ABSTRACT
Modern Chinese, the language of the Han majority in China, who comprise 90% of the population of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), is spoken there by about 885,000,000 people, making it easily the language with the greatest number of native speakers in the world. One of the six official languages of the United Nations, it is a member of the Sino-Tibetan family that includes not only Tibetan and Burmese but also a number of languages closely related to Chinese and spoken in the PRC, for example Cantonese, Hakka, Wu and Min. These languages, though for the most part mutually unintelligible, use the same written form, and for this reason are traditionally termed ‘dialects’ of Chinese. However, their divergence (crucially in phonology, much less so in syntax) is such that the label ‘dialect’ is accurate only in the sense that Romanian and Portuguese are dialects (of Latin), or English and German (of West Germanic) – synchronically, the term is misleading. More accurately these (admittedly closely related) languages are increasingly referred to in linguistics as ‘Chinese languages’. This article will confine itself to standard Modern Chinese, also widely known as Mandarin.
