Aspects of the Chinese Language 1 Chinese, a branch of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages( 汉藏语系 ), consists of hundreds of local language varieties, many of which are not mutually intelligible. It is estimated that more than one billion people speak some form of Chinese as their first language. History 2 Old Chinese is the oldest attested stage of Chinese, and is the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese. It was used from the pre-Qin days to the Jin Dynasty. The first Chinese written records appeared over 3,000 years ago, the earliest examples of which are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones in the late Shang Dynasty. Bronze inscriptions became plentiful during the following Zhou Dynasty. The latter part of the Zhou Dynasty saw a flowering of literature, including classical works such as The Analects, The Works of Mencius and The Spring and Autumn Annals . These works served as models for classical Chinese. 3 Middle Chinese is the language used during the Northern and Southern Dynasties and the Sui, Tang and Song dynasties. It can be divided into an early period, marked by the rhyme book, Qieyun (《切韵》), and a late period, signified by the rhyme tables (韵图)---a guide to the Qieyun system. Middle Chinese is the traditional starting point for efforts to recover the sounds of early forms of Chinese. 4 After the fall of the Northern Song Dynasty, and during the reign of the Jin and Yuan dynasties in northern China, a common speech (now called Old Mandarin) developed. Officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using a "language of officials" based on Mandarin varieties. For most time of the Ming and Qing dynasties, this language was based on dialects spoken in the Nanjing area, though not identical to any single dialect. By 1909, the dying Qing Dynasty had established the Beijing dialect as the “national language.” 5 The People’s Republic of China continued with the promotion of a common national language, and in 1956, the standard language of China was officially defined. Putonghua is the standard form of Modern Chinese with the Beijing phonological system as its norm of pronunciation, and northern dialects as its dialect base, and it looks to exemplary modern works in vernacular literary language for its grammatical norms. Putonghua is now used in education, the media and formal situations in China. Chinese is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Pronunciation 7 Chinese characters do not reliably indicate their pronunciation. It is therefore useful to transliterate Chinese into the Latin alphabet for those who cannot read Chinese characters. The pinyin system was developed in the 1950s by many linguists based on earlier forms of Romanization of Chinese. It was published by the Chinese government in 1958 and has been revised several times. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO)(国际标准化组织)adopted pinyin as an international standard in 1982, followed by the United Nations in 1986. 8 In pinyin, initials and finals form the fundamental elements. Every Mandarin syllable can be spelled with one initial followed by one final, or in some cases with one final only, except for the special syllable er or when a trailing -r is considered part of a syllable. The system includes four diacritics denoting tones. Pinyin without tone marks is used to spell Chinese names and words in languages written with the Latin alphabet, and also in certain computer input methods to enter Chinese characters. Classification 9 Chinese varieties, or dialects, are conventionally classified into seven dialect groups: ●Mandarin: A group of related varieties of Chinese spoken across most of northern and southwestern China, based on the Beijing dialect. ●Wu: Varieties spoken in Shanghai, most of Zhejiang and the southern parts of Jiangsu and Anhui, with the Suzhou dialect being usually taken as representative. The Shanghai dialect features several atypical innovations. ●Gan: Varieties spoken in Jiangxi and neighbouring areas, with the Nanchang dialect being taken as representative ●Xiang: Varieties spoken in Hunan, divided into the New Xiang varieties represented by the Changsha dialect and Old Xiang varieties represented by the Shuangfeng dialect ●Min: The most diverse varieties spoken in Fujian, Guangdong, Hainan, Taiwan, as well as parts of Southeast Asia and other parts of the world, with Hokkien being the most widely spoken. ●Hakka: Varieties spoken by the Hakka, a group of Han Chinese living in the hills of northeastern Guangdong, southwestern Fujian, Taiwan, and many other parts of southern China, as well as parts of Southeast Asia, with the Meizhou dialect being the prestige form. ●Yue: Varieties spoken in Guangdong, Guangxi, Hong Kong and Macao, as well as parts of Southeast Asia and many other parts of the world, with the representative variety being Cantonese.