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Chinese, also being called Mandarin, is the language used by Han people,
the majority ethnic group in China. It is also the official language of
China. Over billion people, or ninety percent of China’s total
population speak Mandarin. Other than Mandarin, a number of regional
languages such as Tibetan, Mongolian, Lolo, Miao and Tai, are spoken by
people from the ethnic minority groups in China.
Chinese or Mandarin belongs to the family of Sino-Tibetan languages.
Besides core differences in vocabularies and pronunciations, Chinese has
several unique features that distinguish itself from most Western
languages: it is monosyllabic; it has very little inflection; and it is
tonal. In order to differentiate meanings between the words that are
similar in pronunciation, a tonal language assigns to its words a
distinctive pitch, high or low, rising or falling.
Oral Chinese has many regional variants, referring to different
dialects. As a matter of fact, Mandarin is the official and most popular
dialect of Chinese. Many call it “standard Chinese”. Most people in
China can at lease understand Mandarin. On the other hand, most Chinese
dialects are mutually intelligible.
In as early as the 17th century, the Imperial government of
the Qing Dynasty had seen the necessity of establishing an official
national language. So it set up a series of language institutes teaching
and promoting standard Peking pronunciation, particularly in the
Cantonese and Fukienese-speaking southern provinces. But their efforts
somehow failed. The concept of a national language was actually
introduced in 1913, when then Ministry of Education convened the
Commission for Pronunciation Unification to establish a set of Chinese
language pronunciation standards.
After several attempts of using the roman alphabetic letters to spell
out the written Chinese, a 58-symbol writing system was finally adopted
in 1958. The main purpose of introducing such a system was to promote
the standardization of the Chinese language and to facilitate the
learning of Chinese characters.
In the present time, a simplified writing system is being used in
mainland China, whereas in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the overseas regions,
the traditional Chinese scripts still dominate. The simplified writing
system differs in two ways from the traditional writing system: a
reduction in number of the strokes per character; and a decrease in
character sets for common use. |
