Chinese language
   Chinese or the Sinitic language 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 one billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "languages" or "dialects" is controversial.

   Chinese is the most widely used language in China and the world at large. It is designated as one of the six official languages by the United Nations. Chinese is the shared language of Han Nationality. Besides Han ethnic group which accounts 91.59% of China’s integral population, some ethnic minorities also speak Chinese or take Chinese as their second mother tongue.

   Modern Chinese can be divided into standard Chinese (mandarin) and dialect. Mandarin takes Peking Dialect as its standard pronunciation, dialect of people in North China as its basis, and classic modern colloquial works as its linguistic regulations. On October 31st, 2000, Law of Universal Language and Character of People's Republic of China came into force and it stipulates mandarin as a universal national language. Han Dialect comprises of seven branches, namely, North China Dialect, Wu Dialect, Hunan Dialect, Jiangxi Dialect, Hakka Dialect, Guangdong Dialect, and Fujian Dialect. Each branch has its own sub-branches and jargons. For instance, the most popular North China Dialect can be further classified into North Mandarin, Northwest Mandarin, Southwest Mandarin, and Xiajiang Mandarin.

Written Chinese
   The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is a complex one. Its spoken variations evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period, although written records have been discovered as far back as the 14th to 11th centuries BCE Shang dynasty oracle bones using the oracle bone scripts.

 

   The Chinese orthography centers around Chinese characters, hanzi, which are written within imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change.

 

Chinese characters
   Chinese characters evolved over time from earliest forms of hieroglyphs. The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic Radicals.

 

   Modern characters are styled after the standard script Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script cursive script and clerical script Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but tend to use traditional characters for traditional art.

   There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia) outside mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty. The Simplified Chinese character system, developed by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common caoshu shorthand variants.

 

Minorities
   Actually the Mandarin and Chinese characters used by Han people are also the common language for other minorities. Among all the 55 Chinese ethnic minorities, the people of Hui and Man nationalities also use Mandarin Chinese and its characters. 29 ethnic minorities have their own traditional languages like Tibetan, Yi, Mongol, Uygur, Kazak, Lahu, Chaoxian and Kirgiz. Some minorities, like Dai nationality and Jingpo nationality, use even more than one kind of language and characters.