General
The official language of China is standard Mandarin (Putonghua or Guoyu), the basic dialect of North-China. This language is understood by the majority (about 70 %) of the inhabitants of  the People’s Republic of China. Each province has a ‘dialect’ of its own; many of these, as e.g. spoken in the provinces of Hunan and Guandong, could even be called official languages. Moreover, all large minority groups, except for the Hui, have a language of their own.
Since 1958 standard Mandarin has been promoted via schools and radio as the spoken language. They are also still simplifying Chinese characters. The simplified Romanising or phonetic transcription of Chinese characters, the so-called Hanyu-Pinyin spelling was accepted officially on January 1-1979.
The Chinese language belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family of languages, especially to the Sinitic branch of it. This Sinitic branch can again be subdivided into seven groups of dialects: Mandarin-Chinese, Cantonese (Yuè), Min, Hakka (Kèjiâ), Wú, Gàn and Xiâng. 

Dialects
The Mandarin-Chinese dialects are related very closely and are spoken from northeast China to 4,000 km to the south in Yunnan. Peking-Chinese, on which the standard language is based, belongs to this group.
Cantonese (Yuè) from Guangdong, with Canton as its capital, is considered the unofficial standard language by the Chinese living outside China. Cantonese is spoken a lot by the Chinese population in Holland.
In the isolated province of Fujian the Min-dialects have developed quite independently, so some characteristics show a unique perspective of older phases of the language.
Hakka (Kèjiâ) is spoken in the north of Guangdong and in some smaller south-Chinese areas. The Hakka people probably descend from north-Chinese migrants, but considering the similarities with Min and Cantonese Hakka belongs to south-China linguistically.
The Wu dialects are mainly spoken in Zhejiang and Jiangsu, south of the estuary of the river Yangzi Jiang. The million city of Shangai is situated in this area.
In Jiangxi and the eastern part of Hunan the Gan dialects are spoken; Xiang is spoken in the rest of Hunan.

Classical Chinese
Classical Chinese or Wényán is the language in which all Chinese texts were written up to the twentieth century. Wényán was the written language of the civil servants, which had already been introduced during the Qin dynasty (221 - 206 B.C.) and served especially to put official pieces in writing. At that time Baihua was the daily spoken language, the language of the ‘living dialects’. The emperors of the Sui and Tang dynasties enforced the use of the north-Chinese dialect of Beijing (Mandarin) on all civil servants in the empire. This dialect has been considered Standard Chinese since the Yuan dynasty.
Sentence structure and vocabulary are based on the spoken language of the Fighting States Period (4^th - 3^rd century B.C.). Still, at that time the written language was somewhat stylized, especially in the vocabulary.
Because all homophonic forms are distinguishable in writing, Classical Chinese developed into a very concise but artificial written language and thus it has no phonetics of its own. For reading, the local current pronunciation is traditionally used all over China. 

Standard language
The need of a living standard language dates from the period of social and political discord at the beginning of last century. People wanted the Peking dialect, the standard in the capital for the last few centuries, to be raised as the standard language. Nevertheless, in 1919 an artificial standard pronunciation was proclaimed, which was exchanged for the Pekinese pronunciation only in 1932.
The sentence structure and vocabulary of the standard language are those of the Mandarin-Chinese dialect group. This language is considered standard both in the People’s Republic of China and on Taiwan. But it is true that both countries have kept their own name for the standard language: on Taiwan the original name is Guoyu (or Kuo-yü, ‘National Language’), but on the continent the language is called Putonghua (‘General Language’).
Classical Chinese was replaced by Báihuà, the modern written language, as the standard written form after the Literary Revolution. 

Pinyin
Chinese writing dates from about 5000 - 4000 B.C., is considered the oldest written language in the world and has got as many as 80,000 characters. The average Chinese uses only 3,000 - 4,000 characters; someone with a good education needs 6,000 - 8,000. To read a paper 2,000 - 3,000 characters will do.
Chinese writing has developed from pictographic script with simple miniature pictures to an ideographic script with very stylised designs, which must be analysed to be understood. The Chinese characters do not give a precise indication about the pronunciation, so speakers of different dialects can use the same script easily all over the country.
In an attempt to reduce analphabetism a generally accepted transcription system is now used to write the language in the Latin alphabet: the so-called Pinyin spelling. Furthermore a system has been developed to simplify the most occurring characters. Thus more than 2,000 were simplified in 1956.
After the foundation of the People’s Republic of China massive campaigns have been held for the spread of the script and Standard Mandarin. For the rendering of Standard Mandarin in the Roman alphabet an official transcription standard was established in 1957: Hànyu Pinyin (literally: “Transcription of Chinese”). However, it has never been intended to exchange the character script for this transcription.
Hànyu Pinyin, mostly Pinyin in short, is meant to note down the pronunciation when learning to write the characters. The use of this transcription system for the rendering of Chinese words has become common outside China since the 80’s. Hànuy Pinyin was acknowledged as standard in 1982 by ISO, the office for international standardisation in Geneva.
More than 30 forms of writing are in use in China. Of these 20 have existed for hundreds of years, among them Mongolian, Tibetan, Dai, Yi, Uygur, Russian and Manchurian. Others, such as the language of the Zhuang, who had no script of their own, were artificially created around 1950 on the basis of the Latin alphabet.
The Pinyin system has 24 consonants, 15 vowels (and vowel combinations) and 4 symbols intonation, important in Chinese. The pitch (flat, rising, lowering-rising, lowering) makes the character another word and gives it a different meaning. Next to this there is a neutral tone, which is determined by the previous tone.
The pronunciation of a character can be distinguished into: tone, initial sound and final sound. The meaning of a character is laid down by the tone of that sound; the tone symbol is placed over the vowel.
Thus the syllable “ma” can mean ‘mother’, ‘horse’, ‘hemp’ or ‘shrew’, dependent on the tone. The Chinese language does not know any inflections and has no masculine or feminine words as Dutch has. To indicate singular and plural, masculine and feminine, present tense and past tense, numerals and adverbs must be added to a sentence. Past tense is indicated by an adverb of time and an addition telling that the activity is already finished.
Many Chinese words consist of two or more characters or monosyllabic words. For instance, the Chinese word for ‘film’ is “dian-ying” and consists of the words “dian” (‘electricity’) and “ying”(‘shadow’). To make reading easier the syllables that together form a word in Pinyin have recently been joined.

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