Chinese language

Chinese
Hànyǔ written in traditional (top) and simplified (middle) forms, Zhōngwén (bottom)
Native to	China Taiwan Hong Kong Macau Malaysia Singapore [1]
Native speakers	1.35 billion (2017–2022)[1]
Language family	Sino-Tibetan Sinitic Chinese
Early forms	Proto-Sino-Tibetan Old Chinese Eastern Han Chinese Middle Chinese[a]
Standard forms	Standard Chinese Standard Cantonese
Varieties	Mandarin Jin Wu Gan Xiang Min Hakka Yue Ping Huizhou
Writing system	Chinese characters Bopomofo Pinyin Xiao'erjing Dungan Chinese Braille ʼPhags-pa
Official status
Official language in	China[b] Taiwan[c] Singapore
Regulated by	China: State Language Commission Taiwan: National Languages Committee, Hakka Affairs Council Malaysia: Chinese Language Standardisation Council Singapore: Ministry of Education, Promote Mandarin Council
Language codes
ISO 639-1	zh
ISO 639-2	chi (B) zho (T)
ISO 639-3	zho
Glottolog	sini1245
Map of the Chinese-speaking world   Majority Chinese-speaking   Significant Chinese-speaking population   Status as an official or educational language
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Chinese (simplified Chinese: 汉语; traditional Chinese: 漢語; pinyin: Hànyǔ; lit. 'Han language' or 中文; Zhōngwén; 'Chinese writing') is a group of languages^[d] spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China, as well as by various communities of the Chinese diaspora. Approximately 1.35 billion people, or 17% of the global population, speak a variety of Chinese as their first language.^[3]

Chinese languages form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be dialects of a single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered to be separate languages in a family.^[e] Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese, of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin with 66%, or around 800 million speakers, followed by Min (75 million, e.g. Southern Min), Wu (74 million, e.g. Shanghainese), and Yue (68 million, e.g. Cantonese).^[5] These branches are unintelligible to each other, and many of their subgroups are unintelligible with the other varieties within the same branch (e.g. Southern Min). There are, however, transitional areas where varieties from different branches share enough features for some limited intelligibility, including New Xiang with Southwestern Mandarin, Xuanzhou Wu Chinese with Lower Yangtze Mandarin, Jin with Central Plains Mandarin and certain divergent dialects of Hakka with Gan. All varieties of Chinese are tonal at least to some degree, and are largely analytic.

The earliest attested written Chinese consists of the oracle bone inscriptions created during the Shang dynasty c. 1250 BCE. The phonetic categories of Old Chinese can be reconstructed from the rhymes of ancient poetry. During the Northern and Southern period, Middle Chinese went through several sound changes and split into several varieties following prolonged geographic and political separation. The Qieyun, a rime dictionary, recorded a compromise between the pronunciations of different regions. The royal courts of the Ming and early Qing dynasties operated using a koiné language known as Guanhua, based on the Nanjing dialect of Mandarin.

Standard Chinese is an official language of both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan), one of the four official languages of Singapore, and one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin and was first officially adopted in the 1930s. The language is written primarily using a logography of Chinese characters, largely shared by readers who may otherwise speak mutually unintelligible varieties. Since the 1950s, the use of simplified characters has been promoted by the government of the People's Republic of China, with Singapore officially adopting them in 1976. Traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and among Chinese-speaking communities overseas.

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