Chinese language

Language or group of languages of the Sino-Tibetan family, spoken in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Chinese communities throughout the world. Varieties of spoken Chinese differ greatly, but all share a written form using thousands of ideographic symbols – characters – which have changed little in 2,000 years. Nowadays, putonghua (‘common speech’), based on the educated Beijing dialect known as Mandarin Chinese, is promoted throughout China as the national spoken and written language.

Because the writing system has a symbolic form (like numbers and music notes) it can be read and interpreted regardless of the reader's own dialect. The Chinese dialects are tonal; that is, they depend on the tone of a syllable to indicate its meaning: ma with one tone means ‘mother’, with another means ‘horse’. The characters of Chinese script were traditionally written down the page from right to left. Today they are commonly written horizontally and read left to right, using 2,000 simplified characters. A variant of the Roman alphabet has been introduced and is used in schools to help with pronunciation. This, called Pinyin, is prescribed for international use by the People's Republic of China for personal and place names (as in Beijing rather than Peking). Pinyin spellings are generally used in this volume, but they are not accepted by the government of Taiwan.