During the Northern and Southern dynasties period, Middle Chinese went through several sound changes and split into several varieties following prolonged geographic and political separation.
The phonetic categories of Old Chinese can be reconstructed from the rhymes of ancient poetry. The earliest Chinese written records are Shang dynasty-era oracle bone inscriptions, which can be dated to 1250 BCE. All varieties of Chinese are tonal to at least some degree, and are largely analytic. There are, however, transitional areas where varieties from different branches share enough features for some limited intelligibility, including New Xiang with Southwest Mandarin, Xuanzhou Wu with Lower Yangtze Mandarin, Jin with Central Plains Mandarin and certain divergent dialects of Hakka with Gan (though these are unintelligible with mainstream Hakka). These branches are unintelligible to each other, and many of their subgroups are unintelligible with the other varieties within the same branch (e.g. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese, of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin (with about 800 million speakers, or 66%), followed by Min (75 million, e.g. Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered separate languages in a family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be variants of a single language. About 1.3 billion people (or approximately 16% of the world's population) speak a variety of Chinese as their first language. Han text (especially written and when distinguished from other languages of China)Ĭhinese ( simplified Chinese: 汉语 traditional Chinese: 漢語 pinyin: Hànyǔ or also 中文 Zhōngwén, especially for the written language) is a group of languages that form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages family, spoken by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in Greater China. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.Ĭhinese ("middle/central") text (or writing) Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters.
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Countries with significant Chinese-speaking minorities.
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