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Classical Chinese [a] is the language in which the classics of Chinese literature were written, from c. the 5th century BCE. [2] For millennia thereafter, the written Chinese used in these works was imitated and iterated upon by scholars in a form now called Literary Chinese, which was used for almost all formal writing in China until the early 20th century.
This is a list of languages by total number of speakers. It is difficult to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect . For example, Chinese and Arabic are sometimes considered single languages, but each includes several mutually unintelligible varieties , and so they are sometimes considered language families instead.
我 wǒ I 给 gěi give 你 nǐ you 一本 yìběn a 书 shū book [我給你一本書] 我 给 你 一本 书 wǒ gěi nǐ yìběn shū I give you a book In southern dialects, as well as many southwestern and Lower Yangtze dialects, the objects occur in the reverse order. Most varieties of Chinese use post-verbal particles to indicate aspect, but the particles used vary. Most Mandarin ...
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 groups, depending on the classification.
A 2006 survey by the Modern Language Association found that Chinese accounted for 3% of foreign language class enrollment in the United States, making it the seventh most commonly learned foreign languages in the United States. Most Chinese as foreign language classes teach simplified characters and Standard Mandarin Chinese. [24]
The local dialect (be it non-Standard Chinese or non-Mandarin altogether) is generally considered more intimate and is used among close family members and friends and in everyday conversation within the local area. Chinese speakers will frequently code switch between Standard Chinese and the local
20th-century Literary Chinese writing. Lower Yangtze Mandarin formed the standard for written vernacular Chinese, until it was displaced by the Beijing dialect during the late Qing. Baihua (白话; 'plain speech') was used by writers across China regardless of their local spoken dialect. Writers used Lower Yangtze and Beijing grammar and ...
Among linguists, Standard Chinese has been referred to as Standard Northern Mandarin [8] [9] [10] or Standard Beijing Mandarin. [11] [12] It is colloquially referred to as simply Mandarin, [13] though this term may also refer to the Mandarin dialect group as a whole, or the late imperial form used as a lingua franca.