Chinese

The Sinitic languages, more broadly known as Chinese is a language family consisting of languages which are the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Over one billion people, about one-fifth of the world’s population, speaks some variety of Chinese as their native language. Internal divisions of Chinese are usually perceived by their native speakers as dialects of a single Chinese language, rather than separate languages. There are between seven and thirteen main regional groups of Chinese, of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin which is spoken by about 850 million people.
Standard Chinese is a standardized form of spoken Chinese, based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin Chinese. Standard Chinese is the official language of the People's Republic of China and Taiwan, as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. It is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Of the other varieties of Chinese, Cantonese is influential among overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong(together with English).
Old Chinese, sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese", was the language common during the early and middle Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCE–256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artefacts and the poetry of the Shījīng. The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters provide hints to their Old Chinese pronunciations. The pronunciation of the borrowed Chinese characters in Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean also provide valuable insights.

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