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Chinese ( simplified Chinese : 汉语; traditional Chinese : 漢語; pinyin : Hànyǔ; lit. ' Han language' or 中文; Zhōngwén; 'Chinese writing') is a group of languages [ d ] spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China. Approximately 1.35 billion people, or 17% of the global population, speak ...
Chinese characters [a] are logographs used to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture.Chinese characters have a documented history spanning over three millennia, representing one of the four independent inventions of writing accepted by scholars; of these, they comprise the only writing system continuously used since its invention.
Yue (including the Cantonese and Taishanese variants) Min (including the Hokkien and Fuzhounese variants) Hakka (Kejia) Xiang (Hunanese) Gan (Jiangxinese) The revised classification of Li Rong, used in the Language Atlas of China (1987) added three further groups split from these: Mandarin → Jin. Wu → Huizhou. Yue → Pinghua.
Mandarin ( / ˈmændərɪn / ⓘ MAN-dər-in; simplified Chinese : 官话; traditional Chinese : 官話; 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 ...
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 ...
Xiang or Hsiang ( Chinese: 湘; Changsha Xiang: [sian˧ y˦˩], [ 2] Mandarin: [ɕi̯aŋ˥ y˨˩˦] ), also known as Hunanese, is a group of linguistically similar and historically related Sinitic languages, spoken mainly in Hunan province but also in northern Guangxi and parts of neighboring Guizhou, Guangdong, Sichuan, Jiangxi and Hubei ...
Conventional English-language usage in Chinese linguistics is to use dialect for the speech of a particular place (regardless of status) while regional groupings like Mandarin and Wu are called dialect groups. [24] Other linguists choose to refer to the major groups as languages. [75]
Jin ( simplified Chinese: 晋语; traditional Chinese: 晉語; pinyin: Jìnyǔ) is a group of Chinese linguistic varieties spoken by roughly 48 million people in northern China, [ 1] including most of Shanxi province, much of central Inner Mongolia, and adjoining areas in Hebei, Henan, and Shaanxi provinces. The status of Jin is disputed among ...