Chinese language

Epic card · No. 11695

Chinese (spoken: simplified Chinese: 汉语; traditional Chinese: 漢語; pinyin: Hànyǔ, written: 中文; Zhōngwén) is a collection of language varieties containing almost all Sinitic languages except Macro-Bai languages, natively spoken by the Han Chinese and some ethnic minorities in Greater China, as well as by communities of the overseas Chinese. Approximately 1.39 billion people, or 17% of the global population, speak one of the varieties of Chinese as their first language. The different Chinese language varieties together form the largest branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages. While the Chinese government defines all spoken Chinese varieties as merely diverse dialects of a single language, the frequent lack of mutual intelligibility, especially among those outside of the dominant northern varieties, has led linguists to consider them as separate languages within a language family. Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. Currently, most classifications...

Read on Wikipedia · Image User:Cangjie6, Public domain