What main Chinese character sets are in use today?

Simplified and Traditional Chinese

What Chinese language issues do I need to watch out for?

Targeting Chinese is very demanding. The character set of the language was developed over 4000 years ago.

Chinese Dialects

The major Chinese dialects - other than Mandarin are: Wu - Cantonese - Min - Hsiang - Hakka

Chinese Language: Mammoth Mandarin leads the way

How many speakers are there of the Chinese language? Mandarin is spoken by 900 million people…

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• 01 What main Chinese character sets are in use today?
• 02 What Chinese language issues do I need to watch out for?
• 03 Chinese Dialects
• 04 Chinese Language: Mammoth Mandarin leads the way
• »
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Chinese - mammoth Mandarin leads the way

The Chinese language: an introduction

Chinese is simply the biggest language in the world - providing that you treat each of its mutually unintelligble varieties as dialects and not languages. In total, there are twice as many speakers as English as a mother tongue language - and it has one of the most ancient character sets. These days Mandarin is considered to be the 'standard' although Chinese has many dialects The major Chinese dialects - other than Mandarin are:

How many speakers are there of the Chinese language?

Mandarin is spoken by some 900 million people - mainly in China.

What Chinese language issues do I need to watch out for?

Targeting Chinese is very demanding. The character set of the language was developed over 4000 years ago and was one of the world's first written scripts. The simplest way to think of Chinese characters is to see them representing syllables - although the reality is a little more complex - but the language is NOT pictographic as some people perceive.

Two main Chinese character sets are in use today:

Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between seven and thirteen main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. Chinese is classified as a macrolanguage with 13 sub-languages in ISO 639-3, though the identification of the varieties of Chinese as multiple "languages" or as "dialects" of a single language is a contentious issue.

The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin, based on the Beijing dialect, which is part of a larger group of North-Eastern and South-Western dialects, often taken as a separate language, this language can be referred to as 官话 Guānhuà or 北方话 Běifānghuà in Chinese. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Of the other varieties, Standard Cantonese is common and influential in Guangdong Province and Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Hokkien, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (where it dominates in Singapore and Malaysia).

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