Used by the Han people in China,the Chinese language has a long history,having established a fairly mature written language more than 3 000 years ago
The Chinese language has more than 1.2 billion users and can be regarded as the one spoken by the greatest number of persons. In addition to China, some people in Singapore and Malaysia also use Chinese, and millions of overseas Chinese and foreign citizens of Chinese origin distributed around the world use various Chinese dialects as native language
The Chinese language is the main language by Chinese,also one of the working languages of the United Nations.
The standard language of Chinese is Putonghua(Mandarin). Mandarin has the Beijing pronunciation,the northern dialect as its basic dialect,and the typical modern vernacular Chinese as its grammatical standard. Mandarin offers convenience for communication between people in different areas or of different ethnic groups in China.
China has a vast territory and a large population. Even though people all use the Chinese language,they speak in different ways in different areas,which are called dialects. Generally called local languages,dialects are branches of the Chinese language and are only used in certain areas. At the present,the Chinese language has seven dialects: the northern dialect, the Wu dialect,the xiang dialect,the Gan dialect,the Hakka ,the Min dialect and the Yue or Cantonese. Among them,then northern dialect is used most widely. The hakka, the Fujian dialect and Cantonese are also used by overseas Chinese.
The dialects of the Chinese language are very complicated. Various dialects differ from each other in three aspects: pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. And the difference in pronunciation is the most outstanding.
