[29], Historically, the Chinese language has spread to its neighbors through a variety of means. Jerry Norman estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese. Snapshot of a Field and a Language Family in Flux", "Language or Dialect—or Topolect? Yes, only email from Microsoft is in Chinese language. The goal was to enter service for the empire, became an official thru a series of examinations. Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 Fó "Buddha" and 菩萨/菩薩 Púsà "bodhisattva." 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. "recognize-know"); shítou 石头/石頭 (lit. Western foreign words representing Western concepts have influenced Chinese since the 20th century through transcription. Choose one foreign language and stick with it throughout high … [42] Generally, mountainous South China exhibits more linguistic diversity than the North China Plain. Chinese Characters: As one of the six official languages used by UN (United Nations), Chinese now has earned itself greater status in the World. Romanization is the process of transcribing a language into the Latin script. 3. This simplification presents syllables as homophones which really are none, and therefore exaggerates the number of homophones almost by a factor of four. The spoken languages of nationalities that are a part of the People's Republic of China belong to at least nine families: Below are lists of ethnic groups in China by linguistic classification. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles: There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. China is a hugely important economic hub, and now you know a little more about the language that’s spoken by a sixth of the world’s population. Chinese is considered by most translators to be the hardest language to translate and it even presents huge challenges for native speakers. "dashing-leaping") for Pentium and 赛百味/賽百味 Sàibǎiwèi (lit. It is largely accurate when describing Classical Chinese and Middle Chinese; in Classical Chinese, for example, perhaps 90% of words correspond to a single syllable and a single character. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, including many of the simplest characters, such as rén 人 (human), rì 日 (sun), shān 山 (mountain; hill), shuǐ 水 (water). In some way or the other, almost 20% of the world population uses this language. Sign up or log in to customize your list. The second-most common romanization system, the Wade–Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. China is a hugely important economic hub, and now you know a little more about the language that’s … The Chinese language I speak, Standard Mandarin, is as old as Chinese civilisations and as young as the modern Chinese state. [52], The official Chinese designation for the major branches of Chinese is fāngyán (方言, literally "regional speech"), whereas the more closely related varieties within these are called dìdiǎn fāngyán (地点方言/地點方言 "local speech"). While official policies in mainland China encourage the development and use of different orthographies for the national languages and their use in educational and academic settings, realistically speaking it would seem that, as elsewhere in the world, the outlook for Skyrocket your fluency now! The language’s reputation as one of the most difficult to master comes mainly from its writing system and the tones. Chinese varieties have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. English has been the dominant global language for a century, but is it the language of the future? The Chinese language is probably the most complex language among all the East Asian languages. But what they mean is, it doesn’t have things like verb conjugations and word endings that can make other languages so difficult to learn. The 7th (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. About 1.2 billion people (or approximately 16% of the world's population) speak a variety of Chinese as their first language. For example, 沙发/沙發 "sofa" and 马达/馬達 "motor" in Shanghainese sound more like their English counterparts. Many believe that Chinese is a monosyllabic language, which presumably means that every word in Chinese consists of a single syllable, like the English words but, aim, quick, work, crime, laugh, and unlike the wor… The phonetic categories of Old Chinese can be reconstructed from the rhymes of ancient poetry. [33], Although they used Chinese solely for written communication, each country had its own tradition of reading texts aloud, the so-called Sino-Xenic pronunciations. The Simplified Chinese character system, introduced by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common cursive shorthand variants. [20] 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.[e]. Thus the character 一 ("one") is uttered yī in Standard Chinese, yat1 in Cantonese and it in Hokkien (form of Min). 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. This makes learning English a serious challenge for Chinese native speakers. Let's take a look at 10 facts you should know about this complicated and very different language. Wu, Hakka, Yue, and Min are just a few examples. The Chinese (or 'Sinitic') languages are typically divided into seven major language groups, and their study is a distinct academic discipline. [25] [13] Most recent reconstructions also describe an atonal language with consonant clusters at the end of the syllable, developing into tone distinctions in Middle Chinese. Recently, in terms of Fishman's typology of the relationships between bilingualism and diglossia and his taxonomy of diglossia (Fishman 1978, 1980) in China: more and more minority communities have been evolving from "diglossia without bilingualism" to "bilingualism without diglossia." The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be variants of a single language. [14] Several derivational affixes have also been identified, but the language lacks inflection, and indicated grammatical relationships using word order and grammatical particles. Almost all characters created since have been made using this format. [8], The first written records appeared over 3,000 years ago during the Shang dynasty. [20][21][22] During the 1950s and 1960s, Russian had some social status among elites in mainland China as the international language of socialism. [62] John DeFrancis argues that it is inappropriate to refer to Mandarin, Wu and so on as "dialects" because the mutual unintelligibility between them is too great. The official language of China is the Mandarin, which is the very name of 'Hanyu' or 'Putonghua', belonging to Sino-Tibetan. [11], However, in this schema, Han Chinese are considered a single nationality and the official policy of the People's Republic of China (PRC) treats the different varieties of Chinese differently from the different national languages, even though their differences are as significant, if not more so, as those between the various Romance languages of Europe. Chinese languages, also called Sinitic languages, Chinese Han, principal language group of eastern Asia, belonging to the Sino-Tibetan language family. "electric brain") for computer; 手机/手機 shǒujī (lit. After the fall of the Northern Song dynasty and subsequent reign of the Jin (Jurchen) and Yuan (Mongol) dynasties in northern China, a common speech (now called Old Mandarin) developed based on the dialects of the North China Plain around the capital. Related Posts. Dr Gil is author of the book Soft Power and the Worldwide Promotion of Chinese Language Learning: The Confucius Institute Project (published by Multilingual Matters), which examines China’s soft-power efforts to promote Chinese as a global language. Early Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt to describe the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones to distinguish words. "actual-connection"); rènshi 认识/認識 (lit. "better-than hundred tastes") for Subway restaurants. The Chinese language is probably the most complex language among all the East Asian languages. [26], In the 1930s, a standard national language, Guóyǔ (国语/國語 ; "national language") was adopted. 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 ma. After much dispute between proponents of northern and southern dialects and an abortive attempt at an artificial pronunciation, the National Language Unification Commission finally settled on the Beijing dialect in 1932. The U.S. Foreign Service Institute estimates it would take a native English speaker 2,200 hours to … The Chinese language is the oldest written language in the world with at least six thousand years of history. Chinese Language. Chinese Language. [30] 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. 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. Therefore, it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. 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. For example, "Israel" becomes 以色列 Yǐsèliè, "Paris" becomes 巴黎 Bālí. How Games Can Really Help Learn a Language. Chinese also has an extensive system of classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighboring languages like Japanese and Korean. The earliest Chinese written records are Shang dynasty-era oracle bone inscriptions, which can be dated to 1250 BCE. Only the first one, 十 "ten", normally appears as such when spoken; the rest are normally replaced with, respectively, shíjì 实际/實際 (lit. Shì shí shí shì shì shì shī. These are not mutually intelligible and many of the regional varieties are themselves a number of non-mutually-intelligible … For example, in addition to Standard Chinese, a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese; and, if they grew up elsewhere, then they are also likely to be fluent in the particular dialect of that local area. Some of the conservative southern varieties of modern Chinese have largely monosyllabic words, especially among the more basic vocabulary. Wade–Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until 2009 was widely used in Taiwan. The growth that China is experiencing is expected to continue. Its spoken varieties have evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. In the Philippines people think that learning Chinese will allow them to get better in the future. That … 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. Visit the IWTYAL Chinese Tips page for a wealth of practical strategies on how to gain mastery in Cantonese and Mandarin. Chinese is also a more difficult language to learn. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. "internet logbook") for blog in Hong Kong and Macau Cantonese. It forms part of a language family called the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. "food-thing"). [44], 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. The Dungan language, considered by many a dialect of Mandarin, is nowadays written in Cyrillic, and was previously written in the Arabic script. 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