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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 ...
The Sinosphere is different from the Sinophone world, which indicates regions where the Chinese language is spoken. [ 11 ] Imperial China was a major regional power in Eastern Asia and exerted influence on tributary states and neighboring states, including Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.
Standard Chinese (simplified Chinese: 现代标准汉语; traditional Chinese: 現代標準漢語; pinyin: Xiàndài biāozhǔn hànyǔ; lit. 'modern standard Han speech') is a modern standard form of Mandarin Chinese that was first codified during the republican era (1912–1949).
The highly diverse Nilo-Saharan languages, first proposed as a family by Joseph Greenberg in 1963 might have originated in the Upper Paleolithic. [1] Given the presence of a tripartite number system in modern Nilo-Saharan languages, linguist N.A. Blench inferred a noun classifier in the proto-language, distributed based on water courses in the Sahara during the "wet period" of the Neolithic ...
Distribution of Chinese languages in China Distribution of Mandarin dialects in China. Chinese language (or Chinese languages) can be divided to 10 primary dialects (or languages). [59] Each Han Chinese subgroup (民系) can be identified through their dialects: [54] [55] Wu (吴语): Jiangzhe people (江浙民系) Hui (徽语): Wannan people ...