History of the Chinese Language
Chinese is a member of the Sino-Tibetan language family and with around 1.3 billion speakers is the world's most commonly spoken language.
There are two main variations of Chinese, Mandarin and Cantonese however they both use the same writing system. This means both Mandarin and Cantonese speakers will use the same character for a word but they will each pronounce that word differently.
The earliest examples of Chinese writing date back to the late Shang Dynasty (1200-1050 BC). They were carved on pieces of bone known as the Oracle bone script discovered in 1899. Only around 1400 of the 2500 characters found on the Oracle bone script can be identified with later Chinese script and deciphered.
Chinese is traditionally written in vertical columns with each character representing a spoken syllable with a basic meaning. Because of this there are almost 50,000 different Chinese characters.
This number of characters was believed to be a contributing factor to the high levels of illiteracy in China. In an attempt to rectify this, the Peoples Republic of China set about simplifying the language to a set of commonly used characters in the 1950's.
Currently the writing system has around 6,000 characters in common use. In order to be able to read a newspaper, the average person needs to know around 3,000 characters while in Chinese secondary schools pupils are taught around 5,000 characters.
