Languages are living things, changing all the time to meet the needs of their speakers and writers. It is only in the last few hundred years that attempts have been made to standardize the way in which languages are used, so that people using the same language can understand each other as well as possible. In the world today, Mandarin Chinese is the most widely used language, with over a billion speakers. English is next, with around half a billion speakers.
Chinese characters can be very complicated, with up to 26 strokes in each. The Japanese have adapted over two thousand characters to write their language, but they also have two alphabets, one for Japanese words and one for foreign words!
People sometimes speak of “Chinese” as if it’s a single language. It’s actually a group of related languages, of which Mandarin Chinese is by far the biggest. It’s an official language in the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of China (Taiwan), and Singapore.
The native name for Mandarin, Putonghua, literally means “common speech”, although in Taiwan people call it Guoyu – “national language”. Historically, it was also called Guanhua – “the speech of officials”. Since Mandarin is more common in northern China, it’s sometimes referred to as beifanghua (???) – “Northern Dialects”.
Mandarin is written using Chinese characters (sometimes called “Han characters”), an ancient pictorial system where each symbol represents a different word. There are two main versions – “traditional” characters, used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, and “simplified” characters, used in China, Singapore, and Malaysia. It’s estimated that you need to learn 2,000-3,000 characters to read a newspaper – an educated Chinese person will know about 8,000!
Picture Credit : Google