Introduction
Spoken in China by over 1 billion people, 95% of the Chinese population. Minorities use languages from different language families:Tibetan, Mongolian, Lolo, Miao and Tai. Chinese is the most spoken language in the world.
As it is the dominant language in East Asia, Chinese influenced the lexicon and spelling of neighboring languages, but belonging to another linguistic group. Among them, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese belong to the Altaic linguistic group. It is believed that, until the 18th century, more than half of the world's books were published in Chinese.
General Features
Chinese, Burmese, and Tibetan—as well as many languages of small Southeast Asian tribes—belong to the Sino-Tibetan family. With the exception of the lexicon and some basic phonemes, Chinese and other related languages show traits that make them different from Western ones:they are monosyllabic, with few tonal inflections.
Languages and Dialects
Chinese has dialects classified into seven major groups (see table). Differences in lexicon and pronunciation are analogous to those in Romance languages. Most Chinese speak the same dialect, called Mandarin by Westerners. Mandarin forms the basis of the current vernacular script, Baihua, which, in turn, is the basis of the official language:Putonghua.
Writing
The writing belongs to the archaic period and conserves types that attribute distinct characters to each word. To read a newspaper it is necessary to know 2 to 3 thousand characters. A dictionary contains over 40,000 characters ordered phonically and formally.
The oldest known texts date back to the 4th century BC. The structure of these texts, as well as most symbols, remains unchanged in the current language. Unlike most written languages, Chinese is made up of ideograms and is not a phonetic language.
Since 1892, the English-speaking world has transcribed Chinese words into the Roman alphabet. The transcription method followed the phonetic system, applied to writing, called "Wade-Giles romanization". Starting in 1958, the People's Republic of China organized another system of romanization of writing and established 58 symbols, known as pinyin (orthographic writing). The replacement of ancient ideograms by Roman symbols, however, poses a threat to literature and historical documents written in the classical language.
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