Most Chinese speak one of the Mandarin dialects, which are largely mutually intelligible. In the classical division, Chinese has seven major language groups of which the Mandarin language group forms the largest group. In order to indicate differences in meaning between words similar in sound, tone languages assign to words a distinctive relative pitch-high or low-or a distinctive pitch contour-level, rising, or falling. Besides a core vocabulary and sounds, Chinese and most related languages share features that distinguish them from most Western languages: they are monosyllabic in origin, have little inflection, and are tonal. Important Chinese-speaking communities are also found in many other parts of the world, especially in Europe, North and South America, and the Hawaiian Islands.Ĭhinese, together with Tibetan and Myanmar (formerly known as Burmese) and the many tribal languages of South and Southeast Asia, belongs to the family of Sino-Tibetan languages. The vast majority of the Chinese-speaking population is in China (over 980 million), Hong Kong, and Taiwan (19 million), but substantial numbers are also found throughout the whole of southeast Asia, especially in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. Approximately 95 percent of the Chinese population speaks Chinese, as opposed to the non-Chinese languages such as Tibetan, Mongolian, Lolo, Miao, and Tai spoken by minorities. They are spoken by over one billion people. The Chinese languages are the languages of the Han (漢) people, the major ethnic group of China.
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