The vast majority of the speakers are in People’s Republic of China (1.1 billion) and Taiwan (19 million), but others are found throughout South-east Asia, including Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore. Chinese has more than twice the number of speakers of English.

History and Origins

The earliest Chinese characters were pictographs. A pictograph is a picture representing a word or idea, similar to a hieroglyph. For example, the symbol for moon would be a crescent, and a sun would be represented by a circle with a dot in the center. Gradually these gave way to nonpictorial ideographs which, in addition to standing for tangible objects, often represent abstract concepts.

Chinese, like the other languages of the Sino-Tibetan family, is a tonal language, which means that different intonations distinguish words that would otherwise be pronounced identically. The four Chinese tones are: flat tone; rising tone; low rising tone; down tone. It is not unusual for only one syllable to be pronounced in each of the four tones, producing four words that each has a completely different meaning!

Different varieties of the language

There are many types of Chinese, which are each referred to as dialects. Mandarin, found in the capital of Beijing, is considered the standard dialect and is spoken by two-thirds of the population, while Cantonese is the second most widely spoken dialect, and is primarily spoken in Hong Kong. The other major dialects are: Wu; Fukienese (or Min), Hakka, and Xiang.

Dialects are as different from each other (mainly in pronunciation and vocabulary) as Spanish is from French or Italian. They are simply referred to as dialects because of their shared origins and common use of the Chinese script. A word may be quite different in Mandarin and Cantonese, but it would be written identically in the two dialects.

Chinese is written with thousands of distinctive characters called ideographs that usually have little relation to the sound of a word. In a large dictionary there are 40-50,000 characters. A Chinese child will learn about 2,000 characters by the time he is ten years-old, but it takes two or three times as many to be able to read a newspaper! The number of strokes required to draw a Chinese character can be as high as 36. Chinese is a very complicated language to learn, and some have shown interest in changing the whole language.

The 20th-century movement for language reform in China is an attempt to revise a complex, literary form of the language that is no longer and use, and difficult for many to understand. Wén-yán (‘literary speech’ or ‘body of classical writing’) is a cultivated language, found to have existed as early as BC1500. Although the traditional unifying medium for all dialects of Chinese, it differs greatly from everyday speech. Its complicated grammatical style and elevated vocabulary are two reasons why politicians and scholars are attempting to reform Chinese.

The goals of the reform are to:

1. Simplify classical written Chinese by cutting down on the number of characters, and reducing the number of strokes it takes to write a character
2. Concentrate solely on the standard Beijing-based variety, and
3. Introduce a phonetic alphabet to replace the Chinese characters in everyday use.