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Mandarin ( / ˈmændərɪn / ⓘ MAN-dər-in; Chinese: 官话; pinyin: Guānhuà; lit. 'officials' speech') 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.
Standard Chinese (simplified Chinese: 现代标准汉语; traditional Chinese: 現代標準漢語; pinyin: Xiàndài biāozhǔn hànyǔ; lit. 'modern standard Han speech') is a modern standard form of Mandarin Chinese that was first codified during the republican era (1912‒1949).
Standard Chinese is the standard language of China (where it is called 普通话; pǔtōnghuà) and Taiwan, and one of the four official languages of Singapore (where it is called either 华语; 華語; Huáyǔ or 汉语; 漢語; Hànyǔ ). Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin.
The Table of General Standard Chinese Characters is the current standard list of 8,105 Chinese characters published by the government of the People's Republic of China and promulgated in June 2013. The project began in 2001, originally named the "Table of Standard Chinese Characters." This table integrates the First Batch of Simplified ...
Taiwanese Mandarin, frequently referred to as Guoyu ( Chinese: 國語; pinyin: Guóyǔ; lit. 'national language') or Huayu ( 華語; Huáyǔ; 'Chinese language'), is the variety of Mandarin Chinese spoken in Taiwan. A large majority of the Taiwanese population is fluent in Mandarin, though many also speak a variety of Min Chinese known as ...
The Chinese term fāngyán 方言, composed of characters meaning 'place' and 'speech', was the title of the first work of Chinese dialectology in the Han dynasty, and has had a range of meanings in the millennia since. [81]
The Chinese language has always consisted of a wide variety of dialects; hence prestige dialects and linguae francae have always been needed. Confucius (c. 551 – c. 479 BC) referred to yayan 'elegant speech' modeled on the dialect of the Zhou dynasty royal lands rather than regional dialects; texts authored during the Han dynasty (202 BC – 220 AD) also refer to tongyu (通語 'common ...
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 ...