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Mandarin (/ ˈ m æ n d ər ɪ n / ⓘ MAN-dər-in; simplified Chinese: 官话; traditional Chinese: 官話; pinyin: Guānhuà; lit. 'officials' speech') is the largest branch of the Sinitic languages. Mandarin varieties are spoken by 70 percent of all Chinese speakers over a large geographical area that stretches from Yunnan in the southwest ...
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.
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 ...
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Standard Chinese instruction has been gaining popularity in schools throughout East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Western world. [79] Besides Mandarin, Cantonese is the only other Chinese language that is widely taught as a foreign language, largely due to the economic and ...
They translated the term Guānhuà into European languages as língua mandarim (Portuguese) and la lengua mandarina (Spanish), meaning the language of the mandarins, or imperial officials. [12] Ricci and Michele Ruggieri published a Portuguese-Mandarin dictionary in the 1580s. Nicolas Trigault's guide to Mandarin pronunciation was published in ...
Mandarin Chinese, branch of Chinese originally spoken in northern parts of the country Standard Chinese or Modern Standard Mandarin, the official language of China; Taiwanese Mandarin, Standard Chinese as spoken in Taiwan; Mandarin (late imperial lingua franca), the spoken standard of the Ming and Qing dynasties of China
It is being swamped by Mandarin, the official language of more than 1 billion people in China and Taiwan — as different from Cantonese as Spanish is from French.
Kunyu Wanguo Quantu, printed in Ming China at the request of the Wanli Emperor in 1602 by the Italian Catholic missionary Matteo Ricci and Chinese collaborators, the mandarin Zhong Wentao, and the technical translator Li Zhizao, is the earliest known Chinese world map with the style of European maps. [1]