China language is a part of the Sino- Tibetan family of languages. All the varieties
of Chinese are tonal and analytic and also there is the internal diversity. In
all there are six to twelve main regional groups of China language of which the
most populous is the Mandarin (800 million), Wu (90 million) and Cantonese (80
million).
The standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of
China and the Republic of China or Taiwan and also one of the official languages
of Singapore. In addition to the national standard spoken language in China,
every region and locality has its own native variants of spoken Chinese. There
are also many samller groups of langauges that are not classifed like the Danzhou
dialect, Xianghua, Shaozhou Tuhua.
Scholars debate whether to call Chinese a langauge and the subdivisions as
dialiects or to call the Chinese a langauge family and its sub divisions languages.
But this has been due to the China's socio political and cultural situation.
Another important aspect in China language is the relationship between the Chinese
spoken and the written language is complex. This was because of the fact that
the spoken evolved for centuries but written Chinese changed less.
China language employs Chinese characters that are Logograms and each symbol
represents a meaningful unit of language, as well as one syllable. They are
not just pictographs (pictures of their meanings), but are highly stylized and
carry much abstract meaning. All modern characters are or are based on the standard
script. There are currently two standards for Chinese characters. One is the
traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau. The other is
the simplified system adopted during the 1950s Chinese Cultural Revolution in
Mainland China.
There is no concrete record of the origin of Chinese characters. Legend suggests
that C?ng Jié, a bureaucrat of the legendary emperor Huángdì
of China about 2600 BC, invented Chinese characters
The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times
to the present has been complex. Most northern Chinese people, in Sìchu?n
and in a broad arc from the northeast (Manchuria) to the southwest (Yúnnán),
use various Mandarin dialects as their home language.
Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on
unrelated languages such as Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese. Korean and Japanese
both have writing systems employing Chinese characters (Hanzi), which are called
Hanja and Kanji, respectively.
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