Sinitic (Chinese) languages constitute an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. About one-fourth of the people in the world speak some variety of Chinese as their native language. By the sheer number of its speakers, the antiquity of its unbroken documented written history, its cultural significance, and its influence on other languages, Chinese is one of the most important languages in the world.

Click on the MLA Interactive Language Map to find out where Chinese (all dialects) is spoken in the United States.

• The situation in the People's Republic of China is characterized by diglossia. For instance, it is common for people to speak Standard Mandarin, plus local dialect(s), plus sometimes a regional lingua franca, such as Cantonese. People frequently switch between Standard Mandarin and the local dialect(s), depending on the situation.
• In the Republic of China (Taiwan), speakers commonly switch back and forth between Standard Mandarin and Taiwanese, and this mixture is considered socially appropriate under many circumstances.
• In Hong Kong, it is acceptable to switch between Cantonese and English, and in some cases, also Standard Mandarin.
• In Singapore, people switch between Standard Mandarin, Mǐn, and English.

The identification of the varieties of Chinese as languages or dialects is a controversial issue. Some call Chinese a language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language branch and its subdivisions languages. The Chinese themselves refer to all forms of spoken Chinese as dialects. This perception is reinforced by a common cultural and political identity and by a common writing system with deep historical roots.

Chinese is distinguished by a great deal of internal diversity. To date, some 1500 varieties of spoken Chinese have been identified. Many variants of spoken Chinese are different enough to be mutually incomprehensible. In fact, the intelligibility between any two of the Chinese dialects is less than that between any two Romance languages. Furthermore, the dialects themselves are far from uniform. There is a great deal of variation within the dialects themselves which also affects intelligibility.

Chinese is usually classified into these major dialect groups:

• Mandarin
  Mandarin is the major dialect of China both in terms of number of speakers (about 70 percent of the total population) and political importance. It is spoken by over 1 billion people primarily in Northern and Central China. The term Mandarin is an English translation of 'official language' , the dialect spoken in . The dialect was considered to be the standard language until the 1950s when the standard language became 'common speech' in China and 'national language' in Taiwan. The two differ slightly from each other in grammar and vocabulary, although both are based on the dialect. One of the four official languages of Singapore, 'Chinese language', is also based on the dialect but is somewhat different from both and.
  
• Wú
  
  
• Yuè
  
  
• Mǐn
  
  Hakka (kè-jiá)
  The Hakka dialects are spoken by over 30 million people throughout southeastern China. The Hakka people were settlers who came from northern China. The name Hakka means 'guest'.
  
• Jìnyǔ
  
  Xiáng
  
  
• Gàn
  The Gàn dialect is spoken by 21 million people in Jiangxi, and some parts of Anhui, Hunan, and Fujian provinces.

Click here to further explore Chinese dialects with interactive maps.

History
Chinese is a written language of great antiquity with an unbroken history dating back to 1,500 BC. There are several main periods in the history of literary (written) Chinese:

• Preclassical (1,500 to 500BC)
  The earliest records of this period are short oracle inscriptions on bone and tortoise shell and an anthology of 305 poems from which scholars have been able to get a great deal of information about the language of that period.
  
• Classical (500BC to 200AD)
  This period begins with the earliest writings of Confucius and ends with the Han dynasty (206BC - 220AD). There are many prose works dating back to this period.
  
• Postclassical (200 AD to mid-20th century)
  The language of this period was modeled on the language of the Classical period. However, even though the written and the spoken language(s) began to diverge to the point that the written form was no longer comprehensible to most people, it continued to be used by administrators, scholars, and the educated elite. This period produced some of the greatest literature of the Tang dynasty (618 to 907 AD) and a large number of neo-Confucian works. This style endured into the first half of the 20th century when efforts began to reform the written language to bring it closer to the spoken form.
  
• Modern (mid 20th century to the present)
  In 1956, Modern Standard Chinese was introduced as part of a broad-sweeping reform to promote literacy. It was based on the pronunciation of the Beijing dialect of Mandarin, the grammar of Northern Mandarin, and the vocabulary used in colloquial speech. Part of the reform movement included the simplification of the traditional characters and the development and dissemination of a phonetic alphabet, known as Pinyin.

Origin
Chinese writing is the oldest system in the world that has hardly changed in the last 4,000 years. It is thought to have originated as pictures around 2,000 BC. The earliest logographs known were on oracle bones. Some of them resembled the objects they attempted to represent. But even so, it was a real writing system and not just a series of pictures.

The precise number of characters in existence is disputed. Historically, estimates range from 40,000 to 80,000, but fluency in reading requires knowledge of approximately 3,000-5,000 characters. Modern dictionaries contain only up to about 8,500 characters, and 7,000 characters are a typical set for a newspaper font.

The Chinese writing system is well-suited for the language because the same words are pronounced quite differently in different parts of China. For instance, the word for man is pronounced as ren, yen, nyin, or len in different regions of China, but it is written everywhere as . This symbol can be understood by speakers of all Chinese dialects regardless of how they may pronounce it. In this way, the Chinese writing system is a unifying factor for all speakers of this largest language community in the world.

Click here to find out more about the origin of Chinese characters.
Click here to find out more about the Chinese writing system.

Characters

Radicals
Each character has a fundamental component, or radical. There are 214 different radicals. Characters are categorized according to their radical. They are then further subcategorized according to their total number of strokes. Each character is made up of a number of strokes, or single movements of the writing instrument, originally a brush, which must be written in a prescribed order. Stroke order can refer to the numerical order in which strokes are written. The number of strokes per character ranges between one and thirty. Characters with more than thirty strokes are extremely rare. This principle of categorization is used by everybody who must learn to read and write Chinese characters because it is easier to memorize the enormous number of characters if they can be broken down into a smaller number of constituents.

In this character for 'mother', the red element on the left is the radical that means 'woman'.

Click here to find out more about stroke order rules and different types of strokes
Click here to see animated presentations of how characters are formed.

Different types of characters
There are five different processes that explain how the characters were created.

• Pictographs
  Roughly 600 Chinese characters are pictographs. They are stylized depictions of objects in the real world and are among the oldest characters in Chinese. They were originally inscribed on stone tablets, bones, and tortoise shells. The evolution of two pictograms is illustrated below.
  Click on Omniglot and Ancient Scripts for more detailed information.

Oracle bone	Seal type*	Modern traditional	Modern simplified**	Pīnyīn	Meaning
				shān	'mountain'
				niǎo	'bird'
* Script used in calligraphy and seals that was used up to the 2nd century BC. **Simplified Chinese characters have been used since ancient times as shortened versions of traditional forms. They were officially formalized in 1958, and a few have been invented in modern times. Some characters are simple enough not to have a simpflied form, such as the character shān 'mountain' above.

• Ideographs
  Ideographs are characters derived from symbols representing ideas or abstractions. For example, the symbols for 'above' and 'below' have become characters 'above' and 'below'.
• Compound Ideograms
  Ideograms are designed to represent relatively abstract ideas, usually by combining several pictograms into a compound whose meaning can be rather arbitrary, as in the example below.

'sun'	'moon'	'bright'

• Phonetic compounds
  Over 90% of Chinese characters were created by combining a character with a related meaning with another character that indicates its pronunciation. This practice appeared relatively late in the development of Chinese writing as the number of homophones (words pronounced identically) uncreased. Phonetic compounding is the standard method for creating new characters today. For example, the character meaning 'washing one's hair' is composed of the character for 'tree', because it sounds the same, and the radical for 'water' because it is semantically related to washing. The phrase 'to wash one's hair' (mù) is pronounced the same as the character mù 'tree'.
  
  

  Meaning	Pronunciation	Character
  xǔi 'water'	mù 'tree'	mù 'wash one's hair

  
  
• Loan characters
  Loan characters are the result of borrowing a character for a word whose pronunciation is that of another word represented by that character. For example, the character yì which means 'easy' today, formerly stood for 'scorpion' because 'easy' and 'scorpion' had the same pronunciation.

Traditional Chinese characters
Traditional Chinese characters are used in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and some overseas Chinese communities. In contrast, simplified characters are used in Mainland China, Malaysia, Singapore and in some overseas Chinese communities, especially those from the above countries who emigrated after the widespread adoption of simplified Chinese characters.

Simplified Chinese characters
The movement to simplify Chinese characters started in the 1890s but did not become an official policy until the 1950s as part of a state-wide campaign to facilitate literacy. Simplification involves a reduction in the number of strokes of commonly used characters. About 2,000 characters have been simplified. Here is an example.

Traditional	Simplified	Pronunciation	Meaning
		mén	'door'

was officially adopted in Mainland China in 1958 to romanize Mandarin. It has been used primarily for teaching Standard Mandarin as a second language/dialect. It is also used in Singapore and Taiwan, and has been adopted by much of the international community as a standard for writing Chinese words and names in the Roman alphabet. The value of lies in the fact that China has thousands of distinct dialects, though there is just one common written language and one common standardized spoken form.

Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in traditional characters, simplified characters, and in . Traditionally, Chinese was written vertically in columns arranged from right to left, but it is common nowadays to write it in horizontal lines from left to right, as is the case below.

Click here to listen to the text in Mandarin

Chinese words in English
English has borrowed many words from Chinese, mostly from Cantonese spoken in the province of Guǎndōng and the city of (Canton), as well as in Hong Kong, and in expatriate Chinese communities and Chinatowns in Southeast Asia, Europe, and the United States. For this reason, many Chinese loanwords made their way into English through Cantonese.

Click here to find out where Chinese is taught in the United States.
Click here to find materials for studying Chinese.

Online resources for the study of Chinese languages
Chinese languages and dialects
An annotated bibliography of Internet Resources for the study of Chinese
Key characteristics of Chinese languages
Open Directory Project: Chinese resources
Chinese characters and radicals
Chinese Romanization Guide
Library of Congress Pinyin Conversion Project
Pīnyīn.info: A guide to the writing of Mandarin Chinese in romanization
UCLA Language Profile for Mandarin
Wikipedia article on Mandarin Chinese
Ethnologue report on Mandarin
Yamada Language Center guide for Chinese
Omniglot guide for Mandarin
Conversational Mandarin Chinese Online
Learning Chinese Online
On-line Chinese Tools
Multimedia Materials