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The earliest historical linguistic evidence of the spoken Chinese language dates back approximately 4,500 years, [1] while examples of the writing system that would become written Chinese are attested in a body of inscriptions made on bronze vessels and oracle bones during the Late Shang period ( c. 1250 – 1050 BCE), [2] [3] with the very ...
Mandarin Chinese, also called Standard Chinese, has been the official language of China for a few decades. It is commonly used in Chinese schools, communities, institutions and media. The Chinese language is actually a collection of various dialects that can be categorized into eight groups: Northern Chinese (Mandarin), Yueh (Cantonese), Wu, Kan, Northern Min, Southern Min, Hsiang, and Hakka ...
Cantonese, a major Sinitic language originating in Guangzhou, is the lingua franca in Guangdong, Guangxi, Hong Kong, and Macau. Cantonese has the most well-developed written form of all Chinese languages apart from Mandarin and Classical Chinese . With the advent of the computer and standardization of character sets specifically for Cantonese ...
Because of their dominance in Chinese diaspora overseas, standard Cantonese and its dialect Taishanese are among the most common Chinese languages that one may encounter in the West. Increasingly since the 1997 handover , Cantonese has been used as a symbol of local identity in Hong Kong, largely through the development of democracy in the territory and desinicization practices to emphasise a ...
Standard Chinese has four tones as shown in table 2.1, and Cantonese has six tones on the syllable si as shown in table 2.2. 2016 , M.M. Eboch, Walking the Dragon's Back [2] , Rourke Educational Media, →ISBN , page 89 :
Phonetics Lab. Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics. City University of Hong Kong. ctlzee@cityu.edu.hk. The style of speech illustrated is that typical of the educated younger generation in Beijing. The recording is that of a 25-year-old female graduate student who has lived all her life in. Beijing. Consonants.
Modern Standard Chinese is based on the Mandarin variety of Chinese, yet it is not Mandarin, but a pluricentric language with different standard forms in mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Macau, and Hong Kong. Hong Kong and Macau have used Modern Standard Chinese in the formal written register even before 1997 and Cantonese is used ...
