Chinese Abbreviations

Chinese (汉语 / 漢語, Pinyin : Hànyǔ; 中文, Huáyǔ or 中文, Zhōngwén ) can be considered as a separate language , but also as a language family , as it is a collection of local languages ​​spoken by the Chinese Han ethnic group . It is one of the languages ​​forming the Sino-Tibetan language family . The various variants (also known as dialects) of Chinese are the native language of about one-sixth of the world’s population, or more than one billion people.

Linguistically, the question of whether Chinese is a “language” or a ” dialect ” is debatable. As a language family, the Chinese language includes nearly 1.2 billion people; Chinese Mandarin alone has about 851 million native speakers, numerically superior to any other language in the world.

Spoken Chinese is characterized by a high level of internal diversity, although all spoken varieties are tonal and analytical . The main regional language groups are between six and twelve (depending on the classification scheme), of which the Mandarin group is the most numerous (885 million), [1] followed by the Wu group (90 million), Min (70 million). and Cantonese (70 million). The difference between most of these groups is greater than even between individual Indo-European languages , although some such as the Xiang dialects and southwestern mandarin, have common expressions and are to some extent mutually intelligible.

Chinese is classified as a macro -language with thirteen sub-languages ​​in ISO 639-3, although the question of how Chinese language varieties should be defined – as many “languages” or as “dialects” in a single language – is not yet fully clarified .

The common form of spoken Chinese is the standard mandarin “普通话 / 普通話” ( pinyin : pǔtōnghùa); 国语 / 國語 ( pinyin : gúoyǔ) ”based on the Beijing dialect. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Taiwan , and one of Singapore ‘s four official languages .

Chinese, the de facto standard Mandarin, is one of the six official languages ​​of the United Nations.

Among other varieties, Standard Cantonese is widespread and influential in various overseas communities and remains one of the official languages ​​in Hong Kong (along with English) and Macau (along with Portuguese). Min Nan, part of the Chinese language group Min, is widespread in southern Fujian, Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (predominant in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines and known there as Hokkian).

In Chinese, as in all other languages, there is a grammatical norm that must be followed. There are tenses, pronouns, particles, verbs, participles and more. But why do some say that grammar in Chinese is easier than other languages? Well, that’s why – the grammar in Chinese is smaller in volume and explained by formulas. This makes memorization much easier. The only difficult part of it remains the phonetics . There is no alphabet in Chinese phonetics, there is a pin-in table . In it the letters (initials) are arranged by position in the human mouth. For example , b, p, m, f fall on the lips, and j, q, x fall far back in the mouth.

List of Acronyms Related to Chinese