Chinese Language

Chinese writing originated nearly four thousand years ago and that spoken language goes back to distant antiquity, making it one of the world’s oldest languages. Chinese belongs to the family of Sino-Tibetan languages. Hanyu (汉语), literally “Han language”, refers to the standard Chinese language, and is spoken by the Han, Hui, Manchu and other ethnic groups that make up 94% of China’s population. There are fifty-six recognized ethnic groups in China, using more than eighty different languages.

The Chinese language includes variations from seven main groups of dialects. The northern or Mandarin dialect covers three-fourths of China’s territory and comprises two-thirds of its population. Standard Chinese is also known by its official name, Putonghua, which literally means “common speech”. Putonghua (普通话) is based on the northern dialect, using the Beijing dialect as the basis for its pronunciation and modern folk literature for its grammatical structure. This is the Chinese dialect that is officially taught in schools in China.

Instead of letters, the Chinese language uses ideograms, i.e. symbols that represent a concept and not a syllable or phoneme. There are 47.000 of these, and to communicate with a Chinese person on a daily basis, you need to know about 600 ideograms. In Chinese there are only 328 simple monosyllabic words, from which the complex words are derived. An ideogram can have many meanings, and this is because the number of simple words is small.

Chinese has 4 tones, that is, 4 different voice intensities. Thus, in oral speech, the meaning of a word is determined by the intensity of the tone, as well as by the position of the word within the sentence. Chinese is not difficult due to the fact that it has a very simple syntax. There are no articles, genders, cases, verb type endings and singular and plural endings.