Chinese

Chinese is spoken in china, Hongkong, macau, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singpore and other regions with Chinese communities. Standard Mandarin is the official Language of the people of Republic of china and the Republic of china (Taiwan). About one-fifth of the world’s population or over 1 Billion people speak some form of Chinese as their native language.

Chinese Language Facts:

About one-fifth of the world speaks some form of Chinese as its native language, making it the language with the most native speakers. The Chinese language (spoken in its standard Mandarin form) is the official language of the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China, one of four official languages of Singapore, and one of six official languages of the United Nations.

The terms and concepts used by Chinese to think about language are different from those used in the West, partly because of the unifying effects of the Chinese characters used in writing, and partly because of differences in the political and social development of China in comparison with Europe.

Whereas after the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe fragmented into small nation-states, the identities of which were often defined by language, China was able to preserve cultural and political unity through the same period

One major difference between Chinese concepts of language and Western concepts is that Chinese makes a sharp distinction between written language (wen) and spoken language (yu). This distinction extends to the distinction between written word (zi) and spoken word (hua).

The concept of a distinct and unified combination of both written and spoken forms of language is much less strong in Chinese than in the West. There are a variety of spoken Chinese, the most prominent of which is Mandarin.

Spoken Chinese is a tonal language related to Tibetan and Burmese, but genetically unrelated to other neighboring languages, such as Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, and Japanese. However, these languages were strongly influenced by Chinese in the course of history, linguistically and also extralinguistically.

Korean and Japanese both have writing systems employing Chinese characters, which are called Hanja and Kanji, respectively. In North Korea, Hanja has been completely discontinued and Hangul is the sole way to express their language, while in South Korea, Hanja is used as a form of bold face.

Along with those two languages, Vietnamese also contains many Chinese loanwords and formerly used Chinese characters.