Chinese
People's Republic of China · Asia
About Chinese
Mandarin Chinese is the official language of mainland China, and one of the official languages of Taiwan and Singapore. Chinese is also one of the official languages in Hong Kong and Macau, although most local people speak Cantonese instead of Mandarin. In English, it is often just called "Mandarin" or "Chinese". While not an official language, it is also widely studied and spoken by the Chinese minorities in Malaysia, Brunei and Myanmar, and commonly heard in Chinatowns throughout the world. In China, it is called Pǔtōnghuà (普通话), meaning "common speech", while in Taiwan it is referred to as Guóyǔ (國語), "the national language." In Indonesia, it is widely known as Zhōnghuáyǔ (中华语), and in Singapore and Malaysia, it simply referred to as Huáyǔ (华语). It has been the main language of education in mainland China and Taiwan since the 1950s, so most non-elderly locals speak it regardless of what their native language or dialect is.
While the spoken Mandarin in the above places is more or less the same, the written characters are different. Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau all still use traditional characters, whereas Mainland China and Singapore use a simplified derivative. In Indonesia, the older Chinese generations tend to use the traditional characters, but younger generations tend to use the simplified one, though most of the time, the usage of the Latin script is way more commonly pr
Chinese travel guide
Understand
China is host to a wide variety of related languages (often referred to as dialects), of which Standard Mandarin is just one. Within the Chinese language family, there are 7-10 major branches, each of which contain their own varieties of languages. Languages from different branches (such as Mandarin and Cantonese) are completely mutually unintelligible, whereas languages within the same branch (such as Standard Mandarin and Sichuanese) may have limited mutual intelligibility. Despite the wide variance in Chinese languages, all speakers normally write the same standard form (using either traditional or simplified characters). This is possible because the Chinese writing system is logographic, meaning individual characters represent ideas as opposed to phonetic sounds. What this means is that one character that would be pronounced completely differently in any number of Chinese languages will be written identically and understood to mean the same thing. Therefore speakers of different Chinese languages who are completely unable to understand each others' speech can effectively communicate via writing. The challenge with a logographic writing system, however, is the huge number of characters required to adequately represent different words: the average Chinese dictionary indexes around 20,000 characters, with an educated Chinese person likely knowing around 8,000, while a typical newspaper requires the reader to know at least 3,000 characters. Historically, there was no standard spoken Chinese, though China's first emperor Qin Shihuang established a literary standard in the 3rd century B.C., which we today call Classical Chinese (文言文 wényán wén). Classical Chinese was also adopted as the literary language in Japan, Korea and Vietnam, and was only abandoned in favour of their respective native languages with the rise of nationalism and colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Classical Chinese was notoriously difficult as it had diverged significantly from any variet
Overview adapted from Wikipedia, travel guide fromWikivoyage (CC BY-SA)。Photography via Wikimedia Commons.