Chinese, a branch of the Sino-Tibetan linguistic family, is a

monosyllabic tone language written by means of characters

representing complete words. The Chinese script is not phonetic
and remains constant throughout China, but the spoken language
has regional phonetic differences. Spoken Chinese falls into two
major groups, separated roughly by a northeast-southwest line
running from the mouth of the Yangtze River to the border of
Vietnam. North and west of this line are the socalled Mandarin
dialects, based on the Beijing dialect and known
as putonghua ("common language"). The most important dialect
south of the linguistic divide is that of Shanghai, the Wu dialect
spoken in the Yangtze River Delta. Hakka and Hokkien are dialects
of the southeastern coastal province. Cantonese, the Yue dialect
spoken in southern China, is the language of the majority of
Chinese emigrants. Others include the Minbei or Fuzhou dialect, the
Xiang, and Gan dialects. Mandarin Chinese was adopted as the
official language of China in 1955.

To communicate in written Chinese, thousands of Chinese

characters must be memorized. Since the establishment of the PRC
in 1949, reform of the written language has been a major priority. A
simplified system of writing, reducing the number of strokes per
character, has been adopted, and the language restructured so that
anyone familiar with the basic 2,0003,000 characters is functionally
literate (defined as being able to read a newspaper).

A number of systems have been developed to transcribe Chinese

characters into the Latin alphabet. The principal romanization
scheme was the Wade-Giles system until 1979, when the PRC
government adopted Pinyin, a system under development in China
since the mid-1950s. Inside China, Pinyin is used in the schools to
facilitate the learning of Chinese characters, in minority areas where
other languages are spoken, and on commercial and street signs.
Pinyin has replaced the Wade-Giles system in all of China's
English-language publications and for the spelling of place names.
In general, pronunciation of Pinyin follows standard American
English, except that among initial sounds, the sound of q is like the
sound of ch as in chart, the sound of x like the sound of sh as
in ship, and the sound of zh like the sound of jas in judge, and
among final sounds, the sound of e is like the sound of oo as
in look, the sound of eng like the sound of ung as in lung, the sound
of ui like the sound of ay as in way, and the sound of uai like the
sound of wi as in wide.

Of the 55 recognized minority peoples in China, only Hui and

Manchus use Chinese as an everyday language. More then 20
minority nationalities have their own forms of writing for their own
languages. Minority languages are used in all state institutions in
minority areas and in all newspapers and books published there.