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The Language Atlas of China (simplified Chinese: 中国语言地图集; traditional Chinese: 中國語言地圖集; pinyin: Zhōngguó yǔyán dìtú jí), published by Hong Kong Longman Publishing Company in two parts in 1987 and 1989, maps the distribution of both the varieties of Chinese and minority languages of China.
The Linguistic Atlas of Chinese Dialects (Chinese: 汉语方言地图集; pinyin: Hànyǔ Fāngyán Dìtú Jí), edited by Cao Zhiyun and published in 2008 in three volumes, is a dialect atlas documenting the geography of varieties of Chinese. Unlike the Language Atlas of China (1987), which aims to map the boundaries of both minority languages ...
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 Sihai Huayi Zongtu ("Complete Map of the Four Seas, China, and the Barbarians") is a Chinese world map dated to 1532, the 11th year of the Ming Dynasty's Jiajing Emperor. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] It is now located in the Harvard Library .
The Chinese territory that existed between the 1750's after the Qing Dynasty had completed its overall unification of China and 1840's before the aggression and encroachment on China by the imperialist powers is the territorial and geographical scope and range of China, a logical and natural formation from the historical process over thousands ...
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.
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 ...