Chinese

Chinese (汉语/漢語, Pinyin: Hànyǔ; 华语/華語, Huáyǔ; or 中文, Zhōngwén) is a language (or language family) that forms part of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. more...

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About one-fifth of the people in the world speak some form of Chinese as their native language.

In general, all varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. However, Chinese is also distinguished for a high level of internal diversity. Regional variation between different variants/dialects is comparable to the Romance language family; many variants of spoken Chinese are different enough to be mutually incomprehensible. It could be argued that there are more native \"Romance\" (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.) speakers than \"Chinese\" speakers. There are between six and twelve main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most populous by far is Mandarin (c. 800 million), followed by Wu (c. 90 million), and Cantonese (c. 80 million). The identification of the varieties of Chinese as \"languages\" or \"dialects\" is a controversial issue. If Chinese is classified as a single language rather than a group of languages, it is the most widely spoken language in the world.

The standardized form of spoken Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect, a member of the Mandarin group; it is described in the article \"Standard Mandarin.\" Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China or Taiwan, as well as one of four official languages of Singapore (together with English, Malay, and Tamil). Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations (alongside English, Arabic, French, Russian, and Spanish). Spoken in the form of Standard Cantonese, Chinese is one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese).

Spoken Chinese

The map below depicts the subdivisions (\"languages\" or \"dialect groups\") within Chinese. The traditionally recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are:

Mandarin 普通话,国语,北方话/北方話 or 官話/官话, (c. 800 million)，;

汉语 Hanyu Chinese is divided into two groups: 文言 Wenyan Classical Chinese languages and 白话 Baihua Modern Chinese languages.

Mandarin Chinese Guanhua 官话 was the main language used at the Imperial Court and Mandarin Chinese Putonghua 普通话 is the main language in China. Both Guanhua and Putonghua are called Mandarin Chinese in the West but they are indeed different languages.

China has had only two official languages in its entire history. 满语 Manyu, the Manchu language, was the first official language of China, from 1644 till 1912. 普通话 Putonghua has been the official language of China since 1958. Before 1958, no form of Chinese was ever the official language of China.

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