History of the Chinese language

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The earliest

Chinese is part of the

The main difficulty in both of these efforts is that, while there is very good documentation that allows for the reconstruction of the ancient sounds of Chinese, there is no written documentation of the point where Chinese split from the rest of the Sino-Tibetan languages. This is actually a common problem in historical linguistics, a field which often incorporates the comparative method to deduce these sorts of changes. Unfortunately the use of this technique for Sino-Tibetan languages has not as yet yielded satisfactory results, perhaps because many of the languages that would allow for a more complete reconstruction of Proto-Sino-Tibetan are very poorly documented or understood.

Therefore, despite their affinity, the common ancestry of the Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages remains an unproven hypothesis.^[7] Categorisation of the development of Chinese is a subject of scholarly debate. One of the first systems was devised by the Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren in the early 20th century. The system was much revised, but always heavily relied on Karlgren's insights and methods.

Old Chinese

Middle Chinese was the form of the language as used during the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties from the 6th to the 10th centuries CE. It can be divided into an early period, which can be shown by the Qieyun rime dictionary dating to 601, and its later redaction the Guangyun, and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by rime tables such as the Yunjing. The evidence for the pronunciation of Middle Chinese comes from several sources: modern dialect variations, rime dictionaries, foreign transliterations, rime tables constructed by ancient Chinese philologists to summarise the phonetic system, and Chinese phonetic translations of foreign words.

Spoken Chinese

The development of Chinese has been complex. Most Chinese people, in

Until the mid-20th century, most southern Chinese only spoke their native local variety of Chinese. However, despite the mix of officials and commoners speaking various Chinese dialects, Nanjing Mandarin became dominant as early as the Qing dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Empire had already been setting up orthoepy academies to conform pronunciation to the Beijing standard, but had little success. During the late 19th century, the Beijing dialect finally replaced the Nanjing dialect in the imperial court. For the general population, although variations of Mandarin were already widely spoken in China then, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their local languages for most aspects of life. The area where the new Beijing court dialect was used was thus fairly limited.

This situation changed with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong and Macau) of an elementary school education system committed to teaching Standard Chinese. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all people in mainland China and on Taiwan.^{[citation needed]} At the time that it was being widely introduced in these places, the British colony of Hong Kong did not use it at all. In Hong Kong, Macau, Guangdong and parts of Guangxi, Cantonese remains the everyday language used in business and education. Due to historical contact with foreign merchants, the Chinese language has adopted a significantly wide array of Japanese words historically which have been adopted in conjunction with Chinese dialect, accent and pronunciation, referred to as the sinification of foreign words.^{[citation needed]} As a result, many lexicographers pass this off due to historical intervention by Chinese historians to not include or forget to include as part of imported foreign words and because of the evolution of languages; most Han characters have a single reading and would have lost the previous vocal reading in correlation to using the new reading institutionally and therefore becoming mainstream. This also applies to Mongolian vocabulary adopted from Southern Mongolia through leading historical figures and dynasties.

Written Chinese

During the reign of the dynasties,