Languages of China

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Template:Short description Template:Use dmy dates Template:Languages of There are several hundred languages in the People's Republic of China. The predominant language is Standard Chinese, which is based on Beijingese, but there are hundreds of related Chinese languages, collectively known as Hanyu (Template:Lang-zh, 'Han language'), that are spoken by 92% of the population. The Chinese (or 'Sinitic') languages are typically divided into seven major language groups, and their study is a distinct academic discipline.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> They differ as much from each other morphologically and phonetically as do English, German and Danish, but speakers of different Chinese languages are taught to write in Mandarin (written vernacular Mandarin) at school and often do to communicate with speakers of other Chinese languages. This does not mean non-Mandarin Sinitic languages do not have vernacular written forms however (see written Cantonese). There are in addition approximately 300 minority languages spoken by the remaining 8% of the population of China.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> The ones with greatest state support are Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur and Zhuang.

According to the 2010 edition of Nationalencyklopedin, 955 million out of China's then-population of 1.34 billion spoke some variety of Mandarin Chinese as their first language, accounting for 71% of the country's population.<ref>Mikael Parkvall, "Världens 100 största språk 2007" (The World's 100 Largest Languages in 2007), in Nationalencyklopedin. Asterisks mark the 2010 estimates for the top dozen languages.</ref> According to the 2019 edition of Ethnologue, 904 million people in China spoke some variety of Mandarin as their first language in 2017.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Standard Chinese, known in China as Putonghua, based on the Mandarin dialect of Beijing,<ref name="Barnes 1978">Template:Cite journal</ref> is the official national spoken language for the mainland and serves as a lingua franca within the Mandarin-speaking regions (and, to a lesser extent, across the other regions of mainland China). Several other autonomous regions have additional official languages. For example, Tibetan has official status within the Tibet Autonomous Region and Mongolian has official status within Inner Mongolia. Language laws of the People's Republic of China do not apply to either Hong Kong or Macau, which have Cantonese, Mandarin (both under the umbrella of "Chinese") and English and Cantonese, Mandarin and Portuguese, respectively, as official languages, unlike the mainland.

Spoken languages

The spoken languages of nationalities that are a part of China belong to at least nine families:

Ethnolinguistic map of China

Sino-Tibetan

Kra–Dai

(Possibly the ancient Bǎiyuè Template:Zhi)

Turkic

Mongolic

Para-Mongolic

Tungusic

Koreanic

Hmong–Mien

(Possibly the ancient Nánmán Template:Zhi, Template:Zhi)

Austroasiatic

Austronesian

Indo-European

Yeniseian

  • Jie (Kjet) (extinct) (?)

Mixed

Unclassified

Written languages

Template:Main

The first page of the astronomy section of the 御製五體清文鑑 (Yuzhi Wuti Qing Wenjian). The work contains four terms on each of its pages, arranged in the order of Manchu, Tibetan, Mongolian, Chagatai, and Chinese languages. For the Tibetan, it includes both transliteration and a transcription into the Manchu alphabet. For the Chagatai, it includes a line of transcription into the Manchu alphabet.

The following languages traditionally had written forms that do not involve Chinese characters (hanzi):

Many modern forms of spoken Chinese languages have their own distinct writing system using Chinese characters that contain colloquial variants. These typically are used as sound characters to help determine the pronunciation of the sentence within that language:

Some non-Sinitic peoples have historically used Chinese characters:

Other languages, all now extinct, used separate logographic scripts influenced by, but not directly derived from, Chinese characters:

During Qing dynasty, palaces, temples, and coins have sometimes been inscribed in five scripts:

During the Mongol Yuan dynasty, the official writing system was:

File:RMB4-1jiao-B.jpg
The reverse of a one jiao note with Chinese (Pinyin) at the top and Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur, and Zhuang along the bottom.

Chinese banknotes contain several scripts in addition to Chinese script. These are:

Other writing system for Chinese languages in China include:

Ten nationalities who never had a written system have, under the PRC's encouragement, developed phonetic alphabets. According to a government white paper published in early 2005, "by the end of 2003, 22 ethnic minorities in China used 28 written languages."

Language policy

Template:Further One decade before the demise of the Qing dynasty in 1912, Mandarin was promoted in the planning for China's first public school system.<ref name="Barnes 1978"/>

Mandarin has been promoted as the commonly spoken language for the country since 1956, based phonologically on the dialect of Beijing. The North Chinese language group is set up as the standard grammatically and lexically. Meanwhile, Mao Zedong and Lu Xun writings are used as the basis of the stylistic standard.<ref name="Barnes 1978" /> Pronunciation is taught with the use of the romanized phonetic system known as pinyin. Pinyin has been criticized for fear of an eventual replacement of the traditional character orthography.<ref name="Barnes 1978" />

There is a debated myth, prevalent among speakers of Yue Chinese, that Cantonese lost to Mandarin in a narrow vote on the language of the new Republic of China.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

The Chinese language policy in mainland China is heavily influenced by the Soviet nationalities policy and officially encourages the development of standard spoken and written languages for each of the nationalities of China.<ref name="Barnes 1978" /> Language is one of the features used for ethnic identification.<ref name="Dreyer 1978">Template:Cite journal</ref> In September 1951, the All-China Minorities Education Conference established that all minorities should be taught in their language at the primary and secondary levels when they count with a writing language. Those without a writing language or with an "imperfect" writing language should be helped to develop and reform their writing languages.<ref name="Dreyer 1978" />

However, in this schema, Han Chinese are considered a single nationality and the official policy of the People's Republic of China (PRC) treats the different varieties of Chinese differently from the different national languages, even though their differences are as significant, if not more so, as those between the various Romance languages of Europe. While official policies in mainland China encourage the development and use of different orthographies for the national languages and their use in educational and academic settings, realistically speaking it would seem that, as elsewhere in the world, the outlook for minority languages perceived as inferior is grim.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> The Tibetan Government-in-Exile argue that social pressures and political efforts result in a policy of sinicization and feels that Beijing should promote the Tibetan language more. Because many languages exist in China, they also have problems regarding diglossia. Recently, in terms of Fishman's typology of the relationships between bilingualism and diglossia and his taxonomy of diglossia (Fishman 1978, 1980) in China: more and more minority communities have been evolving from "diglossia without bilingualism" to "bilingualism without diglossia." This could be an implication of mainland China's power expanding.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

In 2010, Tibetan students protested against changes in the Language Policy on the schools that promoted the use of Mandarin Chinese instead of Tibetan. They argued that the measure would erode their culture.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> In 2013, China's Education Ministry said that about 400 million people were unable to speak the national language Mandarin. In that year, the government pushed linguistic unity in China, focusing on the countryside and areas with ethnic minorities.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

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Mandarin Chinese is the prestige language in practice, and failure to protect ethnic languages does occur. In summer 2020, the Inner Mongolian government announced an education policy change to phase out Mongolian as the language of instructions for humanities in elementary and middle schools, adopting the national instruction material instead. Thousands of ethnic Mongolians in northern China gathered to protest the policy.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> The Ministry of Education describes the move as a natural extension of the Law of the People's Republic of China on the Standard Spoken and Written Chinese Language (Template:Lang-zh) of 2000.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

In 2024, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping called for wider use of Mandarin by ethnic minorities and in border areas. He stated that it is necessary to guide all ethnic groups in border regions to "continuously enhance their recognition of the Chinese nation, Chinese culture and the Communist Party".<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Study of foreign languages

English has been the most widely-taught foreign language in China, as it is a required subject for students attending university.<ref name="Faisal Kidwai 2018">Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Other languages that have gained some degree of prevalence or interest are Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> During the 1950s and 1960s, Russian had some social status among elites in mainland China as the international language of socialism.

In the late 1960s, English replaced the position of Russian to become the most studied foreign language in China.Template:Citation needed After the Reform and opening up policy in 1988, English was taught in public schools starting in the third year of primary school.<ref name="English craze">Template:Cite web</ref><ref name="Asians offer">Template:Cite news</ref>

Russian, French, and German language classes have been made widely available in universities and colleges.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> In Northeast China, there are many bilingual schools (Mandarin-Japanese; Mandarin-Korean; Mandarin-Russian), in these schools, students learn languages other than English.

The Economist reported in 2006 that up to one fifth of the population was learning English. Gordon Brown, the former British prime minister, estimated that the total English-speaking population in China would outnumber the native speakers in the rest of the world in two decades.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

There have been a growing number of students studying Arabic, due to reasons of cultural interest and belief in better job opportunities.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> The language is also widely studied amongst the Hui people.<ref name="Michael Dillon 1999 155">Template:Cite book</ref> In the past, literary Arabic education was promoted in Islamic schools by the Kuomintang when it ruled mainland China.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

There have also been a growing number of students choosing to learn Urdu, due to interest in Pakistani culture, close ties between the respective nations, and job opportunities provided by the CPEC.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Interest in Portuguese and Spanish have increased greatly, due in part to Chinese investment in Latin America as well as in African nations such as Angola, Mozambique, and Cape Verde. Portuguese is also one of the official languages in Macau, although its use had stagnated since the nation's transfer from Portugal to the PRC. It was estimated in 2016 that 2.3% of Macau's locals spoke the language,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> although with government backing since then, interest in it has increased.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Macau is used by China as a hub for learning Portuguese and diplomatic and financial ties with Brazil and Portuguese-speaking African countries.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Esperanto became prominent in certain circles in the early 20th century and reached its peak in the 1980s, though by 2024 its prominence had declined.<ref name=HeWuLastEsp>Template:Cite web</ref>

Use of English

In China, English is used as a lingua franca in several fields, especially for business settings,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> and in schools to teach Standard Mandarin to people who are not Chinese citizens.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> English is also one of the official languages in Hong Kong.

See also

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References

Citations

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Sources

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Further reading

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