Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
"Chinese" is a blanket term covering many different varieties spoken across China. Mandarin Chinese is the most popular dialect, and is used as a lingua franca across China. Linguists classify these varieties as the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Within this broad classification, there are between seven and fourteen dialect ...
Written Chinese is a writing system that uses Chinese characters and other symbols to represent the Chinese languages.Chinese characters do not directly represent pronunciation, unlike letters in an alphabet or syllabograms in a syllabary.
Standard Mandarin Chinese is based on Beijing dialect, with some lexical and syntactic influence from other Mandarin dialects. It is the official spoken language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan (Republic of China, ROC), as well as one of the four official languages of Singapore , and a high-prestige minority language [ 11 ...
Chinese characters "Chinese character" written in traditional (left) and simplified (right) forms Script type Logographic Time period c. 13th century BCE – present Direction Left-to-right Top-to-bottom, columns right-to-left Languages Chinese Japanese Korean Vietnamese Zhuang (among others) Related scripts Parent systems (Proto-writing) Chinese characters Child systems Bopomofo Jurchen ...
In dialects that do not make use of the rhotic coda, it may be omitted in pronunciation, or in some cases a different word may be selected: for example, Beijing 这儿; 這兒; zhèr; 'here' and 那儿; 那兒; nàr; 'there' may be replaced by the synonyms 这里; 這裡; zhèlǐ and 那里; 那裡; nàlǐ.
Linguistically, Xiaogan dialect is a dialect of Mandarin, but the pronunciation and diction are quite different from spoken Standard Chinese. Knowing the local dialect is of considerable social benefit, and most Chinese who permanently move to a new area will attempt to pick up the local dialect.
Some Cantonese writers use simple romanization (e.g., use D as 啲), symbols (add a Latin letter "o" in front of another Chinese character; e.g., 㗎 is defined in Unicode but will not display if not installed on the device in use, hence the proxy o架 is often used), homophones (e.g., use 果 as 嗰), and Chinese characters which have ...
Romanized General Chinese has distinct symbols for the onsets (many of them digraphs, and a few trigraphs) and the rimes distinguished by any of the control dialects. For example, it retains the final consonants p, t, k, and the distinction between final m and n, as these are found in several modern dialects, such as Cantonese.