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Chinese (Spoken language: , Written language: ) is a group of spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China, as well as by various communities of the Chinese diaspora. Approximately 1.39 billion people, or 17% of the global population, speak a variety of Chinese as their first language.
Chinese languages form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be of a single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered to be separate languages in a Language family. Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese, of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin Chinese with 66%, or around 800 million speakers, followed by Min Chinese (75 million, e.g. Southern Min), Wu Chinese (74 million, e.g. Shanghainese), and Yue Chinese (68 million, e.g. Cantonese). These branches are unintelligible to each other, and many of their subgroups are unintelligible with the other varieties within the same branch (e.g. Southern Min). There are, however, transitional areas where varieties from different branches share enough features for some limited intelligibility, including New Xiang with Southwestern Mandarin, Xuanzhou Wu Chinese with Lower Yangtze Mandarin, Jin Chinese with Central Plains Mandarin and certain divergent dialects of Hakka Chinese with Gan Chinese. All varieties of Chinese are tonal at least to some degree, and are largely analytic.
The earliest attested written Chinese consists of the oracle bone inscriptions created during the Shang dynasty . The phonetic categories of Old Chinese can be reconstructed from the rhymes of ancient poetry. During the Northern and Southern period, Middle Chinese went through several and split into several varieties following prolonged geographic and political separation. The Qieyun, a rhyme dictionary, recorded a compromise between the pronunciations of different regions. The royal courts of the Ming and early Qing dynasties operated using a koiné language known as Guanhua, based on the Nanjing dialect of Mandarin.
Standard Chinese is an official language of both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan), one of the four official languages of Singapore, and one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin and was first officially adopted in the 1930s. The language is written primarily using a logography of Chinese characters, largely shared by readers who may otherwise speak mutually unintelligible varieties. Since the 1950s, the use of simplified characters has been promoted by the government of the People's Republic of China, with Singapore officially adopting them in 1976. Traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and among Chinese-speaking Overseas Chinese.
Middle Chinese was the language used during Northern and Southern dynasties and the Sui dynasty, Tang dynasty, and Song dynasty dynasties (6th–10th centuries). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the Qieyun rhyme dictionary (601), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by such as the constructed by ancient Chinese philologists as a guide to the Qieyun system. These works define phonological categories but with little hint of what sounds they represent. Linguists have identified these sounds by comparing the categories with pronunciations in modern varieties of Chinese, borrowed Chinese words in Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese, and transcription evidence. The resulting system is very complex, with a large number of consonants and vowels, but they are probably not all distinguished in any single dialect. Most linguists now believe it represents a diasystem encompassing 6th-century northern and southern standards for reading the classics.
Until the early 20th century, most Chinese people only spoke their local variety. Thus, as a practical measure, officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using a common language based on Mandarin varieties, known as . For most of this period, this language was a koiné based on dialects spoken in the Nanjing area, though not identical to any single dialect. By the middle of the 19th century, the Beijing dialect had become dominant and was essential for any business with the imperial court.
In the 1930s, a Standard Chinese (), was adopted. 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 People's Republic founded in 1949 retained this standard but renamed it . The national language is now used in education, the media, and formal situations in both mainland China and Taiwan.
In Hong Kong and Macau, Cantonese is the dominant spoken language due to cultural influence from Guangdong immigrants and colonial-era policies, and is used in education, media, formal speech, and everyday life—though Mandarin is increasingly taught in schools due to the mainland's growing influence.
Although they used Chinese solely for written communication, each country had its own tradition of reading texts aloud using what are known as Sino-Xenic pronunciations. Chinese words with these pronunciations were also extensively imported into the Korean language, Japanese and Vietnamese languages, and today comprise over half of their vocabularies. This massive influx led to changes in the phonological structure of the languages, contributing to the development of moraic structure in Japanese and the disruption of vowel harmony in Korean.
Borrowed Chinese morphemes have been used extensively in all these languages to coin compound words for new concepts, in a similar way to the use of Latin and Ancient Greek roots in European languages. Many new compounds, or new meanings for old phrases, were created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to name Western concepts and artifacts. These coinages, written in shared Chinese characters, have then been borrowed freely between languages. They have even been accepted into Chinese, a language usually resistant to loanwords, because their foreign origin was hidden by their written form. Often different compounds for the same concept were in circulation for some time before a winner emerged, and sometimes the final choice differed between countries. The proportion of vocabulary of Chinese origin thus tends to be greater in technical, abstract, or formal language. For example, in Japan, Sino-Japanese words account for about 35% of the words in entertainment magazines, over half the words in newspapers, and 60% of the words in science magazines.
Vietnam, Korea, and Japan each developed writing systems for their own languages, initially based on Chinese characters, but later replaced with the alphabet for Korean and supplemented with syllabaries for Japanese, while Vietnamese continued to be written with the complex chữ Nôm script. However, these were limited to popular literature until the late 19th century. Today Japanese is written with a composite script using both Chinese characters called kanji, and kana. Korean is written exclusively with hangul in North Korea, although knowledge of the supplementary Chinese characters called hanja is still required, and hanja are increasingly rarely used in South Korea. As a result of its historical colonization by France, Vietnamese now uses the Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet.
English words of Chinese origin include tea from Hokkien , dim sum from Cantonese , and kumquat from Cantonese .
In parts of South China, the dialect of a major city may be only marginally intelligible to its neighbors. For example, Wuzhou and Taishan are located approximately and away from Guangzhou respectively, but the Yue variety spoken in Wuzhou is more similar to the Guangzhou dialect than is Taishanese. Wuzhou is located directly upstream from Guangzhou on the Pearl River, whereas Taishan is to Guangzhou's southwest, with the two cities separated by several river valleys. In parts of Fujian, the speech of some neighbouring counties or villages is mutually unintelligible.
The classification of Li Rong, which is used in the Language Atlas of China (1987), distinguishes three further groups:
Some varieties remain unclassified, including the Danzhou dialect on Hainan, Waxianghua spoken in western Hunan, and Shaozhou Tuhua spoken in northern Guangdong.
Diglossia is common among Chinese speakers. For example, a Shanghai resident may speak both Standard Chinese and Shanghainese; if they grew up elsewhere, they are also likely fluent in the dialect of their home region. In addition to Standard Chinese, a majority of Taiwanese people also speak Taiwanese Hokkien (also called ), Hakka language, or an Austronesian language. A speaker in Taiwan may mix pronunciations and vocabulary from Standard Chinese and other languages of Taiwan in everyday speech. In part due to traditional cultural ties with Guangdong, Cantonese is used as an everyday language in Hong Kong and Macau.
There are also viewpoints pointing out that linguists often ignore mutual intelligibility when varieties share intelligibility with a central variety (i.e. prestige variety, such as Standard Mandarin), as the issue requires some careful handling when mutual intelligibility is inconsistent with language identity.
The Chinese government's official Chinese designation for the major branches of Chinese is , whereas the more closely related varieties within these are called .
Because of the difficulties involved in determining the difference between language and dialect, other terms have been proposed. These include topolect, lect,, cited in vernacular, regional, and language variety.
The structure of each syllable consists of a syllable nucleus that has a vowel (which can be a monophthong, diphthong, or even a triphthong in certain varieties), preceded by an syllable onset (a single consonant, or consonant + semivowel; a zero onset is also possible), and followed (optionally) by a syllable coda consonant; a syllable also carries a tone. There are some instances where a vowel is not used as a nucleus. An example of this is in Cantonese, where the nasal sonorant consonants and can stand alone as their own syllable.
In Mandarin much more than in other spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda (assuming that a final glide is not analyzed as a coda), but syllables that do have codas are restricted to nasals , , , the retroflex approximant , and voiceless stops , , , or . Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Standard Chinese, are limited to only , , and .
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. The Mandarin dialects in particular have experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds and so have far more polysyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. 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.
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 . The tones are exemplified by the following five Chinese words:
| + Examples of Standard Chinese tones ! scope=col | Pinyin !Chao tone!! scope="col" | Pitch contour |
In contrast, Standard Cantonese has six tones. Historically, finals that end in a stop consonant were considered to be "" and thus counted separately for a total of nine tones. However, they are considered to be duplicates in modern linguistics and are no longer counted as such:
| + Examples of Standard Cantonese tones ! scope=col | Jyutping !! scope=col >Yale !Chao tone!! scope="col" | Pitch contour |
Most modern varieties tend to form new words through polysyllabic compound word. In some cases, monosyllabic words have become disyllabic formed from different characters without the use of compounding, as in from ; this is especially common in Jin varieties. This phonological collapse has led to a corresponding increase in the number of . As an example, the small Langenscheidt Pocket Chinese Dictionary lists six words that are commonly pronounced as in Standard Chinese:
In modern spoken Mandarin, however, tremendous ambiguity would result if all of these words could be used as-is. The 20th century Yuen Ren Chao poem Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den exploits this, consisting of 92 characters all pronounced . As such, most of these words have been replaced in speech, if not in writing, with less ambiguous disyllabic compounds. Only the first one, , normally appears in monosyllabic form in spoken Mandarin; the rest are normally used in the polysyllabic forms of
| 'actual-connection' | |
| 'recognize-know' | |
| 'stone-head' | |
| 'time-interval' | |
| 'foodstuff' |
However, when one of the above words forms part of a compound, the disambiguating syllable is generally dropped and the resulting word is still disyllabic. For example, alone, and not , appears in compounds as meaning 'stone' such as , , , , and . Although many single-syllable morphemes () can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllable compounds known as , which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese can consist of more than one character–morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
Examples of Chinese words of more than two syllables include , , and .
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages: they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure), rather than inflectional morphology (changes in the form of a word), to indicate a word's function within a sentence. In other words, Chinese has very few grammatical inflections—it possesses no tenses, no voices, no grammatical number, and only a few articles. They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and grammatical mood. In Mandarin, this involves the use of particles such as , , and .
Chinese has a subject–verb–object word order, and, like many other languages of East Asia, makes frequent use of the topic–comment construction to form sentences. Chinese also has an extensive system of classifiers and , another trait shared with neighboring languages such as Japanese and Korean. Other notable grammatical features common to all the spoken varieties of Chinese include the use of serial verb construction, pronoun dropping, and the related subject dropping. Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess differences.
Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and lexicalized phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, a compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including oracle bone versions. The Zhonghua Zihai (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The CC-CEDICT project (2010) contains 97,404 contemporary entries including idioms, technology terms, and names of political figures, businesses, and products. The 2009 version of the Webster's Digital Chinese Dictionary (WDCD),Timothy Uy and Jim Hsia, Editors, Webster's Digital Chinese Dictionary – Advanced Reference Edition, July 2009 based on CC-CEDICT, contains over 84,000 entries.
The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volume Hanyu Da Cidian, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases, and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific, and technical terms.
The 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.
Some early Indo-European loanwords in Chinese have been proposed, notably , , and perhaps , , , and . Ancient words borrowed from along the Silk Road during the Old Chinese period include , , and . Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including and . Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as . Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as , generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pali, the liturgical languages of northern India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as , the Chinese lute, or , but from exactly which source is not always clear.
| 'television' |
| 'computer' |
| 'mobile phone' |
| 'Bluetooth' |
| 'blog' |
Occasionally, compromises between the transliteration and translation approaches become accepted, such as from + . Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes (phono-semantic matching), such as for the video game character 'Mario'. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example for 'Pentium' and for 'Subway'.
Foreign words, mainly , continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, 'Israel' becomes , and 'Paris' becomes . A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including , , , , , and . The bulk of these words were originally coined in Shanghai during the early 20th century and later loaned from there into Mandarin, hence their Mandarin pronunciations occasionally being quite divergent from the English. For example, in Shanghainese and sound more like their English counterparts. Cantonese differs from Mandarin with some transliterations, such as and .
Western foreign words representing Western concepts have influenced Chinese since the 20th century through transcription. From French, and were borrowed for 'ballet' and 'champagne' respectively; was borrowed from Italian caffè 'coffee'. The influence of English is particularly pronounced: from the early 20th century, many English words were borrowed into Shanghainese, such as and the aforementioned . Later, American soft power gave rise to , , and . Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English, such as , , , and . With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, for example, , , and . In Taiwan, some of these transliterations are different, such as and for 'blog'.
Another result of English influence on Chinese is the appearance of so-called spelled with letters from the English alphabet. These have appeared in colloquial usage, as well as in magazines and newspapers, and on websites and television:
Since the 20th century, another source of words has been kanji: Japan re-molded European concepts and inventions into , and many of these words have been re-loaned into modern Chinese. Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, ; in Japanese, which in the original Chinese meant 'the workings of the state', narrowed to 'economy' in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then re-imported into Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. 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.
Most modern written Chinese is in the form of written vernacular Chinese, based on spoken Standard Chinese, regardless of dialectical background. Written vernacular Chinese largely replaced Literary Chinese in the early 20th century as the country's standard written language. However, vocabularies from different Chinese-speaking areas have diverged, and the divergence can be observed in written Chinese.
Due to the divergence of variants, some unique morphemes are not found in Standard Chinese. Characters rarely used in Standard Chinese have also been created or inherited from archaic literary standards to represent these unique morphemes. For example, characters like and are actively used in Cantonese and Hakka, while being archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. The most prominent example of a non-Standard Chinese orthography is Written Cantonese, which is used in tabloids and on the internet among Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong and elsewhere.
Chinese had no uniform system of phonetic transcription until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rhyme dictionaries and dictionaries. 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. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted in some Latin character transcription/writing systems, based on various variants of Chinese languages. Some of these Latin character-based systems are still being used to write various Chinese variants in the modern era.
In Hunan, women in certain areas write their local Chinese language variant in Nüshu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by many a dialect of Mandarin, is nowadays written in Cyrillic and was previously written in the Arabic script. The Dungan people are primarily Muslim and live mainly in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia; many Hui people, living mainly in China, also speak the language.
Modern characters are styled after the regular script. Various other written styles are also used in Chinese calligraphy, including seal script, cursive script and clerical script. Calligraphy artists can write in Traditional and Simplified characters, but they tend to use Traditional characters for traditional art.
There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. Traditional characters, used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau, and many overseas Chinese-speaking communities, largely take their form from received character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty and standardized during the Ming. Simplified characters, introduced by the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional to fewer strokes, especially by adopting common cursive shorthand variants and merging characters with similar pronunciations to the one with the least strokes, among other methods. Singapore, which has a large Chinese community, was the second nation to officially adopt simplified characters—first by creating its own simplified characters, then by adopting entirely the PRC simplified characters. It has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia.
The Internet provides practice reading each of these systems, and most Chinese readers are capable of, if not necessarily comfortable with, reading the alternative system through experience and guesswork.
A well-educated Chinese reader today recognizes approximately 4,000 to 6,000 characters; approximately 3,000 characters are required to read a mainland newspaper. The PRC defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. School children typically learn around 2,000 characters whereas scholars may memorize up to 10,000. A large unabridged dictionary like the Kangxi dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; fewer than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.
Today the most common romanization for Standard Chinese is Hanyu Pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the PRC, and later adopted by Singapore and Taiwan. Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across the Americas, Australia, and Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones of new words. In school books that teach Chinese, the pinyin romanization is often shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the Wade–Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels–it is largely an anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade–Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and was widely used in Taiwan until 2009.
When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade–Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade–Giles's extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with (pinyin), and with than (Wade–Giles). This simplification presents syllables as homophones which are not, and therefore exaggerates the number of homophones almost by a factor of four.
For comparison:
| + Comparison of Mandarin romanizations | |
| China | |
| Taiwan | |
| Beijing | |
| Taipei | |
| Sun Yat-sen | |
| Mao Zedong | |
| Chiang Kai-shek | |
| Confucius |
Other systems include Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the French EFEO, the Yale system (invented for use by US troops during World War II), as well as distinct systems for the phonetic requirements of Cantonese, Min Nan, Hakka, and other varieties.
Besides Mandarin, Cantonese is the only other Chinese language that is widely taught as a foreign language, largely due to the economic and cultural influence of Hong Kong and its widespread usage among significant Overseas Chinese communities.
In 1991, there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test, called Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK), comparable to the English Cambridge Certificate, but by 2005 the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660 "汉语水平考试中心：2005年外国考生总人数近12万", Gov.cn Xinhua News Agency, 16 January 2006. and in 2010 to 750,000.
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