?????????????, ??? ????? ???? ???????? ????????
???? ????
(??/漢語, ??????; 中文, ?????????) ?????
???? ???? ??
? ????. ???????? ?????? ??????????? ??? ???? ???????????? ????? ???? ????
???? ??????
??????????????? ??????? ?????? ???????????.
????-???????
????? ???? ?????????? ??? ??????.
[?]
About one-sixth of the world’s population, or over one billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. The
identification of the varieties of Chinese
as "languages" or "dialects" is controversial.
[?]
As a language family Chinese has an estimated nearly 1.2 billion speakers;
Mandarin Chinese
alone has around 851 million native speakers, outnumbering any other language in the world.
[?]
[?]
Spoken Chinese
is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, though all spoken varieties of Chinese are
tonal
and
analytic
. There are between six and twelve main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most populous (by far) is
Mandarin
(c. 850 million), followed by
Wu
(c. 90 million),
Min
(c. 70 million) and
Cantonese
(c. 70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, though some, like
Xiang
and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. Chinese is classified as a
macrolanguage
with thirteen sub-languages in
ISO 639-3
, though the
identification of the varieties of Chinese
as multiple "
languages
" or as "
dialects
" of a single language is a contentious issue.
The standardized form of spoken Chinese is
Standard Mandarin
"普通?/普通話 (
pinyin
: p?t?nghua); ??/國語 (
pinyin
: guoy?)", based on the
Beijing dialect
. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the
People's Republic of China
, the
Republic of China
in Taiwan, as well as one of four official languages of
Singapore
. Chinese?
de facto
, Standard Mandarin?is one of the six official languages of the
United Nations
. Of the other varieties,
Standard Cantonese
is common and influential in Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of
Hong Kong
(together with
English
) and of
Macau
(together with
Portuguese
).
Min Nan
, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern
Fujian
, in
Taiwan
(where it is known as
Taiwanese
or Hoklo) and in
Southeast Asia
(where it dominates in
Singapore
,
Malaysia
and the
Philippines
and is known as Hokkien).
Spoken Chinese
[
????????
]
The map below depicts the linguistic subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within China itself. The traditionally-recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are:
- Guan
(Mandarin) 北方話/北方? or 官話/官?, (c. 885 million),
- Wu
吳/? , which includes
Shanghainese
, (c. 77 million),
- Yue
(Cantonese) ?/?, (c. 71 million),
- Min
?/?, which includes
Taiwanese
, (c. 60 million),
- Xiang
湘, (c. 36 million),
- Hakka
客家 or 客, (c. 34 million),
- Gan
?/?, (c. 31 million)