Chinese Language
Overview
Chinese language is one of humanity's greatest and most enduring cultural achievements. Archaeological research indicates that possible precursors of Chinese characters appeared as early as 8,000 years ago and that Chinese characters formed a complete system of writing by about 3,500 years ago. Among the writing systems in use at that time, only Chinese characters are still used.
There are two elements to the Chinese language: the written language(Chinese characters) and the spoken language. The written language originally had no alphabet, but it was easily understood by literate people no matter what dialect they spoke, some of the numerous dialects of spoken Chinese are totally different from each other. All of them use tones to distinguish different words. Written Chinese characters have no "pronunciation" and can be spoken in a variety of ways depending on the dialect used.
Written Chinese
Written Chinese is a writing system using symbols. These symbols are known as Chinese characters (漢字). There are a few thousands basic Chinese characters which are already words with meanings and sounds. And these characters then form hundreds of thousands of multiple-character words by combining basic Chinese characters together. Most Chinese words (中文字) are not just a single character but are composed of at least two characters. Multiple-character words are created by several methods. A typical method is that the two or more characters composing a word might each contribute meaning which in combination indicates the word's meaning.
Spoken Chinese
There are eight major dialect groups in China, Putonghua (普通話) or Mandarin, Yue (粵語) or Cantonese (廣東話), Wu (吳方言) or Shanghainese (上海閒話), Minbei (閩北話) or Fuzhou (福州話), Minnan (閩南語) or Taiwanese (臺語), Xiang (湘語), Gan (赣語), Hakka (客家話) and many sub-dialects. Among the many dialects in China, Putonghua (普通話) is the official spoken language of China and is variously referred to as Han language (漢語 Hanyu). In the early 1950s a system using the Latin alphabet, called Pinyin – the oral representation of Chinese character based on the spoken sounds of Putonghua developed.