The Chinese language group is regarded as a major branch of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages, which includes Tibetan, Burmese, and numerous minority languages. Some of the outstanding characteristics of this group are its monosyllabicity, relatively simple phonological system, use of tones to distinguish different meanings, and a word order dependent syntax that lacks inflection, grammatical gender, and pluralization. Written Chinese, which has historically provided a link amongst the various Chinese dialects, is unique in that it is the only major modern writing system that uses thousands of semantically meaningful characters rather than a phonetic alphabet or syllabary of a few dozen symbols. The traditional Chinese writing system has inspired and profoundly influenced other writing systems of East Asia, and Chinese characters are still used extensively in modern Japanese and, to a much lesser extent, in modern Korean. A Chinese language is spoken by most of China's minority peoples, as well as nearly all Han Chinese.
Much work remains to be done in classifying and describing the many minority languages of China.