For treatment of the various forms of spoken Chinese, see Chinese spoken languages.
The different ethnic groups in China speak a great variety of languages, called the Zhongguo Yuwen (ä¸å›½è¯æ–‡), meaning “languages of China”. These languages span six linguistic families and most of them are dissimilar morphologically and phonetically.
Chinese language policy is heavily influenced by Soviet nationalities policy and officially encourages the development of standard spoken and written languages for each of the nationalities of China. However, in this schema, Han Chinese are considered a single nationality, and official policy treats the different varieties of the Chinese spoken language differently from the different national languages. For example, while Chinese official policies encourage the development and use of different orthographies for the national languages and their use in educational and academic settings, the same is not true for the different Chinese spoken language, despite the fact that they are more different from each other than, for example, the Romance languages of Europe.
Unofficially, there are large economic and social incentives to be functional in Putonghua, a form of Mandarin Chinese, which serves as a lingua franca among the different groups within China. In addition, it is also considered increasing prestigious and useful to have some ability in English, which is a required subject for persons attending university. During the 1950s and 1960s, Russian had some social status among Chinese elites as the international language of socialism.
Putonghua is the official national spoken language. In addition, Chinese autonomous regions and special administrative regions have additional official languages. For example, Tibetan has official status within the Tibetan Autonomous Region and Mongol has official status within the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region. In addition to the above, English and Portuguese have official status in parts of China. English is an official language in Hong Kong, and all laws of the HK government are published both in English and Chinese, with both versions having equal status. Portuguese has a similar status in Macao.
Another language which has no official status, but is very important in Buddhism is Sanskrit. Among Chinese Muslims, Arabic is also important as a liturgical language.
Terminology
However, the term Zhongguo Yuwen is sometimes used to be synonymous with “Chinese language”. To clarify, one can use Zhongguo de Yuwen (ä¸å›½çš„è¯æ–‡), which unambiguously means “China’s (several) languages”.
The following are the spoken and written languages (they are not in one-to-one correspondence) used by the modern citizens of China.
