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.