Chinese
From EnglishLinguaWiki
[edit] Chinese language
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) (汉语/漢語, Pinyin: Hànyǔ; 华语/華語, Huáyǔ; or 中文, Zhōngwén) can be considered a language or language family. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over 1 billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "languages" or "dialects" is controversial As a language family Chinese has nearly 1.2 billion speakers; Mandarin Chinese alone has around 850 million native speakers, outnumbering any other language in the world.
[edit] Standard Mandarin
Standard Mandarin, or Standard Chinese, is the official modern Chinese spoken language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China (Taiwan), and Singapore.
The phonology of Standard Mandarin is based on the Beijing dialect, which in turn belongs to Mandarin, a large and diverse group of Chinese dialects spoken across northern and southwestern China. The vocabulary is largely drawn from this group of dialects. The grammar of Standard Mandarin is standardized to the body of modern literary works written in Vernacular Chinese, which in practice follows the same tradition of the Mandarin group of dialects with some notable exceptions. As a result, Standard Mandarin itself is usually just called "Mandarin" in non-academic, everyday usage. However, linguists use "Mandarin" to refer to the entire group of dialects. This convention will be adopted by the rest of this article.
Standard Mandarin is officially known
- in the People's Republic of China as Pǔtōnghuà (Simplified Chinese: 普通话; Traditional Chinese: 普通話, literally "common speech")
- in the Republic of China (Taiwan) as Guóyǔ (Traditional Chinese: 國語; Simplified Chinese: 国语, literally "national language")
- in Malaysia and Singapore as Huáyǔ (Traditional Chinese: 華語; Simplified Chinese: 华语, literally "Chinese (in a cultural sense) language").
[edit] Links and references
refs: wikipedia.org "Standard Mandarin" "Chinese Language"
