Languages of China


There are several hundred languages in the People's Republic of China. The predominant language is Standard Chinese, which is based on Beijingese, but there are hundreds of related Chinese languages, collectively known as Hanyu, that are spoken by 92% of the population. The Chinese languages are typically divided into seven major language groups, and their study is a distinct academic discipline. They differ as much from each other morphologically and phonetically as do English, German and Danish, but speakers of different Chinese languages are taught to write in Mandarin at school and often do to communicate with speakers of other Chinese languages. This does not mean non-Mandarin Sinitic languages do not have vernacular written forms however. There are in addition approximately 300 minority languages spoken by the remaining 8% of the population of China. The ones with greatest state support are Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur and Zhuang, as shown in the banknote of Chinese renminbi.
According to the 2010 edition of Nationalencyklopedin, 955 million out of China's then-population of 1.34 billion spoke some variety of Mandarin Chinese as their first language, accounting for 71% of the country's population. According to the 2019 edition of Ethnologue, 904 million people in China spoke some variety of Mandarin as their first language in 2017.
Standard Chinese, known in China as Putonghua, based on the Mandarin dialect of Beijing, is the official national spoken language for the mainland and serves as a lingua franca within the Mandarin-speaking regions. Several other autonomous regions have additional official languages. For example, Tibetan has official status within the Tibet Autonomous Region and Mongolian has official status within Inner Mongolia. Language laws of the People's Republic of China do not apply to either Hong Kong or Macau, which have Cantonese, Mandarin and English and Cantonese, Mandarin and Portuguese, respectively, as official languages, unlike the mainland.

Spoken languages

The spoken languages of nationalities that are a part of China belong to at least nine families:
;Para-Mongolic
The following ethnic minority languages traditionally had written forms that do not involve Chinese characters:
Many modern forms of spoken Chinese languages have their own distinct writing system using Chinese characters that contain colloquial variants.
These typically are used as sound characters to help determine the pronunciation of the sentence within that language:
Some non-Sinitic languages have historically used Chinese characters:
Other languages, all now extinct, used separate logographic scripts influenced by, but not directly derived from, Chinese characters:
During Qing dynasty, palaces, temples, and coins have sometimes been inscribed in five scripts:
During the Mongol Yuan dynasty, the official writing system was:
Chinese banknotes contain several scripts in addition to Chinese script. These are:
  • Latin alphabet
  • Mongolian script
  • Tibetan script
  • Arabic script
  • Latin alphabet
Other writing system for Chinese languages in China include:
Ten nationalities who never had a written system have, under the PRC's encouragement, developed phonetic alphabets. According to published in early 2005, "by the end of 2003, 22 ethnic minorities in China used 28 written languages."

Language policy

One decade before the demise of the Qing dynasty in 1912, Mandarin was promoted in the planning for China's first public school system. There is a debated myth, prevalent among speakers of Yue Chinese, that Cantonese lost to Mandarin in a narrow vote on the language of the new Republic of China.
Standard Mandarin has been promoted as the commonly spoken language for the People's Republic since 1956, based phonologically on the dialect of Beijing, grammatically and lexically on various Mandarin varieties, and stylistically on the writings of Mao Zedong and Lu Xun. Pronunciation is taught with the use of the romanized phonetic system known as pinyin. Pinyin has been criticized for fear of an eventual replacement of the traditional character orthography.