# Chinese language

| Chinese |
| --- |
| 汉语／漢語，华语／華語 or 中文 Hànyǔ, Huáyǔ or Zhōngwén |
| Hànyǔ (*Chinese*) written in Hanzi |
| Native to | People's Republic of China (PRC, commonly known as China), Republic of China (ROC, commonly known as Taiwan), Canada, Peru, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, Indonesia, Mauritius, Australia, the United States, the Philippines and other places with Chinese communities |
| Native speakers | (1.2 billion cited 1984–2000) |
| Language family | Sino-Tibetan
* Sinitic
	+ **Chinese**
 |
| Standard forms | * Mandarin
 |
| Dialects | * Mandarin
* Jin
* Huizhou
* Wu (including Shanghainese)
* Hunanese
* Jiangxinese
* Hakka
* Yue (including Cantonese-Taishanese)
* Pinghua
* Shaojiang
* Northern Min
* Eastern Min (including Fuchow)
* Central Min
* Pu Xian
* Southern Min (including Amoy, Taiwanese)
* Teochew (including Swatow, Chaozhou, Jieyang, parts of Shanwei/Meizhou)
 |
| Writing system | Chinese characters, zhuyin fuhao, pinyin, Xiao'erjing |
| Official status |
| Official language in |  United Nations
 People's Republic of China
 Republic of China (Taiwan)
 Singapore (*one of four official languages*)
Wa State (*alongside the Wa language*)
 Brunei |
| Recognised minority language in |  United States (minority and auxiliary)  Malaysia (minority and auxiliary)  Philippines (minority and auxiliary)  Kiribati (minority and auxiliary)  Nauru (minority and auxiliary) |
| Regulated by | In the PRC: National Commission on Language and Script Work In the ROC: National Languages Committee In Singapore: Promote Mandarin Council/Speak Mandarin Campaign |
| Language codes |
| ISO 639-1 | `zh` |
| ISO 639-2 | `chi (B)` `zho (T)` |
| ISO 639-3 | `zho` – inclusive code Individual codes: `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` – Yue `och` – Old Chinese `ltc` – Late Middle Chinese `lzh` – Classical Chinese |
| Linguasphere | `79-AAA` |
| Map of the Sinophone world.
**Information**:
  Countries identified Chinese as a primary, administrative or native language
  Countries with more than 5,000,000 Chinese speakers
  Countries with more than 1,000,000 Chinese speakers
  Countries with more than 500,000 Chinese speakers
  Countries with more than 100,000 Chinese speakers
  Major Chinese speaking settlements |

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The **Chinese language** is the group of languages used by Chinese people in China and elsewhere. It forms part of a language family called the Sino-Tibetan family of languages.

Chinese includes many regional language varieties, the main ones being Mandarin, Wu, Yue and Min, and are not mutually intelligible Many of the regional varieties are themselves a number of non-mutually-intelligible subvarieties. As a result, many linguists refer to these varieties as separate languages.

"Chinese" can refer to the written or the spoken languages. Although there are many spoken Chinese languages, they use the same writing system. Differences in speaking are reflected in differences in writing. China has a similar official policy to the one in the Soviet Union: one official language is used so that people can understand one another. Standard Chinese is referred to as Mandarin in English, "*Pǔtōnghuà*" or "common to everybody speech" in Mainland China, and "*Guóyǔ*" or "language of the whole country" in Taiwan. All official documents in Pinyin are written in Mandarin, which is taught all over China. It is also a standard for language teaching in some other countries.

Chinese is used by the Han people in China and other ethnic groups in China that are declared Chinese by the Chinese government. Many people in autonomous regions of China speak other languages. Chinese is almost always written in Chinese characters, which are symbols, called logograms, that have meaning. They also give some indication of pronunciation, but the same character can get very different pronunciations among the different kinds of Chinese. Since characters have been around for at least 3500 years, people in places far from each other say them differently, just as "1, 2, 3" can be read differently in different languages.

Chinese people needed to write down pronunciations in dictionaries. Chinese does not have an alphabet and so writing down sounds was a major problem in the beginning. Mandarin now uses Hanyu Pinyin to represent the sounds in the Roman alphabet.

All Chinese languages (or dialects) use tones. That means that they use high and low pitches to make differences in meaning clear.

## Different languages or dialects of Chinese

The Chinese language is like a large tree. The base of the tree started thousands of years ago. The tree now has several main limbs. Some people call "just a branch" what other people call a main limb and so there are six or seven main limbs.

Each of the main limbs splits off into branches like the branches of English spoken in Britain, the United States, Australia, India, Canada, and so forth. Just as all of the Romance languages come from the area around Rome and are based on Latin, the Chinese languages all have some common source, and all have kept many common things.

Branches in modern times are only shown for "Guan" (Language of the officials. Mandarin).
Here are the main seven main groups of languages/dialects of Chinese by size:

* Guan ("Northern" or Mandarin), 北方話/北方话 or 官話/官话 (about 850 million speakers),
* Wu, 吳/吴, which includes Shanghainese (about 90 million speakers),
* Yue (Cantonese), 粵/粤 (about 80 million speakers),
* Min (Hokkien, which includes Taiwanese), 閩/闽 (about 50 million speakers),
* Xiang, 湘 (about 35 million speakers),
* Hakka, 客家 or 客 or "guest family" speech (about 35 million speakers),
* Gan, 贛/赣 (about 20 million speakers)

## Traditional and simplified characters

In 1956, the government of the People's Republic of China made public a set of simplified Chinese characters to make learning, reading and writing the Chinese language easier. In Mainland China and Singapore, people use these simpler characters. In Hong Kong, Taiwan and other places that speak Chinese, people still use the traditional characters. Korean also uses Chinese characters to represent certain words. Japanese uses them even more often. Those characters are known in Korean as hanja and in Japanese as kanji. Vietnamese once used Chinese characters, called Chữ Nôm, but they have been discareded.

A Chinese person with a good education today knows 6,000-7,000 characters. About 3,000 Chinese characters are needed to read a Mainland Chinese newspaper. However, people who have learned only the 400 most frequently used characters can read a newspaper but have to guess some less common words.

## Samples

Spoken Mandarin Chinese
Here are some samples of some words and sentences in Mandarin Chinese. Simplified characters are on the left, and traditional characters are on the right. The pronunciation is given in Pinyin, a system may not always be as simple as it seems for those who have not studied it.

Traditional characters are now used in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Mainland China uses simplified characters, but people may recognize traditional characters.

Before 1956, Chinese was written with only traditional characters. Most Chinese people then could not read or write at all. The government of the People's Republic of China thought that the traditional characters were very hard to learn. It also thought that the characters were simplified, more people could learn how to read and write. Today, many people in China can read and write with the new simplified characters.

| Word | Pinyin | Simplified | Traditional |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| How are you? | Nǐ hǎo ma? | 你好吗？ | 你好嗎？ |
| What is your name? | Nǐ jiào shénme míngzi? | 你叫什么名字？ | 你叫什麽名字？ |
| America | Měiguó | 美国 | 美國 |
| France | Fǎguó | 法国 | 法國 |
| Britain | Yīngguó | 英国 | 英國 |
| Germany | Déguó | 德国 | 德國 |
| Russia | Éguó | 俄国 | 俄國 |
| Thailand | Tàiguó | 泰国 | 泰國 |
| Poland | Bōlán | 波兰 | 波蘭 |
| Japan | Rìbĕn | 日本 | 日本 |
| Pakistan | Bājīsītǎn | 巴基斯坦 | 巴基斯坦 |

## Related pages

* Standard Chinese
* Mandarin Chinese
* Cantonese language
* China population

## Other websites

* Chinese Flashcard Website Learn Chinese Online
* I Love Chinese Learning Chinese Magazine
* Learn Chinese Archived 2021-09-19 at the Wayback Machine Free Chinese Learning Lessons and mp3
* Free Chinese Character Input Software Archived 2008-05-07 at the Wayback Machine Google Pinyin Input Software
* Chinese Pinyin Archived 2021-09-01 at the Wayback Machine a brief introduction to standard Chinese phonetic system
* Day Day Up Chinese Archived 2009-09-27 at the Wayback Machine Online Chinese textbook
* Direct method of learning Chinese—no English translation. A wok is just a wok.
* Study More Chinese Archived 2012-05-22 at the Wayback Machine social network for Mandarin learners with videos, blogs, forum.
* iChineseLearning A site for learning Chinese through skype Chinese lessons.