Chinese language

The Chinese language 汉语 hànyǔ, refers to the language spoken by the Han Chinese minority. It belongs to the Sino-Tibetan group. It is an analytic (or isolating) language, meaning that, in terms of morphological typology, it is a language in which words are or tend to be invariable. Chinese is a tonal language: each syllable is accented. Thus, in Chinese, the syllable "ma" can mean "mother," "horse," "hemp," "insult," or be a syntactic particle depending on its intonation.

The basic unit of Chinese writing is the character called a sinogram. Each Chinese character corresponds to a syllable. A word is generally composed of one or two syllables.

In general, Chinese refers to the language based on the northern Chinese dialect, with the pronunciation of Beijing and the grammar of works of literature in the spoken language (白话 báihuà). It should be noted that there are certain differences in pronunciation between the Chinese of mainland China, the island of Taiwan, and the Chinese of Singapore.

At the oral level, the differences between the various Chinese dialects are quite large, somewhat like the Romance languages (French, Italian, Romanian, Spanish, etc.). This is why many Western linguists consider the different Chinese dialects as a language family. But from the point of view of Chinese writing, its users (the Han Chinese), politics, and cultural unity, most Chinese experts consider the Chinese language as a single language. In mainland China and on the island of Taiwan, standard Chinese (Mandarin) is the common language. For Hong Kong and Macao, it is Cantonese 粤语 yuèyǔ. Overseas Chinese use Cantonese as a common language, but they also use Mandarin Chinese, Hakka, Minnan, and other dialects as local communication languages.

Chinese is a language with an ideographic writing system. Chinese writing is now well unified and codified, as is the grammar. A graphic element in a sinogram can give an indication of the pronunciation of the character, but this indication is not precise. Many characters do not have a phonetic element. Over the very long history of China, the pronunciation of sinograms has undergone great evolutions. This is how we now have such great oral differences between Chinese dialects. But since literary Chinese is standardized, it has reduced the problem of written communication.

Before the movement of written literature in the spoken language 白话 báihuà, the Chinese literary language was Classical Chinese 文言 wényán. This written language is based on the literary works before the unification of China by the First Emperor in -221. After the movement of literature in the spoken language, the literary language, named Baihua, is based on the oral dialect of the officials from the north of the country. Classical Chinese is now practically no longer used, often reduced to fixed expressions, proverbs, etc.