Chinese is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China. Approximately 1.35 billion people, or around 16% of the global population, speak a variety of Chinese as their first language.
Mandarin is a group of Chinese language dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language of China. Because Mandarin originated in North China and most Mandarin dialects are found in the north, the group is sometimes referred to as Northern Chinese. Many varieties of Mandarin, such as those of the Southwest and the Lower Yangtze, are not mutually intelligible with the standard language. Nevertheless, Mandarin as a group is often placed first in lists of languages by number of native speakers.
Standard Chinese is a modern standard form of Mandarin Chinese that was first codified during the republican era (1912‒1949). It is designated as the official language of mainland China and a major language in the United Nations, Singapore, and Taiwan. It is largely based on the Beijing dialect. Standard Chinese is a pluricentric language with local standards in mainland China, Taiwan and Singapore that mainly differ in their lexicon. Hong Kong written Chinese, used for formal written communication in Hong Kong and Macau, is a form of Standard Chinese that is read aloud with the Cantonese reading of characters.
Written Chinese is a writing system that uses Chinese characters and other symbols to represent the Chinese languages. Chinese characters do not directly represent pronunciation, unlike letters in an alphabet or syllabograms in a syllabary. Rather, the writing system is morphosyllabic: characters are one spoken syllable in length, but generally correspond to morphemes in the language, which may either be independent words, or part of a polysyllabic word. Most characters are constructed from smaller components that may reflect the character's meaning or pronunciation. Literacy requires the memorization of thousands of characters; college-educated Chinese speakers know approximately 4,000. This has led in part to the adoption of complementary transliteration systems as a means of representing the pronunciation of Chinese.
Classical Chinese is the language in which the classics of Chinese literature were written, from c. the 5th century BCE. For millennia thereafter, the written Chinese used in these works was imitated and iterated upon by scholars in a form now called Literary Chinese, which was used for almost all formal writing in China until the early 20th century. When writing, each Chinese character generally corresponds to a word in the language, with words almost always being one syllable in length. As a result, the characteristic style of the language is comparatively terse.
Wu is a major group of Sinitic languages spoken primarily in Shanghai, Zhejiang Province, and the part of Jiangsu Province south of the Yangtze River, which makes up the cultural region of Wu. Speakers of various Wu languages sometimes labelled their mother tongue as Shanghainese when introduced to foreigners. The Suzhou dialect was the prestige dialect of Wu as of the 19th century, but had been replaced in status by Shanghainese by the turn of the 20th century. The languages of Northern Wu are mutually intelligible with each other, while those of Southern Wu are not.
Literary language is the form (register) of a language used when writing in a formal, academic, or particularly polite tone; when speaking or writing in such a tone, it can also be known as formal language. It may be the standardized variety of a language. It can sometimes differ noticeably from the various spoken lects, but the difference between literary and non-literary forms is greater in some languages than in others. If there is a strong divergence between a written form and the spoken vernacular, the language is said to exhibit diglossia.
"Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den" is a short narrative poem written in Literary Chinese that is composed of about 94 characters in which every word is pronounced shi when read in modern Standard Chinese, a dialect based on the Mandarin Chinese spoken in Beijing, with only the tones differing.
Written Cantonese is the most complete written form of a Chinese language after that for Mandarin Chinese and Classical Chinese. Written Chinese was the main literary language of China until the 19th century. Written vernacular Chinese first appeared in the 17th century, and a written form of Mandarin became standard throughout China in the early 20th century. Cantonese is a common language in places like Hong Kong and Macau. While the Mandarin form can to some extent be read and spoken word for word in other Chinese varieties, its intelligibility to non-Mandarin speakers is poor to incomprehensible because of differences in idioms, grammar and usage. Modern Cantonese speakers have therefore developed new characters for words that do not exist and have retained others that have been lost in standard Chinese.
Standard Chinese is a standard form of Mandarin Chinese with de facto official status in China, Taiwan, and Singapore.
"Diary of a Madman", also translated as "A Madman's Diary" is a short story by the Chinese writer Lu Xun, published in 1918. It was the first and one of the most influential works written in vernacular Chinese in Republican era China, and would become a cornerstone of the New Culture Movement. Lu Xun's stories often critiqued early 20th century Chinese society, and "Diary of a Madman" established a new language and revolutionary figure of Chinese literature, an attempt to challenge conventional thinking and traditional understanding.
Language reform is a kind of language planning by widespread change to a language. The typical methods of language reform are simplification and linguistic purism. Simplification regularises vocabulary, grammar, or spelling. Purism aligns the language with a form which is deemed 'purer'.
The languages of Taiwan consist of several varieties of languages under the families of Austronesian languages and Sino-Tibetan languages. The Formosan languages, a geographically designated branch of Austronesian languages, have been spoken by the Taiwanese indigenous peoples for thousands of years. Owing to the wide internal variety of the Formosan languages, research on historical linguistics recognizes Taiwan as the Urheimat (homeland) of the whole Austronesian languages family. In the last 400 years, several waves of Han emigrations brought several different Sinitic languages into Taiwan. These languages include Taiwanese Hokkien, Hakka, and Mandarin, which have become the major languages spoken in present-day Taiwan.
A Chinese dictionary is a reference work for the Chinese language. There are two main types of Chinese dictionaries: zidian, which list individual Chinese characters and their definitions, and cidian, which list words and short phrases along with their meanings. Because written Chinese consists of tens of thousands of characters, over time editors of Chinese dictionaries have developed a number of ways to organize them for convenient reference.
Singaporean Mandarin is a variety of Mandarin Chinese spoken natively in Singapore. It is one of the four official languages of Singapore along with English, Malay and Tamil.
Differing literary and colloquial readings for certain Chinese characters are a common feature of many Chinese varieties, and the reading distinctions for these linguistic doublets often typify a dialect group. Literary readings are usually used in loanwords, names, literary works, and in formal settings, while colloquial/vernacular readings are usually used in everyday vernacular speech.
Hokkien, a Southern Min variety of Chinese spoken in Southeastern China, Taiwan and Southeast Asia, does not have a unitary standardized writing system, in comparison with the well-developed written forms of Cantonese and Vernacular Chinese (Mandarin). In Taiwan, a standard for Written Hokkien has been developed by the Republic of China Ministry of Education including its Dictionary of Frequently-Used Taiwan Minnan, but there are a wide variety of different methods of writing in Vernacular Hokkien. Nevertheless, vernacular works written in Hokkien are still commonly seen in literature, film, performing arts and music.
Modern Chinese poetry, including New poetry, refers to post Qing dynasty Chinese poetry, including the modern vernacular (baihua) style of poetry increasingly common with the New Culture and 4 May 1919 movements, with the development of experimental styles such as "free verse" ; but, also including twentieth and twenty-first century continuations or revivals of Classical Chinese poetry forms. Some modern Chinese poetry represents major new and modern developments in the poetry of one of the world's larger areas, as well as other important areas sharing this linguistic affinity. One of the first poets and theorist in the modern Chinese poetry mode was Hu Shih (1891–1962).
Mandarin was the common spoken language of administration of the Chinese empire during the Ming and Qing dynasties. It arose as a practical measure, due to the mutual unintelligibility of the varieties of Chinese spoken in different parts of China. Knowledge of this language was thus essential for an official career, but it was never formally defined. The language was a koiné based on Mandarin dialects. The southern variant spoken around Nanjing was prevalent in the late Ming and early Qing eras, but a form based on the Beijing dialect became dominant by the mid-19th century and developed into Standard Chinese in the 20th century. In some 19th-century works, it was called the court dialect.
