Chinese, as a language name in English, refers to the Sinitic subgroup of Sino-Tibetan languages in Asia. But it can be translated into various Chinese nouns for the language encompassing many different ideas depending on the context.
First of all, Chinese can be translated as zhongwen generally referring to the language. Zhongwen is also the right term to use for the academic discipline in studying Chinese language and literature, such as zhongwenxi for the Chinese department in a university setting.
Second, the term hanyu “Han language” is used in the context contrasting the languages spoken by the Han nationality that makes up 92% of the 1.3 billion Chinese citizens of the People’s Republic with all of the non-Han languages spoken in China and the rest of the world. Therefore, foreign students who are now learning Chinese are said to be learning hanyu.
Third, as hanyu is a general term for the languages, many of which are mutually unintelligible among speakers of different varieties of Han language, it by default refers to the standard dialect of the country that is known as putonghua literally meaning “common language” in the People’s Republic. Putonghua is a constructed norm based upon the language, a variety of Northern Chinese, spoken in the capital city, Beijing. Moreover, Chinese corresponds to a number of Chinese equivalents depending on the given speech community.
Traditionally, Han-Chinese is divided into seven major dialect groups, Mandarin (or beifanghua Northern Chinese),Wu, Xiang, Gan, Kejia (Hakka), Yue (Cantonese), and Min. Though sharing a large number of cognates, or words of common origin, Chinese dialects vary most strikingly in their sound systems. All Chinese dialects have tones with different pitch contours for each syllable.
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