Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language superfamily. In its standard form, it is the official language of Taiwan, China and Singapore, and one of the 6 working and official languages of the UN. More than 1.3 billion people around the world speak Chinese.
Historically, Chinese is considered the language of the Han people, who make up the dominant share of the population of the People's Republic of China (more than 90% of the country's inhabitants). In addition, tens of millions of ethnic Chinese who have preserved their native language live in nearly every country of Southeast Asia, and a large Chinese diaspora is spread across the globe.
Features of the language
Modern Chinese has ten dialect groups. The dialects are characterized by phonetic and lexical differences, and to some extent by grammar, but their grammatical foundations and vocabulary are shared.
The main means of communication between speakers of different dialects is standard Chinese, known as Putonghua in China, Guoyu in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and Huayu in Singapore. These forms differ only slightly in phonetics. In addition, Guoyu is written with traditional (full-form) characters, while Huayu and Putonghua use simplified ones.
Literary Chinese is based on the northern dialects, and Beijing pronunciation is regarded as the phonetic standard. It is worth noting that during the Tang dynasty, when the classical Chinese texts were created, the phonetic norm was closer to the modern Hakka dialect group.
In Chinese writing, each character represents a single morpheme and a single syllable. The total number of characters exceeds 80,000, but most of them appear only in works of classical Chinese literature.
To understand up to 80% of everyday Chinese, you need to know the 500 most frequently used characters. Full command of the language requires learning 2,400 characters. Reading newspapers and magazines calls for knowledge of 3,000 characters. The most complete dictionary of characters, published in 1994, contains more than 87,000 Chinese characters.
Today, Chinese characters are used in two forms: traditional (Hong Kong, Taiwan) and simplified (mainland China).
Traditionally, the Chinese wrote characters from top to bottom, with columns arranged from right to left. Today in the PRC, horizontal writing, following the example of European languages, is predominant, while vertical writing continues to be used in Taiwan alongside horizontal. In mainland China, pre-reform characters and vertical writing are still used as a semantic reference to traditional national culture, in particular in art periodicals, art history publications and the like.
History of the language
The earliest written records documenting the existence of the Chinese language are divinatory inscriptions found on turtle shells and the bones of sacrificial animals, dated to the 14th–11th centuries BC. These artifacts show that a well-formed language system already existed in China during the Shang-Yin period.
The main element that held the language tradition together was the official written language, Wenyan. This unique phenomenon, the dominance of a single writing system, allowed different dialects to exist and develop for a time within independent Chinese states.
For a number of political reasons, the northern dialects came to dominate in Chinese, as they were more uniform than the southern ones. On their basis, Guanhua, the "language of officials," gradually took shape and acquired the status of the official language of the Chinese Empire. Alongside Guanhua, the spoken language of the common people, Baihua, also developed.
The use of the spoken language in writing was a radical turning point in the development of Chinese culture. The democratization of literacy in the early 20th century marked the transition to Baihua and the beginning of the unification of Chinese dialects.
As for vocabulary, it can be said to have gone through two stages of change: the adoption of a new layer of meaning that arrived with the spread of Buddhism in China in the 1st century AD, and the process of merging with the global lexicon.