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The earliest historical linguistic evidence of the spoken Chinese language dates back approximately 4500 years, [1] while examples of the writing system that would become written Chinese are attested in a body of inscriptions made on bronze vessels and oracle bones during the Late Shang period (c. 1250 – 1050 BCE), [2] [3] with the very oldest dated to c. 1200 BCE.
Chinese may be viewed either as a holistic unit with great internal topological variation, or as an entire language family comprising many groupings of varieties. Written Chinese makes use of Chinese characters , one of the four independent inventions of writing agreed by scholars, and the only one of these remaining in use.
The Chinese language has always consisted of a wide variety of dialects; hence prestige dialects and linguae francae have always been needed. Confucius (c. 551 – c. 479 BC) referred to yayan 'elegant speech' modeled on the dialect of the Zhou dynasty royal lands rather than regional dialects; texts authored during the Han dynasty (202 BC – 220 AD) also refer to tongyu (通語 'common ...
Sima Guang. The principal text of the Zizhi Tongjian comprises a year-by-year narrative of the history of China over 294 scrolls, sweeping through many Chinese historical periods (Warring States, Qin, Han, Three Kingdoms, Jin and the Sixteen Kingdoms, Southern and Northern dynasties, Sui, Tang, and Five Dynasties), supplemented with two sections of 30 scrolls each—'tables' (目錄; mùlù ...
The Mongol Yuan dynasty became the first conquest dynasty in Chinese history to rule the entirety of China proper and its population as an ethnic minority. The dynasty also directly controlled the Mongol heartland and other regions, inheriting the largest share of territory of the eastern Mongol empire , which roughly coincided with the modern ...
The Chinese Historical Review is a biannual peer-reviewed academic journal published by Taylor & Francis on behalf of Chinese Historians in the United States.The journal publishes original research on the history of China in every period, China's historical relations with the world, the historical experiences of the overseas Chinese, as well as comparative and transnational studies of history ...
There are several hundred languages in China.The predominant language is Standard Chinese, which is based on Beijingese, but there are hundreds of related Chinese languages, collectively known as Hanyu (simplified Chinese: 汉语; traditional Chinese: 漢語; pinyin: Hànyǔ, 'Han language'), that are spoken by 92% of the population.
The complex relationship between spoken and written Chinese is an example of diglossia: as spoken, Chinese varieties have evolved at different rates, while the written language used throughout China changed comparatively little, crystallizing into a prestige form known as Classical or Literary Chinese.