The Chinese language, or group of related languages, is spoken by the Hans, who constitute 94 per cent of China’s population. One word for the language in Chinese is Hanyu, the Han language. Different, non-Han languages are spoken by the other 6 per cent of the population, the so-called minority peoples, such as the Mongols and the Tibetans.
The Chinese language is divided into a number of major dialects (with many sub-dialects). Speakers of different dialects in some cases find each other unintelligible, but dialects are brought together by the fact that they share a common script. The main and official dialect, which is known by a number of names: Mandarin, modern standard Chinese, or Putonghua (’common speech’). It is spoken in its various sub-dialect forms by almost three quarters of the Hans across the northern, central and western regions of China, but its standard pronunciation and grammar are associated with the Beijing area of north China, though not with Beijing city itself. The other dialects are Wu (spoken in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, including Shanghai), Xiang (in Hunan), Cantonese (in Guangdong), Min (in Fujian), Hakka (in northeast Guangdong and other southern provinces) and Gan (in Jiangxi).
Cantonese, Min and Hakka are widely spoken among overseas Chinese. In Taiwan a form of Min dialect is used, though the official language is Mandarin, and called there guoyu (’national language’). Mandarin in also widely used in Singapore, where it is known as huayu (’Chinese language’). Elsewhere, Chinese emigrants took their particular dialects with them, and in Britain, for instance, the Chinese people, who are largely from Hong Kong, almost all speak Cantonese.
The Chinese character script existed virtually unchanged for two thousand years until a range of simplified forms began to be introduced by the mainland Chinese government in the 1950s. These simplified characters are used throughout China and increasingly in Chinese communities outside China.
The formal written language of China until the early decades of the twentieth century was Classical Chinese, which, as the vehicle for all publicly acknowledged literature and for official documentation, was at the heart of the Chinese cultural tradition. However, it had grown remote from spoken Chinese in syntax and lexis, and had a position somewhat akin to medieval Latin in relation to the Romance languages it had spawned. It was left behind by modern written styles, based on spoken Chinese, which evolved over the last hundred years, but echoes of Classical Chinese remain in contemporary speech and writing, especially in literary and aphoristic registers.
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