are, however, transitional areas where varieties from different branches share enough features for some limited intelligibility, including New Xiang with Southwestern Mandarin, Xuanzhou Wu Chinese with Lower Yangtze Mandarin, Jin with Central Plains Mandarin and certain divergent dialects of Hakka with Gan (though these are unintelligible with mainstream Hakka). These branches are unintelligible to each other, and many of their subgroups are unintelligible with the other varieties within the same branch (e.g.
Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese, of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin (with about 800 million speakers, or 66%), followed by Min (75 million, e.g. Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered to be separate languages in a family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be dialects of a single language. Ĭhinese languages form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages family. About 1.3 billion people (or approximately 16% of the world's population) speak a variety of Chinese as their first language. Han text (especially written and when distinguished from other languages of China)Ĭhinese ( 中文 Zhōngwén, especially when referring to written Chinese) is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in Greater China. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.Ĭhinese ("middle/central") text (or writing) Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Regions with significant Chinese-speaking minorities.
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