Chinese Languages
  
The language and script of the Han ethnic group are the most widely used in China, and are commonly known as the Chinese  language and script. Each of the other ethnic minorities, with the exception of the Hui which uses Chinese, has its own language. The language of the She is very close to Chinese. Increasing numbers of people among the ethnic groups are using Chinese in  addition to their own languages. Many of them have no script of their own and use either the Chinese script or the script of a related ethnic group.
   The Chinese (Han) language belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family. It is often said to be monosyllabic because the smallest meaningful units of speech generally consist of one syllable each. However, very many words of the modern language are polysyllabic compounds of two or more of the one-syllable basic units. Chinese is also described as a tonal language, which means that a syllable generally is pronounced with a characteristic tone (even, rising, falling-rising or falling). On the whole, Chinese lacks the inflections (suffixes, prefixes etc.) that are characteristic of many other languages. These are partly replaced by grammatical "particles", and the parts of speech in a sentence are chiefly determined by the word order.
   Over the vast area throughout which the Chinese language is spoken, there are many different dialects, some of which are mutually unintelligible. In the last few decades a standard language has gradually been formed, based on the language of the north, with the  Beijing pronunciation as the norm and a grammar modeled on modern vernacular writing. This language is called putonghua and is gradually being spread. It will eventually become the form of spoken and written Chinese in universal use.
   The Han script consists of pictographs and ideographs commonly known as Chinese characters, some of which go back more than three thousand years. The earliest characters consisted of a single pictographic or ideographic element: the characters 日 and 月 were, as they still are, pictographs for the sun and the moon, while 上 and下 conveyed the meaning of "upper" and "lower" in terms of the relative position of the vertical stroke to the horizontal. The structure of such characters was relatively primitive and simple. A second step was taken when two or more simple characters were combined to form a more complex character to express a new meaning. For example, the characters 日 and 月were combined to form 明，meaning "bright", and the character 人 (man) with the character 戈 (spear) forms the character 戍, meaning "defend". Still later a third type of character was developed, consisting of one element which stood for the meaning and another for the pronunciation, e.g.:

           芳 fang: fragrance       钫 fang: francium
           房 fang: house           妨 fang: hinder
           访 fang: visit           舫 fang: pleasure boat
           放 fang: set down

   The character 方 fang, which means direction, only indicates the pronunciation and does not contribute anything to the meaning; the other element indicates the meaning. Over a long period of time, Chinese characters have undergone very great changes in appearance, and many new characters have been invented, but the principles for the formation of new characters have persisted. In the development of Chinese culture, the Chinese or Han script has played a very great role in facilitating communication between different regions in China and strengthening the unity of the country. But because each character has its own separate form, the Chinese script is much more difficult to learn, write and print than an alphabetic script. For this reason, the Chinese government has set up a committee for the reform of the Chinese script to study and carry out gradual reforms.
   Twenty-eight of the languages of China's ethnic minorities belong to the Sino-Tibetan family, including Tibetan, Yi, Zhuang, Bouyei, Dai, Miao and Yao. Another eighteen belong to the Altaic family, including Uygur, Kazak, Mongolian, Manchu and Korean. Va, Blang and De'ang (formerly Benglong) belong to the Austroasiatic family, Gaoshan to the Austronesian family, and Tajik and Russian to the Indo-European family. Some people claim that the Gin language belongs to the Austroasiatic family, but this has not been fully established.
   Some minority groups, such as the Mongolians, Tibetans, Uygurs, Kazaks, Koreans, Xibes and Dais, have their own alphabetic scripts. The Tibetan script has a history of more than 1,300 years. The Uygurs and Mongolians have used different alphabetic scripts over periods of more than a thousand years and seven or eight hundred years respectively. The Yi language has a syllabic script which also has a history of over a thousand years. The Naxi script consists of two elements, ideographs and a syllabary, and the ideographs go back more than a thousand years. Ethnic minorities which had no script or incomplete scripts have created or improved their scripts in recent years. Ten of them have devised their phonetic alphabets, and nine of these are being tried out. Both in economic and cultural life many of the ethnic groups have much in common with each other, yet each has its distinctive characteristics.