Komentari

• 

  Зна Мурињо·pre 14 godina

  面積 1,580平方公里
  人口
  －總人口（2003年3月）
  －人口密度 ??

• 

  []·pre 14 godina

  Eto sad svi kinezi na vukajliji znaje gde je London!

• 

  cornelije·pre 14 godina

  ajd plus

• 

  Bruce·pre 14 godina

  去阴茎

• 

  []·pre 14 godina

  汉语/漢語

• 

  Цар·pre 14 godina

  لندن

  من ويكيبيديا، الموسوعة الحرة الكريمة
  لندن
  لندن
  الاسم المستعار : الضباب
  البلد المملكة المتحدة
  تاريخ تأسيسها هي سخية سنة 2000 السخي من التاريخ ،
  1801 لتصبح أكبر مدينة في العالم
  العمدة الحالي بوريس جونسون
  مساحة 1580 كيلومترا مربعا
  عدد السكان
  -- مجموع عدد السكان (مارس 2003)
  -- الكثافة السكانية
  7400000 (لندن الكبرى)
  4680 / كم
  موقع
  -- خط الطول
  -- خط العرض
  0 درجة 05 "00" W
  51 ° 30 "00" N
  درجة حرارة الهواء
  -- أعلى السنوية السخية
  -- المتوسط ​​السنوي السخي
  -- أدنى السنوية السخية
  25 درجة مئوية (7 أشهر)
  درجة مئوية
  -2 درجة مئوية (1 شهر)
  لندن خريطة الموقع

• 

  []·pre 14 godina

  Web
  Images
  Videos
  Maps
  News
  Shopping
  Gmail
  more

  mejl.adresaa@gmail.com

  Google Translate
  From:
  To:
  Chinese language From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Unless otherwise specified, Chinese texts in this article are written in (Simplified Chinese/Traditional Chinese; Pinyin) format. In cases where Simplified and Traditional Chinese scripts are identical, the Chinese term is written once. This article contains Chinese text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Chinese characters. Chinese 汉语／漢語, 华语／華語 or 中文 Hànyǔ (Chinese) written in Hanzi Hanyu.png Spoken in People's Republic of China (PRC, commonly known as China), Republic of China (ROC, commonly known as Taiwan), Singapore, Malaysia, the United States, the Philippines, Australia, Indonesia, Mauritius, Peru, and other regions with Chinese communities Region (majorities): Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Singapore (minorities): Southeast Asia, and other regions with Chinese communities Ethnicity Han Chinese and Hui people Total speakers approx 1.3 billion Language family Sino-Tibetan Sinitic Chinese Standard forms Mandarin Dialects Mandarin Jin Huizhou Wu Hunanese Jiangxinese Hakka Yue (including Cantonese-Taishanese) Pinghua Shaojiang Northern Min Eastern Min (including Fuchow) Central Min Pu Xian Southern Min (including Amoy, Taiwanese) Teochew (including Swatow, Chaozhou, Jieyang, parts of Shanwei/Meizhou) Writing system Chinese characters, zhuyin fuhao, pinyin, Xiao'erjing Official status Official language in United Nations People's Republic of China Hong Kong Macau Republic of China (Taiwan) Singapore (official, but not national language) Recognised minority language in Mauritius United States (minority and auxiliary) Regulated by In the PRC: National Language Regulating Committee1 In the ROC: National Languages Committee In Singapore: Promote Mandarin Council/Speak Mandarin Campaign2 Language codes ISO 639-1 zh ISO 639-2 chi (B) zho (T) ISO 639-3 zho – Macrolanguage individual codes: cdo – Min Dong cjy – Jinyu cmn – Mandarin cpx – Pu Xian czh – Huizhou czo – Min Zhong gan – Gan hak – Hakka hsn – Xiang mnp – Min Bei nan – Min Nan wuu – Wu yue – Yue och – Old Chinese ltc – Late Middle Chinese lzh – Literary Chinese Linguasphere 79-AAA New-Map-Sinophone World.PNG Map of the Sinophone world. Information: Countries identified Chinese as a primary, administrative, or native language Countries with more than 5,000,000 Chinese speakers w/ or w/o recognition Countries with more than 1,000,000 Chinese speakers w/ or w/o recognition Countries with more than 500,000 Chinese speakers w/ or w/o recognition Countries with more than 100,000 Chinese speakers w/ or w/o recognition Major Chinese speaking settlements Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. Chinese language (Spoken) Traditional Chinese 漢語 Simplified Chinese 汉语 showTranscriptions alternative Chinese name Traditional Chinese 華語 Simplified Chinese 华语 showTranscriptions Chinese language (Written) Chinese 中文 Literal meaning Chinese text showTranscriptions The varieties of spoken Chinese citation needed in Eastern China and Taiwan Chinese, the Chinese languages, or the Sinitic languages (汉语/漢語 Hànyǔ; 华语/華語 Huáyǔ; 中文 Zhōngwén) is a language family consisting of languages which are mostly mutually unintelligible to varying degrees.3 Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over one billion people, 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, although this identification is considered inappropriate by some linguists and Sinologists.4 Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between 7 and 13 main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (50 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. Standard Chinese (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu) is a standardized form of spoken Chinese based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin Chinese, referred to as 官话/官話 Guānhuà or 北方话/北方話 Běifānghuà in Chinese. Standard Chinese is the official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC, also known as 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 in Guangdong Province and Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Min Nan, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (known as Hokkien in Singapore and Malaysia). There are also sizeable Hakka and Shanghainese diaspora, for example in Taiwan, where most Hakka communities maintain diglossia by being conversant in Taiwanese and Standard Chinese. Contents hide 1 Varieties of Chinese 1.1 Standard Chinese and diglossia 1.2 Linguistics 1.3 Language and nationality 2 Writing 2.1 Chinese characters 3 History 4 Influences 5 Phonology 6 Phonetic transcriptions 6.1 Romanization 6.2 Other phonetic transcriptions 7 Grammar and morphology 7.1 Tones and homophones 8 Vocabulary 9 Loanwords 9.1 Modern borrowings and loanwords 10 Education 11 See also 12 References 13 Footnotes 14 Further reading 15 External links edit Varieties of Chinese Main article: Varieties of Chinese See also: List of Chinese dialects A map below depicts the linguistic subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within China itself. The traditionally recognized seven main groups, in order of population size arecitation needed: Name↓ Abbreviation↓ Pinyin↓ Local Romanization↓ Simp.↓ Trad.↓ Total Speakers↓ Mandarin Notes: includes Standard Chinese Guan; 官 Guānhuà Pinyin: Guānhuà 官话 官話 c. 1.365 billion Běifānghuà Pinyin: Běifānghuà 北方话 北方話 Wu Notes: includes Shanghainese Wu; 吴/吳 Wúyǔ Long-short: Ng nyiu or Ghu nyiu 吴语 吳語 c. 90 million Yue Notes: includes Cantonese & Taishanese Yue; 粤/粵 Yuèyǔ Jyutping: Jyut6 jyu5; Yale: Yuht yúh 粤语 粵語 c. 70 million Min Notes: includes Hokkien, Taiwanese & Teochew Min; 闽/閩 Mǐnyǔ POJ: Bân gú; BUC: Mìng ngṳ̄ 闽语 閩語 c. 50 million Xiang Xiang; 湘 Xiāngyǔ Romanization: Shiāen'ỳ 湘语 湘語 c. 35 million Hakka Kejia; 客家 Kèjiāhuà Hakka Pinyin: Hak-kâ-fa or Hak-kâ-va 客家话 客家話 c. 35 million Kèhuà Hakka Pinyin: Hak-fa or Hak-va 客话 客話 Gan Gan; 贛 Gànyǔ Romanization: Gon ua 赣语 贛語 c. 31 million Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguistsby whom?: Name↓ Abbreviation↓ Pinyin↓ Local Romanization↓ Simp.↓ Trad.↓ Total Speakers↓ Jin Notes: from Mandarin Jin; 晋/晉 Jìnyǔ None 晋语 晉語 45 million Huizhou Notes: from Wu Hui; 徽 Huīzhōuhuà None 徽州话 徽州話 ~3.2 million Pinghua Notes: from Yue Ping; 平 Guǎngxī Pínghuà None 广西平话 廣西平話 ~5 million There are groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (儋州话/儋州話), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡话/鄉話), not to be confused with Xiang (湘), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (韶州土话/韶州土話), spoken in northern Guangdong. The Dungan language, spoken in Central Asia, is very closely related to Mandarin. However, it is politically not generally considered "Chinese" since it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by Dungan people outside China who are not considered ethnic Chinese. In general, the above language-dialect groups do not have sharp boundaries, though Mandarin is the predominant Sinitic language in the North and the Southwest, and the rest are mostly spoken in Central or Southeastern China. Frequently, as in the case of the Guangdong province, native speakers of major variants overlapped. As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear how the speeches of various parts of China should be classified. The Ethnologue lists a total of 14, but the number varies between seven and 17 depending on the classification scheme followed. For instance, the Min variety is often divided into Northern Min (Minbei, Fuchow) and Southern Min (Minnan, Amoy-Swatow); linguists have not determined whether their mutual intelligibility is small enough to sort them as separate languages. Generally, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may only be marginally intelligible to close neighbours. For instance, Wuzhou is about 120 miles upstream from Guangzhou, but its dialect is more like that of Guangzhou than is that of Taishan, 60 miles southwest of Guangzhou and separated by several rivers from it (Ramsey, 1987). edit Standard Chinese and diglossia Main article: Standard Chinese Putonghua / Guoyu, often called "Mandarin", is the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China (Taiwan), and Singapore (where it is called "Huayu"). It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The government intends for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. In mainland China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature: it is common for a Chinese to be able to speak two or even three varieties of the Sinitic languages (or “dialects”) together with Standard Chinese. For example, in addition to putonghua a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese and, if they did not grow up there, his or her local dialect as well. A native of Guangzhou may speak Cantonese and putonghua, a resident of Taiwan, both Taiwanese and putonghua/guoyu. A person living in Taiwan may commonly mix pronunciations, phrases, and words from Mandarin and Taiwanese, and this mixture is considered normal under many circumstances. In Hong Kong, Mandarin is beginning to take its place beside English and Cantonese, the other official languages.citation needed edit Linguistics Linguists often view Chinese as a language family, though owing to China's socio-political and cultural situation, and the fact that all spoken varieties use one common written system, it is customary to refer to these generally mutually unintelligible variants as "the Chinese language". The diversity of Sinitic variants is comparable to the Romance languages. From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches technically. However, the idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and cultural self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. Most Chinese and Chinese linguists refer to Chinese as a single language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family. Chinese itself has a term for its unified writing system, Zhongwen (中文), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (汉语/漢語, "spoken languages of the Han Chinese")—this term could be translated to either "language" or "languages" since Chinese possesses no grammatical numbers. For centuries in China, owing to the widespread use of a written standard in Classical Chinese, there is much less necessity to maintain a uniform speech-and-writing continuum, as indicated by the employment of two separate character morphemes 语/語 yu and 文 wen. The character morphemes used in written Chinese are logographs that convey semantics graphically rather than phonologically, although some logographs are compounds conveying both semantic meaning (the "radical") and phonological information. Ethnic Chinese often consider these spoken variations as one single language for reasons of nationality and as they inherit one common cultural and linguistic heritage in Classical Chinese. Han native speakers of Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese, for instance, may consider their own linguistic varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese as one—albeit internally very diverse—ethnicity. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmented and disunified than it actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. Additionally, in Taiwan, it is closely associated with Taiwanese independence, where some supporters of Taiwanese independence promote the local Taiwanese Minnan-based spoken language. Within the People's Republic of China and Singapore, it is common for the government to refer to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) beside Standard Chinese as fangyan (“regional tongues”, often translated as "dialects"). Modern-day Chinese speakers of all kinds communicate using one formal standard written language, although this modern written standard is modeled after Mandarin, generally the modern Beijing dialect. edit Language and nationality The term sinophone, coined in analogy to anglophone and francophone, refers to those who speak the Chinese language natively, or prefer it as a medium of communication. The term is derived from Sinae, the Latin word for ancient China. edit Writing Main article: Written Chinese The relationship between the Chinese spoken and written language is rather complex. Its spoken varieties evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period, although written records have been discovered as far back as the 14th to 11th centuries BCE Shang dynasty oracle bones using the oracle bone scripts. The Chinese orthography centers on Chinese characters, hanzi, which are written within imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus the number "one", yi in Mandarin, jat in Cantonese and chi̍t in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("一"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as 冇 and 係 for Cantonese and Hakka, which are considered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere. Use of it is considered highly informal, and does not extend to many formal occasions. In Hunan, women in certain areas write their local language in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by many a dialect of Mandarin, is nowadays written in Cyrillic, and was previously written in the Arabic alphabet. The Dungan people live outside China. edit Chinese characters Main article: Chinese character Chinese characters evolved over time from earlier forms of hieroglyphs. The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic radicals. Only the simplest characters, such as ren 人 (human), ri 日 (sun), shan 山 (mountain; hill), shui 水 (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar Xǔ Shèn in the Hàn Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80–90% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that indicates the pronunciation. There are about 214 radicals recognized in the Kangxi Dictionary. Modern characters are styled after the regular script (楷书／楷書 kǎishū) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (篆书／篆書 zhuànshū), cursive script (草书／草書 cǎoshū) and clerical script (隶书／隸書 lìshū). Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. "Preface to the Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavilion" by Wang Xizhi, written in semi-cursive style There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia) outside mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty. The Simplified Chinese character system, developed by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common caoshu shorthand variants. Singapore, which has a large Chinese community, is the first—and at present the only—foreign nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. The Internet provides the platform to practice reading the alternative system, be it traditional or simplified. A well-educated Chinese reader today recognizes approximately 5,000–7,000 characters; approximately 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. A large unabridged dictionary, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; fewer than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used. edit History History of China History of China ANCIENT 3 Sovereigns and 5 Emperors Xia Dynasty 2100–1600 BCE Shang Dynasty 1600–1046 BCE Zhou Dynasty 1045–256 BCE Western Zhou Eastern Zhou Spring and Autumn Period Warring States Period IMPERIAL Qin Dynasty 221 BCE–206 BCE Han Dynasty 206 BCE–220 CE Western Han Xin Dynasty Eastern Han Three Kingdoms 220–280 Wei, Shu & Wu Jin Dynasty 265–420 Western Jin 16 Kingdoms 304–439 Eastern Jin Southern & Northern Dynasties 420–589 Sui Dynasty 581–618 Tang Dynasty 618–907 ( Second Zhou 690–705 ) 5 Dynasties & 10 Kingdoms 907–960 Liao Dynasty 907–1125 Song Dynasty 960–1279 Northern Song W. Xia Southern Song Jin Yuan Dynasty 1271–1368 Ming Dynasty 1368–1644 Qing Dynasty 1644–1911 MODERN Republic of China 1912–1949 People's Republic of China 1949–present Republic of China (Taiwan) 1945–present Related articles show This box: view · talk · edit Main article: History of the Chinese language Most linguists classify all varieties of modern spoken Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, termed Proto-Sino-Tibetan, from which the Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman languages descended. The relation between Chinese and other Sino-Tibetan languages is an area of active research, as is the attempt to reconstruct Proto-Sino-Tibetan. The main difficulty in this effort is that, while there is enough documentation to allow one to reconstruct the ancient Chinese sounds, there is no written documentation that records the division between Proto-Sino-Tibetan and ancient Chinese. In addition, many of the older languages that would allow us to reconstruct Proto-Sino-Tibetan are very poorly understood and many of the techniques developed for analysis of the descent of the (fusional) Indo-European languages from PIE do not apply to Chinese, an isolating language because of "morphological paucity" especially after Old Chinese.5 Categorization 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 1900s; most present systems rely heavily on Karlgren's insights and methods. 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 artifacts, the poetry of the Shījīng, the history of the Shūjīng, and portions of the Yìjīng (I Ching). 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. Old Chinese was not wholly uninflected. It possessed a rich sound system in which aspiration or rough breathing differentiated the consonants, but probably was still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qīng dynasty philologists. Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably 蜜 mì "honey", 獅 shī "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mǎ "horse", 犬 quǎn "dog", and 鵝 é "goose". The source says the reconstructions of old Chinese are tentative, and not definitive so no conclusions should be drawn. The reconstruction of Old Chinese can not be perfect so this hypothesis may be called into question.6 The source also notes that southern dialects of Chinese have more monosyllabic words than the Mandarin Chinese dialects. Middle Chinese was the language used during Southern and Northern Dynasties and the Suí, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the "Qiēyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the "Guǎngyùn" rime book. Linguists are more confident of having reconstructed how Middle Chinese sounded. The evidence for the pronunciation of Middle Chinese comes from several sources: modern dialect variations, rhyming dictionaries, foreign transliterations, "rhyming tables" constructed by ancient Chinese philologists to summarize the phonetic system, and Chinese phonetic translations of foreign words. However, all reconstructions are tentative; some scholars have argued that trying to reconstruct, say, modern Cantonese from modern Cantopop rhymes would give a fairly inaccurate picture of the present-day spoken language. The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. Most Chinese people, in Sìchuān and in a broad arc from the north-east (Manchuria) to the south-west (Yunnan), use various Mandarin dialects as their home language. The prevalence of Mandarin throughout northern China is largely due to north China's plains. By contrast, the mountains and rivers of middle and southern China promoted linguistic diversity. Until the mid-20th century, most southern Chinese only spoke their native local variety of Chinese. As Nanjing was the capital during the early Ming Dynasty, Nanjing Mandarin became dominant at least until the later years of the Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies (正音书院／正音書院; Zhèngyīn Shūyuàn) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited. This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all young and middle-aged citizens of mainland China and on Taiwan. Cantonese, not Mandarin, was used in Hong Kong during the time of its British colonial period (owing to its large Cantonese native and migrant populace) and remains today its official language of education, formal speech, and daily life, but Mandarin is becoming increasingly influential after the 1997 handover. Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in the 19th century.7 edit Influences Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on unrelated languages such as Korean and Japanese. Korean and Japanese both have writing systems employing Chinese characters (hanzi), which are called Hanja and Kanji, respectively. The Vietnamese term for Chinese writing is Hán tự. It was the only available method for writing Vietnamese until the 14th century, used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese élites. From the 14th to the late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chữ nôm, a modified Chinese script incorporating sounds and syllables for native Vietnamese speakers. Chữ nôm was completely replaced by a modified Latin script created by the Jesuit missionary priest Alexander de Rhodes, which incorporates a system of diacritical marks to indicate tones, as well as modified consonants. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Việt (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese. In South Korea, the Hangul alphabet is generally used, but Hanja is used as a sort of boldface. In North Korea, Hanja has been discontinued. Since the modernization of Japan in the late 19th century, there has been debate about abandoning the use of Chinese characters, but the practical benefits of a radically new script have so far not been considered sufficient. Derived Chinese characters or Sawndip are used to write Zhuang songs, even though Zhuang is not a Chinese dialect. Since the 1950s, the Zhuang language has been written in a modified Latin alphabet.8 Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of loanwords from Chinese. Fifty percent or more of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin,9 likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese10 and Vietnamese vocabulary. Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of 茶 (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 茄汁 (Jyutping: ke2 zap1) and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 金橘 (Jyutping: gam1 gwat1). edit Phonology This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. Main article: Chinese spoken language The phonological structure of each syllable consists of a nucleus consisting of a vowel (which can be a monophthong, diphthong, or even a triphthong in certain varieties) with an optional onset or coda consonant as well as a tone. There are some instances where a vowel is not used as a nucleus. An example of this is in Cantonese, where the nasal sonorant consonants /m/ and /ŋ/ can stand alone as their own syllable. Across all the spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda, but syllables that do have codas are restricted to /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, /p/, /t/, /k/, or /ʔ/. Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Mandarin, are limited to only two, namely /n/ and /ŋ/. Consonant clusters do not generally occur in either the onset or coda. The onset may be an affricate or a consonant followed by a semivowel, but these are not generally considered consonant clusters. The number of sounds in the different spoken dialects varies, but in general there has been a tendency to a reduction in sounds from Middle Chinese. The Mandarin dialects in particular have experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds and so have far more multisyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. The total number of syllables in some varieties is therefore only about a thousand, including tonal variation, which is only about an eighth as many as English.11 All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones. A few dialects of north China may have as few as three tones, while some dialects in south China have up to 6 or 10 tones, depending on how one counts. One exception from this is Shanghainese which has reduced the set of tones to a two-toned pitch accent system much like modern Japanese. A very common example used to illustrate the use of tones in Chinese are four tones of Standard Chinese applied to the syllable "ma." The tones correspond to these five characters: This article contains Ruby annotation. Without proper rendering support, you may see transcriptions in parentheses after the character instead of ruby glosses. 妈／媽(mā) "mother"—high level 麻(má) "linen" or "numb"—high rising 马／馬(mǎ) "horse"—low falling-rising 骂／罵(mà) "scold"—high falling 吗／嗎(ma) "question particle"—neutral Listen to the tones This is a recording of the four main tones. Fifth, or neutral, tone is not included. Problems listening to this file? See media help. edit Phonetic transcriptions The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. Early Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt to describe the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted in some rudimentary Latin transcription systems, based on the Nanjing Mandarin dialect. edit Romanization See also: Chinese language romanisation in Singapore and Romanization of Mandarin Chinese Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages due to the lack of a native phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century. Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Chinese is Hanyu Pinyin, often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore and Taiwan. Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across America, Australia and Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones of new words. In school books that teach Chinese, the Pinyin romanization is often shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside. The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recentlywhen? was widely used in Taiwan. When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade-Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade-Giles' extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng (pinyin), and with Taipei than T'ai²-pei³ (Wade-Giles). Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison: Mandarin Romanization Comparison Characters Wade-Giles Hanyu Pinyin Notes 中国／中國 Chung¹-kuo² Zhōngguó "China" 北京 Pei³-ching¹ Běijīng Capital of the People's Republic of China 台北 T'ai²-pei³ Táiběi Capital of the Republic of China (Taiwan) 毛泽东／毛澤東 Mao² Tse²-tung¹ Máo Zédōng Former Communist Chinese leader 蒋介石／蔣介石 Chiang³ Chieh⁴-shih² Jiǎng Jièshí Former Nationalist Chinese leader (better known to English speakers as Chiang Kai-shek, with Cantonese pronunciation) 孔子 K'ung³ Tsu³ Kǒng Zǐ "Confucius" Other systems of romanization for Chinese include Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the French EFEO, the Yale (invented during WWII for U.S. troops), as well as separate systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages or dialects. edit Other phonetic transcriptions Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The 'Phags-pa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of pre-modern forms of Chinese. Zhuyin (also called bopomofo), a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools to aid standard pronunciation. Although bopomofo characters are reminiscent of katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system. A comparison table of zhuyin to pinyin exists in the zhuyin article. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles: Pinyin table Zhuyin table There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system. edit Grammar and morphology Main article: Chinese grammar See also: Chinese classifiers Chinese is often described as a "monosyllabic" language. However, this is only partially correct. It is largely accurate when describing Classical Chinese and Middle Chinese; in Classical Chinese, for example, perhaps 90% of words correspond to a single syllable and a single character. In the modern varieties, it is still usually the case that a morpheme (unit of meaning) is a single syllable; contrast English, with plenty of multi-syllable morphemes, both bound and free, such as "seven", "elephant", "para-" and "-able". Some of the conservative southern varieties of modern Chinese still have largely monosyllabic words, especially among the more basic vocabulary. In modern Mandarin, however, most nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely disyllabic. A significant cause of this is phonological attrition. Sound change over time has steadily reduced the number of possible syllables. In modern Mandarin, there are now only about 1,200 possible syllables, including tonal distinctions, compared with about 5,000 in Vietnamese (still largely monosyllabic) and over 8,000 in English.12 This phonological collapse has led to a corresponding increase in the number of homophones. As an example, the small Langenscheidt Pocket Chinese Dictionary13 lists 7 words pronounced shī , 6 pronounced shí, 4 pronounced shǐ, and 11 pronounced shì (each word pronounced /ʂɨ/, in tones 1 through 4, respectively). Each such word has a different meaning and is written with a different character, and thus in writing, all can be used without problem. In speaking, however, tremendous ambiguity would result if all of these words could be used, and in fact, the vast majority have been replaced with some other word. As an example, consider the six tone-2 words: 十 "ten"; 实 "real, actual"; 识 "know (a person), recognize"; 石 "stone"; 时 "time"; 食 "food". Only the first one, 十 "ten", normally appears as such when spoken; the rest are normally replaced with, respectively, 实际 shíjì (lit. "actual-connection"); 认识 rènshi (lit. "recognize-know"); 石头 shítou (lit. "stone-head"); 时间 shíjiān (lit. "time-interval"); 食物 shíwù (lit. "food-thing"). In each case, the homophone was disambiguated by adding another word, typically either a synonym or a generic word of some sort (for example, "head", "thing"), whose purpose is simply to indicate which of the possible meanings of the other, homophonic syllable should be selected. Note also that 十 实 识 石 时 食 were pronounced /dʑip/, /ʑit/, /ɕik/, /dʑjek/, /dʑī/, /ʑik/ respectively in Early Middle Chinese, according to William Baxter's transcription – each one different from all the others. Furthermore, when one of the above words forms part of a compound, the disambiguating syllable is dropped and the resulting word is still disyllabic. For example, 石 shí alone, not 石头 shítou, appears in compounds meaning "stone-", for example, 石膏 shígāo "plaster" (lit. "stone cream"), 石灰 shíhuī "lime" (lit. "stone dust"), 石窟 shíkū "grotto" (lit. "stone cave"), 石英 shíyīng "quartz" (lit. "stone flower"), 石油 shíyóu "petroleum" (lit. "stone oil"). Most modern varieties of Chinese have the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character compounds. In some cases, monosyllabic words have become disyllabic without compounding, as in 窟窿 kulong from 孔 kong; this is especially common in Jin. Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest blocks of the language. While many of these single-syllable morphemes (字, zì) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cí (词／詞), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí (“word”) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. For example: Yun 雲—“cloud” (traditional) Yun 云—“cloud” (simplified) Han-bao-bao/Hanbao 漢堡包／漢堡—“hamburger” (traditional) Han-bao-bao/Hanbao 汉堡包／汉堡—"hamburger" (simplified) Wo 我—“I, me” Ren 人—“people” Di-qiu 地球—“earth (globosity)” Shan-dian 閃電—“lightning” (traditional) Shan-dian 闪电—"lightning" (simplifed) Meng 夢—“dream” (traditional) Meng 梦—"dream" (simplified) All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology—i.e., changes in form of a word—to indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has very few grammatical inflections—it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (他 as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century, and both characters are pronounced in exactly the same way. They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le 了 (perfective), hai 还／還 (still), yijing 已经／已經 (already), and so on. Chinese features Subject-Verb-Object word order, and like many other languages in East Asia, makes frequent use of the topic-comment construction to form sentences. Chinese also has an extensive system of classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. Other notable grammatical features common to all the spoken varieties of Chinese include the use of serial verb construction, pronoun dropping and the related subject dropping. Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess differences. edit Tones and homophones Official modern Mandarin has only 400 spoken monosyllables but over 10,000 written characters, so there are many homophones only distinguishable by the four tones. Even this is often not enough unless the context and exact phrase or cí is identified. The mono-syllable jī, first tone in Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: 鸡／雞 chicken, 机／機 machine, 基 basic, 击／擊 (to) hit, 饥／饑 hunger, and 积／積 product. In speech, the glyphing of a monosyllable to its meaning must be determined by context or by relation to other morphemes (for example, "some" as in the opposite of "none"). Native speakers may state which words or phrases their names are found in, for convenience of writing: 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyīng, Jiālíng Jiāng de jiā, Yīngguó de yīng "My name is Jiāyīng, the Jia for Jialing River and the ying for the short form in Chinese of UK." Southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Hakka preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese and have more tones. The previous examples of jī, have more distinct pronunciations in Cantonese (romanized using jyutping): gai1, gei1, gei1, gik1, gei1, and zik1 respectively. For this reason, southern varieties tend to need to employ fewer multi-syllabic words. edit Vocabulary The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are characters. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, a compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including bone oracle versions. The Zhonghua Zihai (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The CC-CEDICT project (2010) contains 97,404 contemporary entries including idioms, technology terms and names of political figures, businesses and products. The 2009 version of the Webster's Digital Chinese Dictionary (WDCD),14 based on CC-CEDICT, contains over 84,000 entries. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumed Hanyu Da Cidian, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms. The latest 2007 5th edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian 现代汉语词典／現代漢語詞典, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 65,000 entries and defines 11,000 head characters. edit Loanwords See also: Translation of neologisms into Chinese and Transcription into Chinese characters Like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizable number of loanwords from other cultures. Most Chinese words are formed out of native Chinese morphemes, including words describing imported objects and ideas. However, direct phonetic borrowing of foreign words has gone on since ancient times. Words borrowed from along the Silk Road since Old Chinese include 葡萄 "grape", 石榴 "pomegranate" and 狮子／獅子 "lion". Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩萨／菩薩 "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 胡同 "hutong". Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄 "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of North India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as 琵琶 "pípa", the Chinese lute, or 酪 "cheese" or "yoghurt", but from exactly which source is not always clear. edit Modern borrowings and loanwords Modern neologisms are translated into Chinese primarily in three ways: free translation (calque, by meaning), phonetic translation (by sound) and a combination of the above two (partially transcriptive with a careful selection of meaning-encoding characters). Today, it is much more common to use existing Chinese morphemes to coin new words in order to represent imported concepts, such as technical expressions and international scientific vocabulary, owing to the structural differences from Western languages. Any Latin or Greek etymologies are dropped and converted into the corresponding meaning-carrying Chinese characters (for example, anti- typically becomes "反", literally opposite), making them more comprehensible for Chinese but introducing more difficulties in understanding foreign texts. For example, the word telephone was loaned phonetically as 德律风／德律風 (Shanghainese: télífon təlɪfoŋ, Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later 电话／電話 (diànhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include 电视／電視 (diànshì "electric vision") for television, 电脑／電腦 (diànnǎo "electric brain") for computer; 手机／手機 (shǒujī "hand machine") for cellphone, and 蓝牙／藍牙 (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. 網誌 (wǎng zhì "internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 汉堡包／漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo, "Hamburg bun") for "hamburger". Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as 拖拉机／拖拉機 (tuōlājī, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马利奥／馬利奧 for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾／奔騰 (bēnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and 赛百味／賽百味 (Sàibǎiwèi "better-than hundred tastes") for Subway restaurants. Foreign words, mainly proper nouns (names of people, places), continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, "Israel" becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè), "Paris" becomes 巴黎 (pinyin: bālí). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including 沙发／沙發 shāfā "sofa", 马达／馬達 mǎdá "motor", 幽默 yōumò "humor", 逻辑／邏輯 luójí "logic", 时髦／時髦 shímáo "smart, fashionable" and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ "hysterics". The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghainese dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. For example, 沙发／沙發 and 马达／馬達 in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor". Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transcription. From French came 芭蕾 (bāléi "ballet"), 香槟 (xiāngbīn, "champagne"), via Italian 咖啡 (kāfēi "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed, such as the above-mentioned 沙发／沙發 (shāfā "sofa"), 幽默 (yōumò "humour"), and 高尔夫／高爾夫 (gāoěrfū "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪斯科 (dísīkè "disco"), 可乐／可樂 (kělè "cola") and 迷你 (mínǐ "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon 卡通 (cartoon), 基佬 (gay people), 的士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, for example, 粉丝／粉絲 (fěnsī "fans"), 黑客 (hēikè "hacker", literally "black guest"), 部落格 (bùluōgé "blog", literally "interconnected tribes") in Taiwanese Mandarin. Another result of the English influence on Chinese is the appearance in Modern Chinese texts of so-called 字母词 zìmǔcí ("lettered words") spelled with letters from foreign alphabets. This has appeared in magazines, newspapers, on web sites and on TV: 三G手机 "3rd generation cell phones" (三 sān "three" + G "generation" + 手机 shǒujī "mobile phones"), IT界 "IT industry", HSK (hànyǔ shuǐpíng kǎoshì, 汉语水平考试), GB (guóbiāo, 国标), CIF价 (Cost, Insurance, Freight + 价 jià "price"); e家庭 "electronic home" (家庭 jiātīng "home"); W时代 "wireless generation" (时代 shídài "generation"); 的士call, TV族, 后РС时代 "post-PC era" (后 hòu "after/post" + PC "personal computer" + 时代 shídài "epoch"), and so on. Since the 20th century, another source has been Japan. Using existing kanji, which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language, the Japanese re-moulded European concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, jīngjì (经济／經濟, keizai), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was narrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this toing-and-froing process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese share a corpus linguistic of terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European languages. edit Education See also: Chinese as a Foreign or Second Language With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and has become an increasingly popular subject of study amongst the young in the Western world, as in the UK.15 In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test (comparable to the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.16 edit See also China portal Language portal Chinese character Chinese exclamative particles Chinese honorifics Chinese classifier Chinese dialects Chinese number gestures Chinese numerals Chinese punctuation Classical Chinese grammar Four-character idiom Han unification Haner language HSK test Languages of China Regional differences in the Chinese language North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics Nü shu edit References DeFrancis, John (1984). The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0-8248-1068-6. Hannas, William C. (1997). Asia's Orthographic Dilemma. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0-8248-1892-X. Norman, Jerry (1988). Chinese. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-29653-6. Qiu, Xigui (2000). Chinese Writing. Society for the Study of Early China and Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. ISBN 1-55729-071-7. Ramsey, S. Robert (1987). The Languages of China. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01468-X. edit Footnotes ^ http://www.china-language.gov.cn/ (Chinese) ^ http://mandarin.org.sg/html/home.htmdead link ^ * David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. “The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.” Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. “The Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.” Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. “The modern Chinese dialects are really more like a family of language." John DeFrancis. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984), p.56. "To call Chinese a single language composed of dialects with varying degrees of difference is to mislead by minimizing disparities that according to Chao are as great as those between English and Dutch. To call Chinese a family of languages is to suggest extralinguistic differences that in fact do not exist and to overlook the unique linguistic situation that exists in China." ^ Mair, Victor H. (1991). "What Is a Chinese "Dialect/Topolect"? Reflections on Some Key Sino-English Linguistic Terms" (PDF). Sino-Platonic Papers. ^ Analysis of the concept "wave" in PST. ^ Encyclopedia Britannica s.v. "Chinese languages": "Old Chinese vocabulary already contained many words not generally occurring in the other Sino-Tibetan languages. The words for ‘honey' and ‘lion,' and probably also ‘horse,' ‘dog,' and ‘goose,' are connected with Indo-European and were acquired through trade and early contacts. (The nearest known Indo-European languages were Tocharian and Sogdian, a middle Iranian language.) A number of words have Austroasiatic cognates and point to early contacts with the ancestral language of Muong-Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer"; Jan Ulenbrook, Einige Übereinstimmungen zwischen dem Chinesischen und dem Indogermanischen (1967) proposes 57 items; see also Tsung-tung Chang, 1988 Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese;. ^ *Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4 ^ Zhou, Minglang: Multilingualism in China: The Politics of Writing Reforms for Minority Languages, 1949–2002 (Walter de Gruyter 2003); ISBN 3-11-017896-6; pp. 251–258. ^ Sohn, Ho-Min. The Korean Language (Section 1.5.3 "Korean vocabulary", p. 13), Cambridge University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-521-36943-6 ^ Shibatani, Masayoshi. The Languages of Japan (Section 7.2 "Loan words", p.142), Cambridge University Press, 1990. ISBN 0521369185 ^ DeFrancis (1984) p.42 counts Chinese as having 1,277 tonal syllables, and about 398 to 418 if tones are disregarded; he cites Jespersen, Otto (1928) Monosyllabism in English; London, p.15 for a count of over 8000 syllables for English. ^ DeFrancis (1984) p.42 counts Chinese as having 1,277 tonal syllables, and about 398 to 418 if tones are disregarded; he cites Otto Jespersen (Monosyllabism in English, London, 1928, p.15) for a count of over 8,000 syllables for English. ^ Terrell, Peter, ed (2005). Langenscheidt Pocket Chinese Dictionary. Berlin and Munich: Langenscheidt KG. ISBN 1-58573-057-2. ^ *Dr. Timothy Uy and Jim Hsia, Editors, Webster's Digital Chinese Dictionary – Advanced Reference Edition, July 2009 ^ "How hard is it to learn Chinese?". BBC News. January 17, 2006. Retrieved April 28, 2010. ^ (Chinese) "汉语水平考试中心：2005年外国考生总人数近12万",Gov.cn Xinhua News Agency, January 16, 2006. . edit Further reading Shang wu yin shu kuan (1903). English and Chinese pronouncing dictionary. Harvard University. Retrieved 2011-6-27. ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawai’i Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X. ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9. Chinese Phrase Book, sinoplanet, 2009 Chinese for everyone: for all ages and learning styles. Marie- Laure de Shazer (2007), International edition. edit External links Chinese language edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Classical Chinese texts – Chinese Text Project Keys to the Chinese Language: Book II—Google Books Chinese language Tree Dear Dim Sum | Daily small bites Chinese lessons showv · d · eChinese language(s) showv · d · eChinese language loan vocabularies showv · d · eLanguages of Asia showv · d · eOfficial languages of the United Nations Categories: Chinese language | Sinology | Isolating languages Log in / create account Article Discussion Read Edit View history Main page Contents Featured content Current events Random article Donate to Wikipedia Interaction Help About Wikipedia Community portal Recent changes Contact Wikipedia Toolbox Print/export Languages Afrikaans አማርኛ العربية Aragonés Azərbaycanca বাংলা Bân-lâm-gú Беларуская ‪Беларуская (тарашкевіца)‬ Bikol Central Boarisch བོད་ཡིག Bosanski Brezhoneg Български Català Чӑвашла Cebuano Česky Cymraeg Dansk Deutsch ދިވެހިބަސް Dolnoserbski Eesti Ελληνικά Español Esperanto Euskara فارسی Fiji Hindi Føroyskt Français Frysk Gaeilge Gaelg Galego 贛語 Hak-kâ-fa Хальмг 한국어 Hawai`i Հայերեն हिन्दी Hornjoserbsce Hrvatski Ido Ilokano Bahasa Indonesia Íslenska Italiano עברית Basa Jawa Kalaallisut ಕನ್ನಡ ქართული Қазақша Kernowek Къэбэрдеибзэ / Qabardjajəbza Kiswahili Kongo ລາວ Latina Latviešu Lietuvių Líguru Limburgs Lojban Magyar Македонски മലയാളം मराठी مصرى Bahasa Melayu Монгол Nāhuatl Nederlands 日本語 Нохчийн ‪Norsk (bokmål)‬ ‪Norsk (nynorsk)‬ Occitan پنجابی ភាសាខ្មែរ Plattdüütsch Polski Português Qırımtatarca Reo Mā`ohi Română Runa Simi Русиньскый Русский Саха тыла संस्कृत Scots Seeltersk Sesotho Shqip Simple English Slovenčina Slovenščina Српски / Srpski Srpskohrvatski / Српскохрватски Suomi Svenska Tagalog தமிழ் Татарча/Tatarça తెలుగు ไทย Тоҷикӣ Türkçe Türkmençe Twi Українська اردو ئۇيغۇرچە / Uyghurche‎ Vahcuengh Tiếng Việt Võro Walon 文言 Winaray 吴语 ייִדיש Yorùbá 粵語 Žemaitėška 中文 This page was last modified on 18 July 2011 at 15:07. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. See Terms of use for details. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization. Contact us Privacy policy About Wikipedia Disclaimers Wikimedia Foundation Powered by MediaWiki
  English to Chinese translation
  中国语文
  从维基百科，自由的百科全书

  除非另有说明，本文中的中文文本的书面（简体中文/繁体中文，汉语拼音）格式。在简体和繁体中文脚本相同的情况下，对中国来说是一次写入。

  本文包含中文文本。如果没有适当的渲染支持，您可能会看到问号，箱子，或其他符号，而不是中文字符。
  中国
  汉语/汉语，华语/华语或中文
  Hànyǔ（中国）用汉字写在
  Hanyu.png
  口语在中华人民共和国（中国，俗称中国），中国的中华民国，俗称台湾，新加坡，马来西亚，美国，菲律宾，澳大利亚，印度尼西亚，毛里求斯，秘鲁，并与其他地区华人社区
  地区：中国内地，香港，澳门，台湾，新加坡（多数）
  （少数民族）：东南亚和其他地区的华人社区
  种族的汉人和回族人
  扬声器约1.3亿
  汉藏语系

  Sinitic
  中国

  标准表格
  国语
  方言
  国语
  金
  惠州市
  吴
  湖南
  Jiangxinese
  客家
  乐（包括广东话，台山）
  平华
  韶
  北闵
  东闵（包括Fuchow）
  中央敏
  莆仙
  闽南（包括厦门，台湾）
  潮州（包括汕头，潮州，揭阳，汕尾/梅州市的部分地区）
  书写系统中文字符，拼音，注音富豪，Xiao'erjing
  官方地位
  在联合国的官方语言

  中华人民共和国中国

  香港
  澳门

  中国的中华民国（台湾）
  新加坡（官方的，但不是国家语言）
  在毛里求斯的认可少数民族语言
  美国（少数人及​​辅助）
  受中国：民族语言规范委员会1
  在我国：国家语言委员会
  在新加坡：推广普通话理事会/讲华语运动2
  语言代码
  ISO 639-1 ZH
  ISO 639-2志（二）ZHO（T）
  ISO 639-3 ZHO - Macrolanguage
  个别代码：
  CDO - 董敏
  cjy - 金玉
  CMN - 普通话
  CPX - 莆仙
  CZH - 惠州
  czo - 钟敏
  甘 - 甘
  陈克勤 - 客家
  HSN - 香
  贝MNP - 闵
  南 - 闽南
  wuu - 武
  岳 - 岳
  OCH - 旧中国
  LTC - 晚中东中国
  文学LZH - 中国
  Linguasphere 79 - AAA级
  新地图Sinophone World.PNG
  Sinophone世界地图。

  信息：
  国家确定的中国作为一个初级的，行政的，或母语
  国家超过500万中国音箱W / W / O识别
  国家有超过100万中国扬声器W /或W / O识别
  国家超过50万中国音箱W / W / O识别
  国家超过10万中国音箱W / W / O识别
  主要会讲中文的定居点
  注意：此页面可能包含在Unicode的国际音标注音符号。
  中国的语言（口语）
  传统的中国汉语
  简体中国汉语
  显示改编
  替代的中文名称
  传统的中国华语
  简体中国华语
  显示改编
  中国的语言（书面）
  中国中文
  字面意思的中文文本
  显示改编
  中文口语品种引证需要在中国东部及台湾

  中国，中国的语言，或Sinitic语言（汉语/汉语Hànyǔ华语/华语Huáyǔ;中文仲文）是一种语言大多是在不同程度上相互不知所云的语言组成的家庭。3最初由讲土著语言在中国汉族中国，形成汉藏语系的分支之一。关于第五次世界人口，或超过10亿的人，会讲一些中文作为他们的母语的各种。 4中国的内部分歧通常认为他们的母语作为一个单一的中国语言，而不是单独的语言方言，虽然这个识别被认为是不适当的，有些语言学家和汉学家。

  中国的特色就是其内部多样性的高层次，尽管中国的所有品种的色调和分析。有7和13之间的主要区域集团的中国（根据分类计划），其中，到目前为止，是最讲普通话（约850万美元），吴（90万），粤语（乐）（70万）和最小（50万）。这些团体大多是相互难以理解的，虽然有些像项和西南官话方言，可以分享共同的术语和某种程度的可理解性。

  标准中文（普通话/国宇/华宇）是一种标准化的形式发言中文普通话的北京方言，被称为中国的官话/官话冠华或北方话/北方话Běifānghuà在中国。中国标准是中国的中华人民共和国（中国）和中华人民共和国（中华民国，又称台湾），以及四个新加坡的官方语言之一的官方语言。它是联合国六种官方语言之一。广东话是中国的其他品种，在广东省和操粤语的海外社区的影响，并保持香港（连同英语）和澳门（连同葡萄牙语）的官方语言之一。闽南分钟语言组的一部分，是在福建南部广泛使用，在邻近的台湾（它是台湾或福佬）和东南亚（福建在新加坡和马来西亚）。也有相当大的客家人和上海散居，例如在台湾，大多数客家社区保持在台湾和标准的中国正在熟悉diglossia。
  目录
  隐藏

  1中国品种
  1.1标准中文和diglossia
  1.2语言学
  1.3语言和国籍
  2写作
  2.1中文字符
  3历史
  4影响
  5音韵学
  6个音标
  6.1罗马
  6.2其他音标
  7语法和形态
  7.1铃声和同音词
  8词汇
  9外来词
  9.1现代借​​款和外来词
  10教育
  11参见
  12参考文献
  13脚注
  14进一步阅读
  15个外部链接

  编辑中国的品种
  主要文章：中国的品种
  另见：中国方言名单

  下面的地图，描绘了在中国本身的语言的细分（“语言”或“方言”）。传统上公认的7个主要群体，是为了在人口规模需要的引证]：
  名称↓缩写↓拼音↓本地罗马↓SIMP。↓繁体。↓共有
  音箱↓
  国语
  注：包括标准中国关;官冠华拼音：冠华官话官话C. 13.65亿
  Běifānghuà拼音：Běifānghuà北方话北方话
  吴
  注：包括上海吴吴/吴Wúyǔ多空：吴nyiu或Ghu nyiu吴语吴语C.。 90万
  乐
  注：包括粤语和台山乐;粤/粤Yuèyǔ粤拼：Jyut6 jyu5;
  耶鲁大学：Yuht裕粤语粤语C. 70万
  闵
  注：包括福建，台湾及潮州敏;闽/闽Mǐnyǔ POJ：班固;
  BUC的：明NGU闽语闽语C. 50万
  香香;湘Xiāngyǔ罗马：Shiāen'ỳ：湘语：湘语C. 3500万
  客家客家客家Kèjiāhuà客家话拼音：陈克- KA - FA或黑布- KA

• 

  Manana·pre 14 godina

  星架坡，又叫星加坡（加讀架）、星架波同新加坡（加讀架），正式名新加坡共和國（英文：Republic of Singapore，馬來話：Republik Singapura，泰米爾話：சிங்கப்பூர் குடியரச，Cingkappūr Kudiyarasu）係東南亞嘅一城島國。講廣東話嘅華僑，鍾意叫佢星架坡，而舊文書亦都有寫做新加坡。唐人亦都叫佢做石叻或者叻埠，來自馬來話Selat，即係海峽咁解。

  地理上星架坡島同埋側邊幾個島組成，位於馬來半島南端，馬六甲海峽南口，南面有星加坡海峽同印尼隔海相望，北同馬來西亞相隔柔佛海峽，有長堤相連，所以又有星洲之稱。

  1819年英國東印度公司嘅萊佛士同柔佛蘇丹簽訂條約，獲批准喺星架坡建立交易站同殖民地。由於特殊嘅地理位置，星架坡喺第二次世界大戰之前一直係大英帝國喺東南亞最重要嘅據點，因為咁慢慢發展成為繁榮嘅轉口港。1965年獨立後，喺總理李光耀嘅領導之下，新加坡喺一代人嘅時間內從一個第三世界國家轉變為一個有錢嘅已發展國家，人均國民生產總值居世界前茅。新加坡以廉潔嘅政府、清潔嘅都市、高效率同完善嘅法制聞名於世，但同時又以政府嚴格嘅管制著稱。
  目錄
  收埋

  1 史
  2 政治
  3 地理
  4 人口同語言
  5 宗教
  6 經濟
  7 交通
  8 教育
  9 出面網頁

  史 編輯
  萊佛士嘅尊像

  星架坡早期主要有馬來人住，佢最早嘅文獻，源自中國公元3世紀。14世紀中國大明時將星架坡叫做淡馬錫（Temasek）。1819年1月29號英國不列顛東印度公司僱員萊佛士登陸星架坡，並開始管轄呢個地區。1824年星架坡正式成為英國殖民地，最初隸屬於英屬印度殖民當局管轄，1867年升格為海峽殖民地，受英國直接統治。

  1941年太平洋戰爭時期，星架坡畀日本佔領達3年6個月，改埋名叫昭南特別市（Syonan）。1945年8月英國重新接管星架坡，恢復舊名。1959年星架坡取得自治地位，1963年佢同馬來亞聯邦、砂勞越同北婆羅州（現沙巴）成立馬來西亞聯邦，完全脫離英國統治。1965年8月9號馬來西亞宣布將星架坡驅逐出聯邦，星架坡被迫獨立。

  星架坡獨立後，尤其喺1970年之後，政治上嘅自由空間，逐步壓制，之不過經濟上，就取得高速發展，好快就成為東南亞重要嘅金融同埋轉口貿易中心，成為「亞洲四小龍」之一。同時星架坡人嘅生活水平，亦得到大幅度提高，住屋、教育、交通等問題，都步步解決，到1990年李光耀卸任總理時，星架坡已經成為區內，乃至整個亞洲經濟發展模範。喺吳作棟做第二任總理嗰陣，星架坡平穩咁度過咗1997年亞洲金融危機。但到21世紀初第三任總理李顯龍接任嗰陣，星架坡又再度遇到，點樣面對區內其他經濟體系崛起嘅新難題。
  政治 編輯
  星架坡國會大廈

  根據星架坡憲法，星架坡實行嘅係議會制政府。國家機構三權分立，總統由直接民選產生，為國家元首。國會議員亦都係選舉產生，總理喺國會多數黨中產生，佢領導嘅內閣擁有行政權，並由獨立嘅公共服務委員會管理公務員嘅聘用同埋處分。總理喺議員中選出內閣部長。

  自1965年起，人民行動黨一直係唯一嘅執政黨，喺議會亦好少有能夠形成監督力量嘅反對黨。外界普遍認為，人民行動黨對反對黨同埋異見分子嘅打擊係毫不留情，包括喺選舉前重新劃分選區、運用行政資源同訴諸法律行動等。但同時唔可以否認嘅，人民行動黨確實喺星架坡人中有好高威望，喺建國後嘅歷次選舉中該黨嘅總得票率從未低過 65%。

  有啲西方國家指責人民行動黨主宰咗星架坡主要嘅政治舞臺，因為國會成員絕大多數都係該黨黨員，三任總理李光耀、吳作棟同李顯龍亦都係人民行動黨黨員。不過，由於國會嘅構成嚟自選舉結果，呢啲指責並無太大嘅說服力。不過，星架坡即使係實行選舉制度，亦有啲人認為星架坡政府體制似乎更接近專政統治而唔係民主政治。

  一般認為，星架坡言論自由嘅空間喺1965年獨立之後就一直受到壓制，雖然近年佢為咗鼓勵創意產業嘅發展同展現更開明嘅政府態度，已經喺呢方面有所放鬆。有啲人認為，人民行動黨政府通過政府持股嘅方式間接控制咗該國兩大媒體集團，反對聲音亦因為種種限制好難通過其他私人出版機構出版佢哋嘅著作或者發表言論。外國媒體對星架坡政府嘅批評往往會導致誹謗官司，或者被限制喺星架坡嘅發行量。此外，個人或民間組織亦被禁止自行安裝衛星天線接收器，冚辦爛鬼佬嘅電視節目都可被審查。政府亦對網絡進行管制，具體管制情況不詳，不過封鎖嘅網站好多都係鹹網。

  人民嘅行動自由並冇受到太大限制，但當局對一切集會活動都非常關注。只要達到一定數量嘅戶外集會，都必須同警方備案。星架坡嘅內部安全局擁有非常大嘅許可權，被殖民地時期留低嘅內部安全法授權可以喺必要時無限期拘留任何被懷疑可能對種族和諧同社會穩定造成威脅嘅人士，並可以喺不經審訊嘅情況下扣押多年。有啲人認為，呢部法律喺人民行動黨政府對付共產黨嘅時候被濫用。

  此外星架坡嘅高壓管制重表現喺對日常行為嘅監督上：香口膠被禁止喺新加坡境內銷售（醫療用香口膠除外）；隨地丟垃圾、用完廁所後唔沖水、喺地鐵飲水或者食嘢都會導致高額罰款或強制勞役，好似罰喺公眾地方掃街示眾。呢個國家重擁有可能係全世界最嚴格嘅禁毒法律，攜帶毒品入境或藏毒作販賣用途嘅主要刑罰係絞刑。另外對於成年男性犯罪者重可以使用笞刑處罰。不過雖然大多數外國人無法理解呢啲嚴厲嘅刑法，大多數星架坡人都認同可以用重罰嚟遏制犯罪或破壞性嘅行為。
  地理 編輯
  星架坡地圖

  星架坡一共有大小島嶼 50 幾個，地勢起伏和緩，主島星架坡嘅面積佔 90% 以上。星架坡好多地都係填海得嚟，1950年到而家大約有20%嘅國土面積係由填海嚟。

  星架坡地處熱帶，四季如夏，氣溫變化較細，年平均溫度喺24到32攝氏度之間，濕度高，每日平均濕度係84%。降雨充足，年均降雨量喺2400毫米左右，每年11月到1月係雨季，雨水較多。

  星架坡早期嘅移民多數聚集喺中南部新加坡河出海口一帶，其他地區好多係熱帶雨林或農業用地，但係除咗少數嘅自然保護區外，今日基本上都已經係城市。星架坡綠地面積非常大，除咗美化城市外，重有降暑嘅功用。

  由於無淡水河，星架坡嘅主要水源就係降雨，因此修建咗多個水塘。雖然降雨量大，呢啲雨水都係無法滿足當地嘅用水需要，目前50%嘅水源依靠進口，大部分嘅水係喺馬來西亞進口。星架坡亦都積極開發其他水源，包括海水淡化同埋再生水。
  人口同語言 編輯

  星架坡係世界上除咗澳門以外人口密度最高嘅地區，而家常住人口超過400萬，其中25%以上係外國公民。本國公民中，四分之三嘅人口係華人，亦係世界上除兩岸四地以外，唯一華人人口佔大多數嘅國家。馬來人佔 14% 左右，印度族為 8%，重有少部分歐亞混血人口。

  係住房方面，84% 嘅星架坡人口住喺由政府起嘅組屋，價格非常低廉，重可以高價再轉賣畀無權買新組屋嘅新加坡永久居民或外國人士。組屋之外最多人居住嘅係共管式公寓，屬於私人嘅公寓住宅，價格一般係政府組屋嘅四、五倍之多。此外重有少部分嘅排屋（即聯體別墅）或獨棟別墅。

  新加坡通用華語、英語、馬來語同埋泰米爾語四種官方語言，其中馬來語係國語，但政府機構等多通用英語。早期嘅新加坡華人大多習慣使用唔同嘅方言，但係經過幾次大規模政府主導嘅「說華語運動」後，絕大多數新一代嘅華人多數習慣講普通話；此外新加坡嘅電視、電台對於方言節目亦有非常嚴格嘅限制，例如好多臺灣進口嘅閩南語電視連續劇同香港進口嘅粵語電視劇就必須用華語重新配音後先至可以播出。

  英語雖然係星架坡官方語言，但洋涇濱語情況十分普遍。因此，新加坡政府發起咗「講正確英語運動」，鼓勵國民學說、多說以英美英語為標準嘅規範英語（睇星架坡英語）。
  宗教 編輯
  實利·馬利亞曼印度廟

  星架坡係一個多元民族、多元文化嘅移民社會，亦因此彙集咗世界上多種宗教。

  86%嘅星架坡人有宗教信仰。

  佛教：星架坡第一大宗教。約佔人口嘅30%，信徒基本上係唐人。
  伊斯蘭教：馬來血統同巴基斯坦血統嘅人基本上都係穆斯林，有34.8萬人，全國有約80座清真寺。著名嘅有花蒂瑪清真寺同蘇丹清真寺。
  基督教同天主教：10歲以上信徒28.5萬人（佔12.6%），係星架坡唯一重增長緊嘅宗教。有186座教堂。星架坡最早嘅教堂係禧街嘅阿美利安教堂同聖安德烈路嘅聖安德烈教堂。
  道教：佔人口嘅13%，信徒基本上係唐人。
  印度教：有教徒8萬幾人，基本上係印度裔。印度廟22座。

  其他宗教人數較少，合計只有1萬1千幾人。錫克教係19世紀喺印度傳入嘅，教徒主要係錫克族警察、看守人，有7間錫克廟。好似奎因街嘅中央錫克廟。猶太教喺星架坡有兩個會堂。拜火教冇廟。星架坡雖然有宗教自由，但係對少數偏門宗系，好似耶和華見證人，仍然有所禁制。
  經濟 編輯
  中央商業區

  1965年後星架坡經濟發展迅速，係新興嘅現代化工業國家。工業主要包括區內最大嘅煉油中心、化工、造船、電子同機械等。擁有著名嘅裕廊工業區。國際貿易同金融業喺新加坡經濟中扮演重要角色。星架坡目前係繼紐約，倫敦同東京之後國際上第四大外匯市場交易中心。運輸業發達，擁有全世界最繁忙嘅港口同機場。人民生活水平較高，人均國民生產總值超過三萬美元，居世界前列。旅遊業亦喺總體經濟結構中佔重要比重，遊客主要嚟自日本、中國、歐美同東南亞其他國家。

  得益於呢個國家穩定嘅政局、廉潔高效嘅政府同較低嘅成本，早期星架坡係眾多跨國公司在東南亞投資嘅首選地。但係隨住人力成本嘅提高，同埋東南亞其他國家嘅相繼發展，星架坡嘅呢啲優勢逐漸喪失，好多工業、製造業紛紛外遷。但係由於英語嘅普及同高素質嘅人才，星架坡依然係區內最重要嘅金融中心。

  但係受限於自身環境同埋全球經濟蕭條影響，2001年星架坡經歷建國後經濟狀況最乍抖嘅一年，GDP負增長2.2%，迫使政府開始考慮其他嘅發展道路。目前該國政府開始鼓勵私人創業同埋依靠中國及印度嘅崛起調整經濟結構，鼓勵企業到新興工業國家進行投資，但重未見成效。

  旅遊業同樣係政府重點支持嘅產業，雖然近年來旅遊業頻頻受到打擊，歐美同日本旅客明顯減少，憑住良好嘅旅遊服務質量同豐富多元嘅文化，星架坡每年接待嘅外國遊客重有超過600萬人次。其中中國遊客數量增長最為顯著，主要係由於政府放寬中國公民簽證程序同埋延長逗留時間所致。為咗進一步鼓勵旅遊業嘅發展，星架坡好重視廉價航空行業嘅發展趨勢，除咗開兩間私營嘅廉價航空公司之外，亦鼓勵馬來西亞、泰國、印度尼西亞同埋澳州等國嘅廉價航空公司將新加坡列入目的地之中，亦表示願意降低樟宜國際機場對過往客機嘅收取費用。
  交通 編輯
  列車喺友諾士地鐵站
  樟宜機場

  星架坡交通發達方便，交通產業佔全國GDP總產值嘅10%左右。星架坡港嘅年噸位吞吐量，係居世界之冠，2004年全年達到10.4億噸，而以貨櫃數量嚟計算，就位居世界第二，達到2130萬個標準箱。

  星架坡而家有5個機場，其中樟宜機場同實里達機場係國際民航機場；另外嘅巴耶利峇機場、三巴旺機場同登加機場等3個就用作軍事用途。

  星架坡嘅樟宜機場亦係東南亞甚至全世界最繁忙嘅機場之一，亦係澳洲去歐洲航線嘅必停站。作為亞洲最繁忙嘅5個機場之一，樟宜機場嘅年旅客數已經突破3000萬人次。樟宜機場雖然已經有超過20年嘅歷史，但依然被評為全世界最舒適嘅機場之一，目前擁有2個候機樓同兩條跑道，第三個候機樓就喺度起緊。估計到2008年，樟宜機場嘅年過境旅客人數就會達到6670萬人次。

  重有，星架坡北部嘅實里達機場而家擁有一條長達1620米嘅跑道，專門連接鄰近國家嘅旅遊景點嘅定期航班、團體包機或者接待私人飛機，喺2005年，有關當局計劃擴展跑道到2000米，用嚟接待波音737級數嘅客機，佢係新加坡第一個國際民用機場。

  巴耶利峇空軍基地，擁有一條長達3760米嘅跑道，係畀外國空軍到訪時使用。據了解，美國空軍經常喺呢個空軍基地停留。新加坡另外重有三巴旺空軍基地同登加空軍基地。

  星架坡本島嘅公路完善，擁有10多條高速公路貫穿全島。重有公共交通同樣發達，而家開通咗3條地鐵線，重有一條起緊；巴士路線有成百條，由兩間巴士公司經營，分別係新捷運同SMRT巴士有限公司。

  私家車普及率喺星架坡係好高，主要係由於政府嘅諸多限制措施。私人買車必須首先競標攞到數量有限嘅擁車證，一張擁車證嘅價格就已經相當於一架普通進口轎車嘅價格。另外新加坡亦係全球第一個用電子收費站嘅國家，喺入去市中心嘅道路上架設自動電子收費系統，喺高峰時段入去市中心嘅車輛就要自動畀錢。由於買私家車嘅成本太高，再加上完善、方便嘅公共交通網絡，令到大多數星架坡人選擇唔買車，呢個現象有效咁解決咗其他都市普遍存在嘅交通擠塞問題。
  教育 編輯
  教育部總部

  星架坡嘅教育制度同英國嘅制度好似，除咗語文科之外，其他科目都係用英文教嘅。一般讀完十到十一年嘅中小學之後，可以揀到初級學院、高中或者理工學院讀書，讀初級學院或者高中嘅學生，半數以上能夠升上國內大學。星架坡有五間理工學院同埋三所大專學府，其中新加坡國立大學同南洋理工大學係亞洲頗具名氣嘅學府。

  每年星架坡都吸納唔少嚟自中國大陸同馬來西亞等地方嘅留學生升學，令星架坡成為亞洲嘅區域教育樞紐。
  Unbalanced scales.svg
  呢篇文嘅中立性有得拗；佢嘅內容、語氣可能太過主觀、側埋一邊，或者地方色彩太重。
  請喺編輯之前睇下討論版。
  喺拗掂數之前，唔好拎走呢通告示。

  星架坡教育制度成日俾人批評過分依賴教材，扼殺咗有彈性嘅獨立思想空間。本土戲「小孩不笨」就針對呢個教育弊病拍成嘅。
  出面網頁 編輯 :(

• 

  Bruce·pre 14 godina

  Nemojte ljudi, ko Boga vas molim!

• 

  Vučica21·pre 14 godina

  理工學院同埋三所大專學府，其中新加坡國立大學同南洋理工大學係亞洲頗具名氣嘅學府。

  每年星架坡都吸納唔少嚟自中國大陸同馬來西亞

• 

  []·pre 14 godina

  Wikipedia
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Page semi-protected
  For Wikipedia's non-encyclopedic visitor introduction, see Wikipedia:About.
  Wikipedia White sphere made of large jigsaw pieces. Letters from many alphabets are shown on the pieces.
  Wikipedia wordmark
  The logo of Wikipedia, a globe featuring glyphs from many different writing systems
  Screenshot show
  URL wikipedia.org
  Slogan The Free Encyclopedia
  Commercial? No
  Type of site Internet encyclopedia project
  Registration Optional (required only for certain tasks such as editing protected pages, creating pages or uploading files)
  Available language(s) 270 active editions (282 in total)
  Content license Creative Commons Attribution/
  Share-Alike 3.0 (most text also dual-licensed under GFDL)
  Media licensing varies
  Owner Wikimedia Foundation (non-profit)
  Created by Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger1
  Launched January 15, 2001 (10 years ago)
  Alexa rank increase 7 (As of July 2011)2
  Current status Active

  Wikipedia (Listeni/ˌwɪkɨˈpiːdi.ə/ or Listeni/ˌwɪkiˈpiːdi.ə/ wik-i-pee-dee-ə) is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 19 million articles (over 3.6 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site.3 As of May 2011, there were editions of Wikipedia in 281 languages. Wikipedia was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger4 and has become the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet,2567 ranking around seventh among all websites on Alexa and having 365 million readers.28

  The name Wikipedia was coined by Larry Sanger9 and is a combination of wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopedia.

  Wikipedia's departure from the expert-driven style of encyclopedia building and the large presence of unacademic content has been noted several times. When Time magazine recognized You as its Person of the Year for 2006, acknowledging the accelerating success of online collaboration and interaction by millions of users around the world, it cited Wikipedia as one of several examples of Web 2.0 services, along with YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook.10 Some have noted the importance of Wikipedia not only as an encyclopedic reference but also as a frequently updated news resource because of how quickly articles about recent events appear.1112 Students have been assigned to write Wikipedia articles as an exercise in clearly and succinctly explaining difficult concepts to an uninitiated audience.13

  Although the policies of Wikipedia strongly espouse verifiability and a neutral point of view, critics of Wikipedia accuse it of systemic bias and inconsistencies (including undue weight given to popular culture),14 and allege that it favors consensus over credentials in its editorial processes.15 Its reliability and accuracy are also targeted.16 Other criticisms center on its susceptibility to vandalism and the addition of spurious or unverified information;17 however, scholarly work suggests that vandalism is generally short-lived.1819 A 2005 investigation in Nature showed that the science articles they compared came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors."20
  Contents
  hide

  1 History
  2 Nature of Wikipedia
  2.1 Editing
  2.2 Rules and laws governing content
  2.3 Content licensing
  2.4 Accessing Wikipedia's content
  2.5 Defenses against undesirable edits
  2.6 Coverage of topics
  2.7 Quality of writing
  2.8 Reliability
  2.9 Plagiarism concerns
  2.10 Sexual content
  2.11 Privacy
  2.12 Community
  2.12.1 Power structure
  2.12.2 Contributors
  2.12.3 Interactions
  2.12.4 Recognition
  2.12.5 New users
  2.12.6 Demographics
  2.13 Language editions
  3 Operation
  3.1 Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia chapters
  3.2 Software and hardware
  3.3 Mobile access
  4 Impact
  4.1 Impact on publishing
  4.2 Cultural significance
  4.2.1 Awards
  4.2.2 Satire
  5 Related projects
  6 See also
  7 Notes
  8 Further reading
  9 External links

  History
  Main article: History of Wikipedia
  Logo reading "Nupedia.com the free encyclopedia" in blue with large initial "N."
  Wikipedia originally developed from another encyclopedia project, Nupedia.

  Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. Nupedia was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, Inc, a web portal company. Its main figures were Jimmy Wales, Bomis CEO, and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia. Nupedia was licensed initially under its own Nupedia Open Content License, switching to the GNU Free Documentation License before Wikipedia's founding at the urging of Richard Stallman.21
  Main Page of the English Wikipedia on October 20, 2010.

  Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia.2223 While Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia,2425 Sanger is usually credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal.26 On January 10, 2001, Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia.27 Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com,28 and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.24 Wikipedia's policy of "neutral point-of-view"29 was codified in its initial months, and was similar to Nupedia's earlier "nonbiased" policy. Otherwise, there were relatively few rules initially and Wikipedia operated independently of Nupedia.24
  Graph of number of articles and rate of increase showing article count doubling each year until the end of 2006, and becoming a linear increase in 2007.
  Graph of the article count for the English Wikipedia, from January 10, 2001, to September 9, 2007 (the date of the two-millionth article).

  Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and web search engine indexing. It grew to approximately 20,000 articles and 18 language editions by the end of 2001. By late 2002, it had reached 26 language editions, 46 by the end of 2003, and 161 by the final days of 2004.30 Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former's servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. English Wikipedia passed the two million-article mark on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, eclipsing even the Yongle Encyclopedia (1407), which had held the record for exactly 600 years.31

  Citing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control in a perceived English-centric Wikipedia, users of the Spanish Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create the Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002.32 Later that year, Wales announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and its website was moved to wikipedia.org.33 Various other wiki-encyclopedia projects have been started, largely under a different philosophy from the open and NPOV editorial model of Wikipedia. Wikinfo does not require a neutral point of view and allows original research. New Wikipedia-inspired projects – such as Citizendium, Scholarpedia, Conservapedia, and Google's Knol where the articles are a little more essayistic34 – have been started to address perceived limitations of Wikipedia, such as its policies on peer review, original research, and commercial advertising.
  Number of articles in the English Wikipedia plotted against Gompertz function trending to 4.4 million articles.

  Though the English Wikipedia reached three million articles in August 2009, the growth of the edition, in terms of the numbers of articles and of contributors, appeared to have flattened off around early 2007.35 In 2006, about 1,800 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia; by 2010 that average was roughly 1,000.36 A team at the Palo Alto Research Center speculated that this is due to the increasing exclusiveness of the project.37 New or occasional editors have significantly higher rates of their edits reverted (removed) than an elite group of regular editors, colloquially known as the "cabal." This could make it more difficult for the project to recruit and retain new contributors over the long term, resulting in stagnation in article creation. Others suggest that the growth is flattening naturally because the low-hanging fruit already exist.3839

  In November 2009, a Ph.D thesis written by Felipe Ortega, a researcher at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid, found that the English Wikipedia had lost 49,000 editors during the first three months of 2009; in comparison, the project lost only 4,900 editors during the same period in 2008.4041 The Wall Street Journal reported that "unprecedented numbers of the millions of online volunteers who write, edit and police Wikipedia are quitting." The array of rules applied to editing and disputes related to such content are among the reasons for this trend that are cited in the article.42 These claims were disputed by Jimmy Wales, who denied the decline and questioned the methodology of the study.43

  In January 2007, Wikipedia initially entered the top ten list of the most popular websites in the United States, according to comScore Networks Inc. With 42.9 million unique visitors and rank #9, Wikipedia surpassed New York Times (#10) and Apple Inc. (#11). It is a significant increase as in January 2006 the rank was #33 with just 18.3 million unique visitors.44 In April 2011 it was listed as the fifth most popular website by Google Inc.4546
  Nature of Wikipedia
  See also: Reliability of Wikipedia and Academic studies about Wikipedia
  Editing
  See also: Wikipedia:How to edit a page and Wikipedia:Template messages
  Wiki feel stupid v2.ogv
  In April 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation conducted a Wikipedia usability study, questioning users about the editing mechanism.47

  In a departure from the style of traditional encyclopedias, Wikipedia employs an open, "wiki" editing model. Except for a few particularly vandalism-prone pages, every article may be edited anonymously or with a user account. Different language editions modify this policy: only registered users may create a new article in the English edition. No article is owned by its creator or any other editor, or is vetted by any recognized authority; rather, the articles are agreed on by consensus.48

  By default, any edit to an article becomes available immediately, prior to any review. This means that an article may contain errors, misguided contributions, advocacy, or even patent nonsense, until another editor corrects the problem. Different language editions, each under separate administrative control, are free to modify this policy. For example the German Wikipedia maintains a system of "stable versions" of articles,49 to allow a reader to see versions of articles that have passed certain reviews. In June 2010, its administrators announced that the English Wikipedia would remove strict editing restrictions from "controversial" or vandalism-prone articles (such as George W. Bush, David Cameron or homework) by using reviews.5051 In place of an editing prohibition for new or unregistered users, there would be a "new system, called 'pending changes'" which, as Jimmy Wales told the BBC, would enable the English Wikipedia "to open up articles for general editing that have been protected or semi-protected for years." The "pending changes" system was introduced on June 15, 2010, shortly after 11 pm GMT. Edits to specified articles are now "subject to review from an established Wikipedia editor before publication." Wales opted against the German Wikipedia model of requiring editor review before edits to any article, describing it as "neither necessary nor desirable." He added that the administrators of the German Wikipedia were "going to be closely watching the English system, and I'm sure they'll at least consider switching if the results are good."52
  Web page showing side-by-side comparison of an article highlighting changed paragraphs.
  Editors keep track of changes to articles by checking the difference between two revisions of a page, displayed here in red.

  Contributors, registered or not, can take advantage of features available in the software that powers Wikipedia. The "History" page attached to each article records every single past revision of the article, though a revision with libelous content, criminal threats or copyright infringements may be removed afterwards.5354 This feature makes it easy to compare old and new versions, undo changes that an editor considers undesirable, or restore lost content. The "Discussion" pages associated with each article are used to coordinate work among multiple editors.55 Regular contributors often maintain a "watchlist" of articles of interest to them, so that they can easily keep tabs on all recent changes to those articles. Computer programs called Internet bots have been used widely to remove vandalism as soon as it was made,19 to correct common misspellings and stylistic issues, or to start articles such as geography entries in a standard format from statistical data.
  The editing interface of Wikipedia.

  Articles in Wikipedia are organized roughly in three ways according to: development status, subject matter and the access level required for editing. The most developed state of articles is called "featured article" status: articles labeled as such are the ones that will be featured in the main page of Wikipedia.5657 Researcher Giacomo Poderi found that articles tend to reach the FA status via the intensive work of few editors.58 In 2007, in preparation for producing a print version, the English-language Wikipedia introduced an assessment scale against which the quality of articles is judged.59

  A WikiProject is a place for a group of editors to coordinate work on a specific topic. The discussion pages attached to a project are often used to coordinate changes that take place across articles. Wikipedia also maintains a style guide called the Manual of Style or MoS for short, which stipulates, for example, that, in the first sentence of any given article, the title of the article and any alternative titles should appear in bold.
  Rules and laws governing content

  For legal reasons, content in Wikipedia is subject to the laws (in particular copyright law) of Florida, where Wikipedia servers are hosted. Beyond that, the Wikipedian editorial principles are embodied in the "five pillars", and numerous policies and guidelines are intended to shape the content appropriately. Even these rules are stored in wiki form, and Wikipedia editors as a community write and revise those policies and guidelines60 and enforce them by deleting, annotating with tags, or modifying article materials failing to meet them. The rules on the non-English editions of Wikipedia branched off a translation of the rules on the English Wikipedia and have since diverged to some extent. While they still show broad-brush similarities, they differ in many details.

  According to the rules on the English Wikipedia, each entry in Wikipedia to be worthy of inclusion must be about a topic that is encyclopedic and is not a dictionary entry or dictionary-like.61 A topic should also meet Wikipedia's standards of "notability",62 which usually means that it must have received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources such as mainstream media or major academic journals that are independent of the subject of the topic. Further, Wikipedia must expose knowledge that is already established and recognized.63 In other words, it must not present, for instance, new information or original works. A claim that is likely to be challenged requires a reference to a reliable source. Among Wikipedia editors, this is often phrased as "verifiability, not truth" to express the idea that the readers, not the encyclopedia, are ultimately responsible for checking the truthfulness of the articles and making their own interpretations.64 Finally, Wikipedia must not take a side.65 All opinions and viewpoints, if attributable to external sources, must enjoy an appropriate share of coverage within an article.66 This is known as neutral point of view, or NPOV.

  Wikipedia has many methods of settling disputes. A "bold, revert, discuss" cycle sometimes occurs, in which a user makes an edit, another user reverts it, and the matter is discussed on the appropriate talk page. In order to gain a broader community consensus, issues can be raised at the Village Pump, or a Request for Comment can be made soliciting other users' input. "Wikiquette Alerts" is a non-binding noticeboard where users can report impolite, uncivil, or other difficult communications with other editors.

  Specialized forums exist for centralizing discussion on specific decisions, such as whether or not an article should be deleted. Mediation is sometimes used, although it has been deemed by some Wikipedians to be unhelpful for resolving particularly contentious disputes. The Wikipedia Arbitration Committee settles disputes when other methods fail. The ArbCom generally does not rule on the factual correctness of article content, although it sometimes enforces the "Neutral Point of View" policy. Statistical analyses suggest that Wikipedia's dispute resolution ignores the content of user disputes and focuses on user conduct instead, functioning not so much to resolve disputes and make peace between conflicting users, but to weed out problematic users while weeding potentially productive users back in to participate. Its remedies include banning users from Wikipedia (used in 15.7% of cases), subject matter remedies (23.4%), article bans (43.3%) and cautions and probations (63.2%). Total bans from Wikipedia are largely limited to instances of impersonation and anti-social behavior. Warnings tend to be issued for editing conduct and conduct that is anti-consensus, rather than anti-social.67
  Content licensing

  All text in Wikipedia was covered by GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), a copyleft license permitting the redistribution, creation of derivative works, and commercial use of content while authors retain copyright of their work,68 up until June 2009, when the site switched to Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-by-SA) 3.0.69 Wikipedia had been working on the switch to Creative Commons licenses because the GFDL, initially designed for software manuals, was not considered suitableclarification needed for online reference works and because the two licenses were incompatible.70 In response to the Wikimedia Foundation's request, in November 2008, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) released a new version of GFDL designed specifically to allow Wikipedia to relicense its content to CC-BY-SA by August 1, 2009. Wikipedia and its sister projects held a community-wide referendum to decide whether or not to make the license switch.71 The referendum took place from April 9 to 30.72 The results were 75.8% "Yes," 10.5% "No," and 13.7% "No opinion."73 In consequence of the referendum, the Wikimedia Board of Trustees voted to change to the Creative Commons license, effective June 15, 2009.73 The position that Wikipedia is merely a hosting service has been successfully used as a defense in court.7475

  The handling of media files (e.g., image files) varies across language editions. Some language editions, such as the English Wikipedia, include non-free image files under fair use doctrine, while the others have opted not to. This is in part because of the difference in copyright laws between countries; for example, the notion of fair use does not exist in Japanese copyright law. Media files covered by free content licenses (e.g., Creative Commons' cc-by-sa) are shared across language editions via Wikimedia Commons repository, a project operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.
  Accessing Wikipedia's content

  Because Wikipedia content is distributed under an open license, anyone can reuse, or re-distribute it at no charge. The content of Wikipedia has been published in many forms, both online and offline, outside of the Wikipedia website.

  Web sites - Thousands of "mirror sites" exist that republish content from Wikipedia; two prominent ones, that also include content from other reference sources, are Reference.com and Answers.com. Another example is Wapedia, which began to display Wikipedia content in a mobile-device-friendly format before Wikipedia itself did.

  Mobile devices - A variety of mobile apps provide access to Wikipedia on hand-held devices. This can be via apps for the Android or the Apple iOS devices (see Wikipedia iOS apps), or via a mobile web browser that accesses specially formatted pages (see MediaWiki Mobile).

  Search engines - Some web search engines also display content from Wikipedia on search results: examples include Bing.com (via technology gained from Powerset)76 and Duck Duck Go.

  Other wikis - Some wikis, most notably Enciclopedia Libre and Citizendium, began as forks of Wikipedia content. For example, the website DBpedia, begun in 2007, is a project that extracts data from the infoboxes and category declarations of the English-language Wikipedia and makes it available in a queriable semantic format, RDF. The possibility has also been raised to have Wikipedia export its data directly in a semantic format, possibly by using the Semantic MediaWiki extension. Such an export of data could also help Wikipedia reuse its own data, both between articles on the same language Wikipedia and between different language Wikipedias.77

  Compact Discs, DVDs - Collections of Wikipedia articles have also been published on optical disks. An English version, 2006 Wikipedia CD Selection, contained about 2,000 articles.7879 The Polish-language version contains nearly 240,000 articles.80 There are also German and Spanish-language versions.8182 Also: "Wikipedia for Schools", the Wikipedia series of CDs/DVDs, produced by Wikipedians and SOS Children, is a free, hand-checked, non-commercial selection from Wikipedia targeted around the UK National Curriculum and intended to be useful for much of the English-speaking world.83 The project is available online; an equivalent print encyclopedia would require roughly 20 volumes.

  Books - There has also been an attempt to put a select subset of Wikipedia's articles into printed book form.8485 Since 2009, tens of thousands of print on demand books which reproduced English, German, Russian and French Wikipedia articles have been produced by the American company Books LLC and by three Mauritian subsidiaries of the German publisher VDM.86

  Obtaining the full contents of Wikipedia for reuse presents challenges, since direct cloning via a web crawler is discouraged.87 Wikipedia publishes "dumps" of its contents, but these are text-only; as of 2007 there is no dump available of Wikipedia's images.88
  Defenses against undesirable edits

  The open nature of the editing model has been central to most criticism of Wikipedia. For example, a reader of an article cannot be certain that it has not been compromised by the insertion of false information or the removal of essential information. Former Encyclopædia Britannica editor-in-chief Robert McHenry once described this by saying:89

  The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him.90

  White-haired elderly gentleman in suit and tie speaks at a podium.
  John Seigenthaler has described Wikipedia as "a flawed and irresponsible research tool."91

  However, obvious vandalism is easy to remove from wiki articles, since the previous versions of each article are kept. In practice, the median time to detect and fix vandalisms is very low, usually a few minutes,1819 but in one particularly well-publicized incident, false information was introduced into the biography of American political figure John Seigenthaler and remained undetected for four months.91 John Seigenthaler, the founding editorial director of USA Today and founder of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, called Jimmy Wales and asked if Wales had any way of knowing who contributed the misinformation. Wales replied that he did not, but nevertheless the perpetrator was eventually traced.9293 This incident led to policy changes on the site, specifically targeted at tightening up the verifiability of all biographical articles of living people.

  Wikipedia's open structure inherently makes it an easy target for Internet trolls, spamming, and those with an agenda to push.5394 The addition of political spin to articles by organizations including members of the U.S. House of Representatives and special interest groups17 has been noted,95 and organizations such as Microsoft have offered financial incentives to work on certain articles.96 These issues have been parodied, notably by Stephen Colbert in The Colbert Report.97

  For example, in August 2007, the website WikiScanner began to trace the sources of changes made to Wikipedia by anonymous editors without Wikipedia accounts. The program revealed that many such edits were made by corporations or government agencies changing the content of articles related to them, their personnel or their work.98

  In practice, Wikipedia is defended from attack by multiple systems and techniques. These include users checking pages and edits (e.g. 'watchlist's and 'recent changes'), computer programs ('bots') that are carefully designed to try to detect attacks and fix them automatically (or semi-automatically), filters that warn users making undesirable edits,99 blocks on the creation of links to particular websites, blocks on edits from particular accounts, IP addresses or address ranges.

  For heavily attacked pages, particular articles can be semi-protected so that only well established accounts can edit them,100 or for particularly contentious cases, locked so that only administrators are able to make changes.101 Such locking is applied sparingly, usually for only short periods of time while attacks appear likely to continue.
  Coverage of topics
  See also: Notability in Wikipedia
  Pie chart of Wikipedia content by subject as of January 2008.102
  Wikipedia compresses information in a variety of topics, including earthquakes, for example. In the picture, is the article for the 2010 Pichilemu earthquake.

  Wikipedia seeks to create a summary of all human knowledge in the form of an online encyclopedia, with each topic of knowledge covered encyclopedically in one article. Since it has virtually unlimited disk space, it can have far more topics than can be covered by any conventional print encyclopedias.103 It also contains materials that some people may find objectionable, offensive, or pornographic.104 It was made clear that this policy is not up for debate, and the policy has sometimes proved controversial. For instance, in 2008, Wikipedia rejected an online petition against the inclusion of Muhammad's depictions in its English edition, citing this policy. The presence of politically sensitive materials in Wikipedia had also led the People's Republic of China to block access to parts of the site.105 (See also: IWF block of Wikipedia)

  As of September 2009, Wikipedia articles cover about half a million places on Earth. However, research conducted by the Oxford Internet Institute has shown that the geographic distribution of articles is highly uneven. Most articles are written about North America, Europe, and East Asia, with very little coverage of large parts of the developing world, including most of Africa.106

  A 2008 study conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Palo Alto Research Center gave a distribution of topics as well as growth (from July 2006 to January 2008) in each field:102

  Culture and the arts: 30% (210%)
  Biographies and persons: 15% (97%)
  Geography and places: 14% (52%)
  Society and social sciences: 12% (83%)
  History and events: 11% (143%)
  Natural and the physical sciences: 9% (213%)
  Technology and the applied science: 4% (−6%)
  Religions and belief systems: 2% (38%)
  Health: 2% (42%)
  Mathematics and logic: 1% (146%)
  Thought and philosophy: 1% (160%)

  However, it must be considered that these numbers relate only to articles; it is possible that one topic contains a lot of short articles and another one quite large ones.

  Furthermore, the exact coverage of Wikipedia is under constant review by the editors, and disagreements are not uncommon (see also deletionism and inclusionism).107108
  Quality of writing

  Because contributors usually rewrite small portions of an entry rather than making full-length revisions, high- and low-quality content may be intermingled within an entry. Critics sometimes argue that non-expert editing undermines quality. For example, Roy Rosenzweig had several criticisms of its prose and its failure to distinguish the genuinely important from the merely sensational. He said that Wikipedia is "surprisingly accurate in reporting names, dates, and events in U.S. history" (Rosenzweig's own field of study) and that most of the few factual errors that he found "were small and inconsequential" and that some of them "simply repeat widely held but inaccurate beliefs", which are also repeated in Encarta and the Britannica. However, he made one major criticism.

  Good historical writing requires not just factual accuracy but also a command of the scholarly literature, persuasive analysis and interpretations, and clear and engaging prose. By those measures, American National Biography Online easily outdistances Wikipedia.109

  Contrasting Wikipedia's treatment of Abraham Lincoln to that of Civil War historian James McPherson in American National Biography Online, he said that both were essentially accurate and covered the major episodes in Lincoln's life, but praised "McPherson's richer contextualization... his artful use of quotations to capture Lincoln's voice ... and ... his ability to convey a profound message in a handful of words." By contrast, he gives an example of Wikipedia's prose that he finds "both verbose and dull." Rosenzweig made a further criticism, contrasting "the skill and confident judgment of a seasoned historian" displayed by McPherson and others to the "antiquarianism" of Wikipedia (which he compares in this respect to American Heritage magazine), and said that while Wikipedia often provides extensive references, they are not the best ones.109

  Rosenzweig also criticized the "waffling—encouraged by the npov policy—which means that it is hard to discern any overall interpretive stance in Wikipedia history." By example, he quoted the conclusion of Wikipedia's article on William Clarke Quantrill. While generally praising the article, he pointed out its "waffling" conclusion: "Some historians...remember him as an opportunistic, bloodthirsty outlaw, while others continue to view him as a daring soldier and local folk hero."109

  Other critics have made similar charges that, even if Wikipedia articles are factually accurate, they are often written in a poor, almost unreadable style. Frequent Wikipedia critic Andrew Orlowski commented: "Even when a Wikipedia entry is 100 per cent factually correct, and those facts have been carefully chosen, it all too often reads as if it has been translated from one language to another then into to a third, passing an illiterate translator at each stage."110 A study of cancer articles by Yaacov Lawrence of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Thomas Jefferson University found that the entries were mostly accurate, but they were written at college reading level, as opposed to the ninth grade level seen in the Physician Data Query. He said that "Wikipedia's lack of readability may reflect its varied origins and haphazard editing."111 The Economist noted that the quality of writing of Wikipedia articles can be a guide to the reader: "inelegant or ranting prose usually reflects muddled thoughts and incomplete information."112 A 2005 study by the journal Nature compared Wikipedia's science content to that of Encyclopædia Britannica, stating that Wikipedia's accuracy was close to that of Britannica, but that the structure of Wikipedia's articles was often poor."20
  Reliability
  Main article: Reliability of Wikipedia
  The way Wikipedia crowdsources means that anyone can lie or vandalize, yet these risks are common knowledge. Moreover, anyone can correct suspect assertions or criticize openly, behaviors empowered by the system.

  As a consequence of the open structure, Wikipedia "makes no guarantee of validity" of its content, since no one is ultimately responsible for any claims appearing in it.113 Concerns have been raised regarding the lack of accountability that results from users' anonymity,114 the insertion of spurious information,115 vandalism, and similar problems.

  Wikipedia has been accused of exhibiting systemic bias and inconsistency;16 additionally, critics argue that Wikipedia's open nature and a lack of proper sources for much of the information makes it unreliable.116 Some commentators suggest that Wikipedia is generally reliable, but that the reliability of any given article is not always clear.15 Editors of traditional reference works such as the Encyclopædia Britannica have questioned the project's utility and status as an encyclopedia.117 Many university lecturers discourage students from citing any encyclopedia in academic work, preferring primary sources;118 some specifically prohibit Wikipedia citations.119 Co-founder Jimmy Wales stresses that encyclopedias of any type are not usually appropriate as primary sources, and should not be relied upon as authoritative.120

  However, an investigation reported in the journal Nature in 2005 suggested that for scientific articles Wikipedia came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors."20 These claims have been disputed by Encyclopædia Britannica.121122

  Economist Tyler Cowen writes, "If I had to guess whether Wikipedia or the median refereed journal article on economics was more likely to be true, after a not so long think I would opt for Wikipedia." He comments that many traditional sources of non-fiction suffer from systemic biases. Novel results are over-reported in journal articles, and relevant information is omitted from news reports. However, he also cautions that errors are frequently found on Internet sites, and that academics and experts must be vigilant in correcting them.123

  In February 2007, an article in The Harvard Crimson newspaper reported that some of the professors at Harvard University include Wikipedia in their syllabi, but that there is a split in their perception of using Wikipedia.124 In June 2007, former president of the American Library Association Michael Gorman condemned Wikipedia, along with Google,125 stating that academics who endorse the use of Wikipedia are "the intellectual equivalent of a dietitian who recommends a steady diet of Big Macs with everything." He also said that "a generation of intellectual sluggards incapable of moving beyond the Internet" was being produced at universities. He complains that the web-based sources are discouraging students from learning from the more rare texts which are either found only on paper or are on subscription-only web sites. In the same article Jenny Fry (a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute) commented on academics who cite Wikipedia, saying that: "You cannot say children are intellectually lazy because they are using the Internet when academics are using search engines in their research. The difference is that they have more experience of being critical about what is retrieved and whether it is authoritative. Children need to be told how to use the Internet in a critical and appropriate way."125
  Plagiarism concerns

  The Wikipedia Watch criticism website in 2006 has listed dozens of examples of plagiarism by Wikipedia editors on the English version.126 Jimmy Wales, the Wikipedia co-founder,127 has said in this respect: "We need to deal with such activities with absolute harshness, no mercy, because this kind of plagiarism is 100% at odds with all of our core principles."126
  Sexual content

  Wikipedia has been criticized for allowing graphic sexual content such as images and videos of masturbation and ejaculation as well as photos from hardcore pornographic films found on its articles. Child protection campaigners say graphic sexual content appears on many Wikipedia entries, displayed without any warning or age verification.128

  The Wikipedia article Virgin Killer – a 1976 album from German heavy metal band Scorpions – features a picture of the album's original cover, which depicts a naked prepubescent girl. The original release cover caused controversy and was replaced in some countries. In December 2008, access to the Wikipedia article Virgin Killer was blocked for four days by most Internet service providers in the United Kingdom, after it was reported by a member of the public as child pornography.129 The Internet Watch Foundation, a nonprofit, nongovernment-affiliated organization, criticized the inclusion of the picture as "distasteful."130

  In April 2010, Larry Sanger wrote a letter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, outlining his concerns that two categories of images on Wikimedia Commons contained child pornography, and were in violation of U.S. federal obscenity law.131 Sanger later clarified that the images, which were related to pedophilia and one about lolicon, were not of real children, but said that they constituted "obscene visual representations of the sexual abuse of children", under the PROTECT Act of 2003.132 That law bans photographic child pornography and cartoon images and drawings of children that are obscene under American law.132 Sanger also expressed concerns about access to the images on Wikipedia in schools.133 Wikipedia strongly rejected Sanger's accusation.134 Wikimedia Foundation spokesman Jay Walsh said that Wikipedia does not have "material we would deem to be illegal. If we did, we would remove it."134 Following the complaint by Larry Sanger, Wales deleted sexual images without consulting the community. After some editors who volunteer to maintain the site argued that the decision to delete had been made hastily, Wales voluntarily gave up some of the powers he had held up to that time as part of his co-founder status. He wrote in a message to the Wikimedia Foundation mailing list that this action was "in the interest of encouraging this discussion to be about real philosophical/content issues, rather than be about me and how quickly I acted."135
  Privacy

  One privacy concern in the case of Wikipedia is the right of a private citizen to remain private; to remain a "private citizen" rather than a "public figure" in the eyes of the law.136 It is somewhat of a battle between the right to be anonymous in cyberspace and the right to be anonymous in real life ("meatspace"). Wikipedia Watch argues that "Wikipedia is a potential menace to anyone who values privacy" and that "a greater degree of accountability in the Wikipedia structure" would be "the very first step toward resolving the privacy problem."137 A particular problem occurs in the case of an individual who is relatively unimportant and for whom there exists a Wikipedia page against their wishes.

  In 2005 Agence France-Presse quoted Daniel Brandt, the Wikipedia Watch owner, as saying that "the basic problem is that no one, neither the trustees of Wikimedia Foundation, nor the volunteers who are connected with Wikipedia, consider themselves responsible for the content."138

  In January 2006, a German court ordered the German Wikipedia shut down within Germany because it stated the full name of Boris Floricic, aka "Tron", a deceased hacker who was formerly with the Chaos Computer Club. More specifically, the court ordered that the URL within the German .de domain (http://www.wikipedia.de/) may no longer redirect to the encyclopedia's servers in Florida at http://de.wikipedia.org although German readers were still able to use the US-based URL directly, and there was virtually no loss of access on their part. The court order arose out of a lawsuit filed by Floricic's parents, demanding that their son's surname be removed from Wikipedia.139 On February 9, 2006, the injunction against Wikimedia Deutschland was overturned, with the court rejecting the notion that Tron's right to privacy or that of his parents were being violated.140 The plaintiffs appealed to the Berlin state court, but were refused relief in May 2006.
  Community
  Main article: Community of Wikipedia
  Wikimania, an annual conference for users of Wikipedia and other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.

  Wikipedia's community has been described as "cult-like,"141 although not always with entirely negative connotations,142 and criticized for failing to accommodate inexperienced users.143
  Power structure

  The Wikipedia community has established "a bureaucracy of sorts", including "a clear power structure that gives volunteer administrators the authority to exercise editorial control."144145146 Editors in good standing in the community can run for one of many levels of volunteer stewardship; this begins with "administrator,"147148 a group of privileged users who have the ability to delete pages, lock articles from being changed in case of vandalism or editorial disputes, and block users from editing. Despite the name, administrators do not enjoy any special privilege in decision-making; instead they are mostly limited to making edits that have project-wide effects and thus are disallowed to ordinary editors, and to block users making disruptive edits (such as vandalism).149150
  Contributors
  Demography of Wikipedia editors

  Wikipedia does not require that its users provide identification.151 However, as Wikipedia grows with its unconventional model of encyclopedia building, "Who writes Wikipedia?" has become one of the questions frequently asked on the project, often with a reference to other Web 2.0 projects such as Digg.152 Jimmy Wales once argued that only "a community ... a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers" makes the bulk of contributions to Wikipedia and that the project is therefore "much like any traditional organization." Wales performed a study finding that over 50% of all the edits are done by just 0.7% of the users (at the time: 524 people). This method of evaluating contributions was later disputed by Aaron Swartz, who noted that several articles he sampled had large portions of their content (measured by number of characters) contributed by users with low edit counts.153 A 2007 study by researchers from Dartmouth College found that "anonymous and infrequent contributors to Wikipedia ... are as reliable a source of knowledge as those contributors who register with the site."154 Although some contributors are authorities in their field, Wikipedia requires that even their contributions be supported by published and verifiable sources. The project's preference for consensus over credentials has been labeled "anti-elitism."14

  In a 2003 study of Wikipedia as a community, economics Ph.D. student Andrea Ciffolilli argued that the low transaction costs of participating in wiki software create a catalyst for collaborative development, and that a "creative construction" approach encourages participation.155 In his 2008 book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, Jonathan Zittrain of the Oxford Internet Institute and Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society cites Wikipedia's success as a case study in how open collaboration has fostered innovation on the web.156 A 2008 study found that Wikipedia users were less agreeable and open, though more conscientious, than non-Wikipedia users.157158 A 2009 study suggested there was "evidence of growing resistance from the Wikipedia community to new content."159

  At OOPSLA 2009, Wikimedia CTO and Senior Software Architect Brion Vibber gave a presentation entitled "Community Performance Optimization: Making Your People Run as Smoothly as Your Site"160 in which he discussed the challenges of handling the contributions from a large community and compared the process to that of software development.
  Interactions
  Editing Hoxne Hoard at the British Museum.ogv
  Wikipedians and British Museum curators collaboration on the article Hoxne Hoard in June 2010.

  Members of the community predominantly interact with each other via 'talk' pages, which are wiki-edited pages which are associated with articles, as well as via talk pages that are specific to particular contributors, and talk pages that help run the site. These pages help the contributors reach consensus about what the contents of the articles should be, how the site's rules may change, and to take actions with respect to any problems within the community.161

  The Wikipedia Signpost is the community newspaper on the English Wikipedia,162 and was founded by Michael Snow, an administrator and the former chair of the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees.163 It covers news and events from the site, as well as major events from sister projects, such as Wikimedia Commons.164
  Recognition

  Wikipedians sometimes award one another barnstars for good work. These personalized tokens of appreciation reveal a wide range of valued work extending far beyond simple editing to include social support, administrative actions, and types of articulation work. The barnstar phenomenon has been analyzed by researchers seeking to determine what implications it might have for other communities engaged in large-scale collaborations.165
  New users

  60% of registered users never make another edit after their first 24 hours. Possible explanations are that such users only register for a single purpose, or are scared away by their experiences.166 Goldman writes that editors who fail to comply with Wikipedia cultural rituals, such as signing talk pages, implicitly signal that they are Wikipedia outsiders, increasing the odds that Wikipedia insiders will target their contributions as a threat. Becoming a Wikipedia insider involves non-trivial costs; the contributor is expected to build a user page, learn Wikipedia-specific technological codes, submit to an arcane dispute resolution process, and learn a "baffling culture rich with in-jokes and insider references." Non-logged-in users are in some sense second-class citizens on Wikipedia,167 as "participants are accredited by members of the wiki community, who have a vested interest in preserving the quality of the work product, on the basis of their ongoing participation,"168 but the contribution histories of IP addresses cannot necessarily with any certainty be credited to, or blamed upon, a particular user.
  Demographics
  Wiki letter w cropped.svg This section requires expansion.

  The New York Times ran a column about a Wikipedia survey at the time of Wikipedia's 10th anniversary. Quoting from it, "Wikimedia Foundation...collaborated on a study of Wikipedia’s contributor base and discovered that it was barely 13 percent women; the average age of a contributor was in the mid-20s, according to the study by a joint center of the United Nations University and Maastricht University" and also notes that "surveys suggest that less than 15 percent of its hundreds of thousands of contributors are women." A goal set by Sue Gardner, Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director, is to see female editing contributions increase to 25 percent by 2015.169 Linda Basch, President of the National Council for Research on Women notes the contrast in these Wikipedia editors' statistics with the majority percentage which women are currently filling in enrollment in BA, Masters and PhD programs in nations such as the US.170
  Language editions
  See also: List of Wikipedias
  Percentage of all Wikipedia articles in English (red) and top ten largest language editions (blue). As of July 2007, less than 23% of Wikipedia articles are in English.

  There are currently 279 language editions (or language versions) of Wikipedia; of these, 3, the English, German, and French Wikipedias have over 1 million articles, 36 have over 100,000 articles and 99 have over 1,000 articles.171 The largest, the English Wikipedia, has 3,687,831 articles. According to Alexa, the English subdomain (en.wikipedia.org; English Wikipedia) receives approximately 54% of Wikipedia's cumulative traffic, with the remaining split among the other languages (Japanese: 10%, German: 8%, Spanish: 5%, Russian: 4%, French: 4%, Italian: 3%).2 As of July 2008, the five largest language editions are (in order of article count) English, German, French, Polish, and Japanese Wikipedias.172

  Since Wikipedia is web-based and therefore worldwide, contributors of a same language edition may use different dialects or may come from different countries (as is the case for the English edition). These differences may lead to some conflicts over spelling differences, (e.g. color vs. colour)173 or points of view.174 Though the various language editions are held to global policies such as "neutral point of view," they diverge on some points of policy and practice, most notably on whether images that are not licensed freely may be used under a claim of fair use.175176177

  Jimmy Wales has described Wikipedia as "an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language."178 Though each language edition functions more or less independently, some efforts are made to supervise them all. They are coordinated in part by Meta-Wiki, the Wikimedia Foundation's wiki devoted to maintaining all of its projects (Wikipedia and others).179 For instance, Meta-Wiki provides important statistics on all language editions of Wikipedia,180 and it maintains a list of articles every Wikipedia should have.181 The list concerns basic content by subject: biography, history, geography, society, culture, science, technology, foodstuffs, and mathematics. As for the rest, it is not rare for articles strongly related to a particular language not to have counterparts in another edition. For example, articles about small towns in the United States might only be available in English.

  Translated articles represent only a small portion of articles in most editions, in part because fully automated translation of articles is disallowed.182 Articles available in more than one language may offer "Interwiki links", which link to the counterpart articles in other editions.
  Operation
  Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia chapters
  Wikimedia Foundation logo
  Main article: Wikimedia Foundation

  Wikipedia is hosted and funded by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization which also operates Wikipedia-related projects such as Wiktionary and Wikibooks. The Wikimedia chapters, local associations of users and supporters of the Wikimedia projects, also participate in the promotion, the development, and the funding of the project.
  Software and hardware
  See also: MediaWiki

  The operation of Wikipedia depends on MediaWiki, a custom-made, free and open source wiki software platform written in PHP and built upon the MySQL database.183 The software incorporates programming features such as a macro language, variables, a transclusion system for templates, and URL redirection. MediaWiki is licensed under the GNU General Public License and it is used by all Wikimedia projects, as well as many other wiki projects. Originally, Wikipedia ran on UseModWiki written in Perl by Clifford Adams (Phase I), which initially required CamelCase for article hyperlinks; the present double bracket style was incorporated later. Starting in January 2002 (Phase II), Wikipedia began running on a PHP wiki engine with a MySQL database; this software was custom-made for Wikipedia by Magnus Manske. The Phase II software was repeatedly modified to accommodate the exponentially increasing demand. In July 2002 (Phase III), Wikipedia shifted to the third-generation software, MediaWiki, originally written by Lee Daniel Crocker. Several MediaWiki extensions are installed184 to extend the functionality of MediaWiki software. In April 2005 a Lucene extension185186 was added to MediaWiki's built-in search and Wikipedia switched from MySQL to Lucene for searching. Currently Lucene Search 2.1,187 which is written in Java and based on Lucene library 2.3,188 is used.
  Diagram showing flow of data between Wikipedia's servers. Twenty database servers talk to hundreds of Apache servers in the backend; Apaches talk to fifty squids in the frontend.
  Overview of system architecture, December 2010. See server layout diagrams on Meta-Wiki.

  Wikipedia currently runs on dedicated clusters of Linux servers (mainly Ubuntu),189190 with a few OpenSolaris machines for ZFS. As of December 2009, there were 300 in Florida and 44 in Amsterdam.191 Wikipedia employed a single server until 2004, when the server setup was expanded into a distributed multitier architecture. In January 2005, the project ran on 39 dedicated servers in Florida. This configuration included a single master database server running MySQL, multiple slave database servers, 21 web servers running the Apache HTTP Server, and seven Squid cache servers.

  Wikipedia receives between 25,000 and 60,000 page requests per second, depending on time of day.192 Page requests are first passed to a front-end layer of Squid caching servers.193 Further statistics are available based on a publicly available 3-months Wikipedia access trace.194 Requests that cannot be served from the Squid cache are sent to load-balancing servers running the Linux Virtual Server software, which in turn pass the request to one of the Apache web servers for page rendering from the database. The web servers deliver pages as requested, performing page rendering for all the language editions of Wikipedia. To increase speed further, rendered pages are cached in a distributed memory cache until invalidated, allowing page rendering to be skipped entirely for most common page accesses. Two larger clusters in the Netherlands and Korea now handle much of Wikipedia's traffic load.
  Mobile access

  Wikipedia's original medium was for users to read and edit content using any standard web browser through a fixed internet connection. However, Wikipedia content is now also accessible through the mobile web.

  Access to Wikipedia from mobile phones was possible as early as 2004, through the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), via the Wapedia service. In June 2007, Wikipedia launched en.mobile.wikipedia.org, an official website for wireless devices. In 2009 a newer mobile service was officially released,195 located at en.m.wikipedia.org, which caters to more advanced mobile devices such as the iPhone, Android-based devices, or the Palm Pre. Several other methods of mobile access to Wikipedia have emerged (See Help:Mobile access). Several devices and applications optimise or enhance the display of Wikipedia content for mobile devices, while some also incorporate additional features such as use of Wikipedia metadata (See Wikipedia:Metadata), such as geoinformation.196197
  Impact
  Impact on publishing

  Some observers claim that Wikipedia is undesirable, because it is an economic threat to publishers of traditional encyclopedias, many of whom may be unable to compete with a product that is essentially free. Nicholas Carr writes in the essay "The amorality of Web 2.0", speaking of the so-called Web 2.0 as a whole: "Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can't imagine anything more frightening."198 Others dispute the notion that Wikipedia, or similar efforts, will entirely displace traditional publications. For instance, Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, wrote in Nature that the "wisdom of the crowds" approach of Wikipedia will not displace top scientific journals with their rigorous peer review process.199
  Cultural significance
  Main article: Wikipedia in culture
  Graph showing the number of days between every 10,000,000th edit.
  Wikipedia page on Atlantic Records being edited to read: "You suck!"
  Wikipedia shown in Weird Al's music video for his song "White & Nerdy."

  In addition to logistic growth in the number of its articles,200 Wikipedia has steadily gained status as a general reference website since its inception in 2001.201 According to Alexa and comScore, Wikipedia is among the ten most visited websites worldwide.7202 The growth of Wikipedia has been fueled by its dominant position in Google search results;203 about 50% of search engine traffic to Wikipedia comes from Google,204 a good portion of which is related to academic research.205 The number of readers of Wikipedia worldwide reached 365 million at the end of 2009.8 The Pew Internet and American Life project found that one third of US Internet users consulted Wikipedia.206 In October 2006, the site was estimated to have a hypothetical market value of $580 million if it ran advertisements.207

  Wikipedia's content has also been used in academic studies, books, conferences, and court cases.208209210 The Parliament of Canada's website refers to Wikipedia's article on same-sex marriage in the "related links" section of its "further reading" list for the Civil Marriage Act.211 The encyclopedia's assertions are increasingly used as a source by organizations such as the U.S. Federal Courts and the World Intellectual Property Organization212 – though mainly for supporting information rather than information decisive to a case.213 Content appearing on Wikipedia has also been cited as a source and referenced in some U.S. intelligence agency reports.214 In December 2008, the scientific journal RNA Biology launched a new section for descriptions of families of RNA molecules and requires authors who contribute to the section to also submit a draft article on the RNA family for publication in Wikipedia.215

  Wikipedia has also been used as a source in journalism,216 often without attribution, and several reporters have been dismissed for plagiarizing from Wikipedia.217218219 In July 2007, Wikipedia was the focus of a 30-minute documentary on BBC Radio 4220 which argued that, with increased usage and awareness, the number of references to Wikipedia in popular culture is such that the term is one of a select band of 21st-century nouns that are so familiar (Google, Facebook, YouTube) that they no longer need explanation and are on a par with such 20th-century terms as Hoovering or Coca-Cola.

  On September 28, 2007, Italian politician Franco Grillini raised a parliamentary question with the Minister of Cultural Resources and Activities about the necessity of freedom of panorama. He said that the lack of such freedom forced Wikipedia, "the seventh most consulted website" to forbid all images of modern Italian buildings and art, and claimed this was hugely damaging to tourist revenues.221
  Jimmy Wales receiving the Quadriga A Mission of Enlightenment award.

  On September 16, 2007, The Washington Post reported that Wikipedia had become a focal point in the 2008 U.S. election campaign, saying, "Type a candidate's name into Google, and among the first results is a Wikipedia page, making those entries arguably as important as any ad in defining a candidate. Already, the presidential entries are being edited, dissected and debated countless times each day."222 An October 2007 Reuters article, titled "Wikipedia page the latest status symbol," reported the recent phenomenon of how having a Wikipedia article vindicates one's notability.223
  Awards

  Wikipedia won two major awards in May 2004.224 The first was a Golden Nica for Digital Communities of the annual Prix Ars Electronica contest; this came with a €10,000 (£6,588; $12,700) grant and an invitation to present at the PAE Cyberarts Festival in Austria later that year. The second was a Judges' Webby Award for the "community" category.225 Wikipedia was also nominated for a "Best Practices" Webby. On January 26, 2007, Wikipedia was also awarded the fourth highest brand ranking by the readers of brandchannel.com, receiving 15% of the votes in answer to the question "Which brand had the most impact on our lives in 2006?"226

  In September 2008, Wikipedia received Quadriga A Mission of Enlightenment award of Werkstatt Deutschland along with Boris Tadić, Eckart Höfling, and Peter Gabriel. The award was presented to Jimmy Wales by David Weinberger.227
  Satire

  Many parody Wikipedia's openness and susceptibility to inserted inaccuracies, with characters vandalizing or modifying the online encyclopedia project's articles.

  Comedian Stephen Colbert has parodied or referenced Wikipedia on numerous episodes of his show The Colbert Report and coined the related term wikiality, meaning "together we can create a reality that we all agree on—the reality we just agreed on."97 Another example can be found in a front-page article in The Onion in July 2006, with the title "Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years of American Independence."228 Others draw upon Wikipedia's motto, such as in "The Negotiation," an episode of The Office, where character Michael Scott says "Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject, so you know you are getting the best possible information." "My Number One Doctor", a 2007 episode of the TV show Scrubs, also lampooned Wikipedia's reliance on editors who edit both scholarly and pop culture articles with a scene in which Dr. Perry Cox reacts to a patient who says that a Wikipedia article indicates that the raw food diet reverses the effects of bone cancer by retorting that the same editor who wrote that article also wrote the Battlestar Galactica episode guide.229 In one episode of 30 Rock, Pete and Frank add nonsensical information to the Janis Joplin Wikipedia page after telling Jenna that she should look it up to learn more about her, as, since Wikipedia could be edited by anybody, it was the most informative research because they find out more every day.

  In July 2009, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a comedy series called Bigipedia, which was set on a website which was a parody of Wikipedia. Some of the sketches were directly inspired by Wikipedia and its articles.230

  The comedic website CollegeHumor produced a video sketch named "Professor Wikipedia," in which the fictitious Professor Wikipedia instructs a class with a medley of unverifiable and occasionally absurd statements.231
  Related projects

  A number of interactive multimedia encyclopedias incorporating entries written by the public existed long before Wikipedia was founded. The first of these was the 1986 BBC Domesday Project, which included text (entered on BBC Micro computers) and photographs from over 1 million contributors in the UK, and covering the geography, art, and culture of the UK. This was the first interactive multimedia encyclopedia (and was also the first major multimedia document connected through internal links), with the majority of articles being accessible through an interactive map of the UK. The user-interface and part of the content of the Domesday Project were emulated on a website until 2008.232 One of the most successful early online encyclopedias incorporating entries by the public was h2g2, which was created by Douglas Adams and is run by the BBC. The h2g2 encyclopedia was relatively light-hearted, focusing on articles which were both witty and informative. Both of these projects had similarities with Wikipedia, but neither gave full editorial privileges to public users. A similar non-wiki project, the GNUPedia project, co-existed with Nupedia early in its history; however, it has been retired and its creator, free software figure Richard Stallman, has lent his support to Wikipedia.21

  Wikipedia has also spawned several sister projects, which are also run by the Wikimedia Foundation. The first, "In Memoriam: September 11 Wiki,"233 created in October 2002,234 detailed the September 11 attacks; this project was closed in October 2006. Wiktionary, a dictionary project,

• 

  []·pre 14 godina

  Wikipedia
  Wikipedia
  Wikipedia-logo-v2.svg
  Tipe Wiki
  Taal Veeltalig, insluitend Afrikaans
  Registrasie Opsioneel
  Eienaar Wikimedia Stigting
  Outeur Die gemeenskap
  Opgerig 15 Januarie 2001
  Status Aktief
  URL http://af.wikipedia.org/

  Wikipedia is 'n veeltalige "kopielinkse" ensiklopedie ontwerp om deur enigiemand gelees en gewysig te word. Dit berus op samewerkende verandering en onderhoud deur duisende gebruikers deur middel van wiki-sagteware, en word verskaf en ondersteun deur die nie-winsgewende Wikimedia Stigting. Afgesien van tipiese ensiklopedie-inskrywings sluit Wikipedia ook inligting in wat meer algemeen verbind word met almanakke, aardrykskundige woordeboeke en spesialis-tydskrifte, asook dekking van huidige gebeure.

  Daar bestaan tans Wikipedia weergawes in 190 tale en daar is ongeveer 16 000 geregistreerde gebruikers wat saamwerk aan die Engelse uitgawe van Wikipedia, wat dit moontlik gemaak het om die ensiklopedie in minder as vier jaar te laat groei tot die wêreld se grootste ensiklopedie, met meer as 'n miljoen artikels (wat steeds groei teen 'n tempo van duisende per dag). As die weergawes in al die tale bymekaar getel word, bevat Wikipedia miljoene artikels.

  Wikipedia is een van die gewildste verwysingswerwe op die Web, met ongeveer 80 miljoen besoeke per dag. Wikipedia ontvang lof vanweë die feit dat dit vrylik toeganklik is en 'n wye reeks onderwerpe in diepte dek. Dit is al gekritiseer vir die potensiaal wat dit het om onakkurate inligting te bevat, die gebrek aan gesaghebbendheid teenoor 'n tradisionele ensiklopedie, vir 'n sistematiese vooroordeel en vir gebreke in die meer tradisionele ensiklopedie onderwerpe. Vandalisme is 'n gereelde probleem, hoewel dit oor die algemeen vinnig opgemerk en artikels maklik en gou herstel word.
  Inhoud
  versteek

  1 Verwante projekte
  1.1 Taaluitgawes
  1.2 Susterprojekte
  2 Toekennings en nominasies
  2.1 2004
  3 Sien ook
  4 Eksterne skakels
  4.1 Verwante werwe
  4.2 Opstelle

  Verwante projekte
  Taaluitgawes

  Sedert 2004 word Wikipedia in baie tale bedryf. Tientalle taaluitgawes het reeds meer as 10 000 artikels. Van die taaluitgawes met die meeste artikels sluit in:
  The Wikipedia is governed by the impartiality.

  Duits
  Engels
  Frans
  Hebreeus
  Italiaans
  Nederlands
  Pools
  Japannees
  Portugees
  Sjinees
  Sweeds
  Spaans

  Sedertdien vergroot verskeie weergawes, met vele tale met meer as honderd duisend artikels. Sien 1 vir die volledige lys, en 2 vir 'n volledige tabel van die aantal artikels in elke taaluitgawe.
  Susterprojekte

  Wikipedia het die volgende susterprojekte:

  WikiWoordeboek (Wiktionary), 'n gratis woordeboek
  WikiBoeke (WikiBooks), 'n gratis handboek
  WikiAanhaling (WikiQuote), 'n gratis ensiklopedie van aanhalings
  WikiBron (WikiSource), 'n stoor van brontekste in enige taal wat in die publieke domein of onder die GFDL vrygestel is

  Daar is ander projekte verwant aan die konsep, soos Wikitravel.

  In Februarie 2002 het meeste deelnemers aan die Spaanse Wikipedia nie saamgestem met die rigting van die projek nie, en weggebreek om die Enciclopedia Libre te vorm.
  Toekennings en nominasies
  2004

  In Mei 2004 het Wikipedia twee groot toekennings verwerf: Die eerste was die Golden Nica for Digital Communities, wat deur Prix Ars Electronica toegeken is, tesame met 'n €10 000 vergunning en 'n uitnodiging om 'n toespraak te lewer by die PAE Cyberarts Festival in Oostenryk later daardie jaar. Die tweede was 'n "Beoordeelaars se Webby award" vir "Gemeenskap" 3. Wikipedia was ook genomineer vir 'n "Best Practices" Webby.

  In September 2004 het die Japannese Wikipedia 'n toekenning van die land se grootste Adverteerdersvereniging gewen. Hierdie toekenning, wat gewoonlik aan individue wat 'n groot bydrae tot die Web in Japannees gelewer het, toegeken word, is namens die projek aanvaar deur 'n jarelange bydraer.
  Sien ook

  Afrikaanse Wikipedia

  Eksterne skakels

  Taalneutrale voorblad van Wikipedia
  Afrikaanse uitgawe van Wikipedia
  Wikipedia Frequently Asked Questions

  Verwante werwe

  Meta-Wikipedia - Beleid-verwante en tegniese bespreking oor Wikipedia en sy susterprojekte; sluit 'n handleiding in oor hoe om 'n eie MediaWiki-werf te begin.
  Webwerf van MediaWiki - die sagteware van Wikipedia
  OpenFacts: Kopieë van Wikipedia-inhoud
  Die Wikipedia Cafeshop
  Argief van Wikipedia-persverklarings
  Wikipedia Trofee-uitstalling

  Opstelle
  Commons
  Wikimedia Commons het meer media verwant aan:
  Wikipedia (bladsy)

  The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource deur Richard Stallman (RMS)
  IBM History Flow: Technical experiment on "visualizing dynamic, evolving documents and the interactions of multiple collaborating authors". Gebruik verskeie Wikipedia-artikels as voorbeelde.
  Operation of a Large Scale, General Purpose Wiki Website, November 2002, deur Lars Aronsson, stigter van susning.nu.
  Coase's Penguin deur Yochai Benkler.

  Wikimedia Stigting Wikimedia-logo.svg

  Projekte: Broeikas - Commons - Meta-Wiki - Wikibooks - Wikinews - Wikipedia - Wikiquote - Wikisource - Wikispecies - WikiWoordeboek - Wikiversity

  Sien ook: Wiki - MediaWiki
  Kategorieë: Ensiklopedieë | Wikimediaprojekte | Wikipedia

  Teken in

  Artikel
  Bespreking

  Lees
  Wys bronteks
  Wys geskiedenis

  Tuisblad
  Gebruikersportaal
  Geselshoekie
  Onlangse wysigings
  Lukrake bladsy
  Hulp
  Sandput
  Skenkings

  Gereedskap

  Skakels hierheen
  Verwante veranderings
  Spesiale bladsye
  Drukbare weergawe
  Permanente skakel
  Haal dié blad aan

  Ander tale

  Acèh
  Akan
  Alemannisch
  አማርኛ
  Aragonés
  Ænglisc
  العربية
  ܐܪܡܝܐ
  مصرى
  Asturianu
  Aymar aru
  Azərbaycanca
  Башҡортса
  Boarisch
  Žemaitėška
  Беларуская
  ‪Беларуская (тарашкевіца)‬
  Български
  भोजपुरी
  Bislama
  Bahasa Banjar
  Bamanankan
  বাংলা
  ইমার ঠার/বিষ্ণুপ্রিয়া মণিপুরী
  Brezhoneg
  Bosanski
  ᨅᨔ ᨕᨘᨁᨗ
  Буряад
  Català
  Chavacano de Zamboanga
  Mìng-dĕ̤ng-ngṳ̄
  Нохчийн
  Cebuano
  Chamoru
  ᏣᎳᎩ
  Tsetsêhestâhese
  کوردی
  Corsu
  Qırımtatarca
  Česky
  Kaszëbsczi
  Словѣ́ньскъ / ⰔⰎⰑⰂⰡⰐⰠⰔⰍⰟ
  Чӑвашла
  Cymraeg
  Dansk
  Deutsch
  Zazaki
  Dolnoserbski
  ދިވެހިބަސް
  Ελληνικά
  English
  Esperanto
  Español
  Eesti
  Euskara
  Estremeñu
  فارسی
  Fulfulde
  Suomi
  Võro
  Føroyskt
  Français
  Arpetan
  Nordfriisk
  Furlan
  Frysk
  Gaeilge
  Gagauz
  贛語
  Gàidhlig
  Galego
  گیلکی
  Avañe'ẽ
  

• 

  Manana·pre 14 godina

  出自維基百科，自由嘅百科全書
  倫敦
  London
  別名：霧都
  國家 英國
  成立嘅日期 都有成2,000幾年嘅歷史，
  1801年成為世界最大都市
  現任市長 Boris Johnson
  面積 1,580平方公里
  人口
  －總人口（2003年3月）
  －人口密度
  740萬（大倫敦地區）
  4680/平方公里
  位置
  －經度
  －緯度
  0°05」00』W
  51°30」00』N
  氣溫
  －全年嘅最高
  －全年嘅平均
  －全年嘅最低
  25 °C（7月）
  °C
  -2 °C（1月）
  倫敦位置圖

  倫敦（London）係英國嘅首都，所以亦叫英京。同時亦係英格蘭嘅首府、歐盟人口最多嘅城市。自18世紀以來，倫敦一直都係世界上最重要嘅政治、經濟、文化、藝術同埋娛樂中心之一。係2005年，倫敦嘅人口有差唔多750萬，大城市區嘅人口超過1200萬人。倫敦係一個非常多元化嘅大都市，居民來自世界各地，具有多元嘅種族、宗教同文化，喺城市之中所講嘅語言超過300種。同時，倫敦更係世界聞名嘅旅遊勝地，擁有數量眾多嘅名勝景點與博物館等。
  地理 編輯

  泰晤士河穿過倫敦，而且將城市分開做南同北。自從羅馬人喺嗰度定居之後，河上面逐漸起咗一條條嘅橋，而其中最著名嘅就係倫敦橋。
  人口 編輯

  倫敦係歐洲繼莫斯科同巴黎之後嘅第三大都市。據2001年嘅人口普查，倫敦市區同佢嘅自治市（鎮）（約610平方英里）有7,172,036 人口。其中大概有71%係白人，10%係印度、孟加拉或巴基斯坦後裔，5%係非洲黑人後裔，5%係加勒比海黑人後裔，3%混血人種，重有差唔多1%係華人。58.2%嘅人口信奉基督教，15.8%嘅人口冇宗教信仰。大概有21.8%嘅倫敦居民喺歐盟以外嘅地區出世。

  生活喺倫敦都市圈（6,267平方英里）入面嘅大約有13,945,000人口，比起蘇格蘭、威爾士同北愛爾蘭嘅人口總和重要多。倫敦都市圈係歐洲最大嘅都市圈，亦係世界上最大嘅20個都市圈之一。

  pre 13 minuta
  Manana
  12 komentara

  Komentari
  Thumb_gzwl2kqr6z-k_b3fpgtcerpxihit2ty6
  Zna Murinjo

  面積 1,580平方公里
  人口
  －總人口（2003年3月）
  －人口密度 ??

  pre 12 minuta

  Thumb_capture
  []

  Eto sad svi kinezi na vukajliji znaje gde je London!

  pre 12 minuta

  Thumb_the-beatles-02-1-1
  cornelije

  ajd plus

  pre 11 minuta

  Thumb_midnight-rose
  Bruce

  去阴茎

  pre 10 minuta

  Thumb_capture
  []

  汉语/漢語

  pre 10 minuta

  Thumb_konstantin_bodin
  Цар

  لندن

  من ويكيبيديا، الموسوعة الحرة الكريمة
  لندن
  لندن
  الاسم المستعار : الضباب
  البلد المملكة المتحدة
  تاريخ تأسيسها هي سخية سنة 2000 السخي من التاريخ ،
  1801 لتصبح أكبر مدينة في العالم
  العمدة الحالي بوريس جونسون
  مساحة 1580 كيلومترا مربعا
  عدد السكان
  -- مجموع عدد السكان (مارس 2003)
  -- الكثافة السكانية
  7400000 (لندن الكبرى)
  4680 / كم
  موقع
  -- خط الطول
  -- خط العرض
  0 درجة 05 "00" W
  51 ° 30 "00" N
  درجة حرارة الهواء
  -- أعلى السنوية السخية
  -- المتوسط ​​السنوي السخي
  -- أدنى السنوية السخية
  25 درجة مئوية (7 أشهر)
  درجة مئوية
  -2 درجة مئوية (1 شهر)
  لندن خريطة الموقع

  pre 6 minuta

  Thumb_capture
  []

  Web
  Images
  Videos
  Maps
  News
  Shopping
  Gmail
  more

  mejl.adresaa@gmail.com

  Google Translate
  From:
  To:
  Chinese language From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Unless otherwise specified, Chinese texts in this article are written in (Simplified Chinese/Traditional Chinese; Pinyin) format. In cases where Simplified and Traditional Chinese scripts are identical, the Chinese term is written once. This article contains Chinese text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Chinese characters. Chinese 汉语／漢語, 华语／華語 or 中文 Hànyǔ (Chinese) written in Hanzi Hanyu.png Spoken in People's Republic of China (PRC, commonly known as China), Republic of China (ROC, commonly known as Taiwan), Singapore, Malaysia, the United States, the Philippines, Australia, Indonesia, Mauritius, Peru, and other regions with Chinese communities Region (majorities): Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Singapore (minorities): Southeast Asia, and other regions with Chinese communities Ethnicity Han Chinese and Hui people Total speakers approx 1.3 billion Language family Sino-Tibetan Sinitic Chinese Standard forms Mandarin Dialects Mandarin Jin Huizhou Wu Hunanese Jiangxinese Hakka Yue (including Cantonese-Taishanese) Pinghua Shaojiang Northern Min Eastern Min (including Fuchow) Central Min Pu Xian Southern Min (including Amoy, Taiwanese) Teochew (including Swatow, Chaozhou, Jieyang, parts of Shanwei/Meizhou) Writing system Chinese characters, zhuyin fuhao, pinyin, Xiao'erjing Official status Official language in United Nations People's Republic of China Hong Kong Macau Republic of China (Taiwan) Singapore (official, but not national language) Recognised minority language in Mauritius United States (minority and auxiliary) Regulated by In the PRC: National Language Regulating Committee1 In the ROC: National Languages Committee In Singapore: Promote Mandarin Council/Speak Mandarin Campaign2 Language codes ISO 639-1 zh ISO 639-2 chi (B) zho (T) ISO 639-3 zho – Macrolanguage individual codes: cdo – Min Dong cjy – Jinyu cmn – Mandarin cpx – Pu Xian czh – Huizhou czo – Min Zhong gan – Gan hak – Hakka hsn – Xiang mnp – Min Bei nan – Min Nan wuu – Wu yue – Yue och – Old Chinese ltc – Late Middle Chinese lzh – Literary Chinese Linguasphere 79-AAA New-Map-Sinophone World.PNG Map of the Sinophone world. Information: Countries identified Chinese as a primary, administrative, or native language Countries with more than 5,000,000 Chinese speakers w/ or w/o recognition Countries with more than 1,000,000 Chinese speakers w/ or w/o recognition Countries with more than 500,000 Chinese speakers w/ or w/o recognition Countries with more than 100,000 Chinese speakers w/ or w/o recognition Major Chinese speaking settlements Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. Chinese language (Spoken) Traditional Chinese 漢語 Simplified Chinese 汉语 showTranscriptions alternative Chinese name Traditional Chinese 華語 Simplified Chinese 华语 showTranscriptions Chinese language (Written) Chinese 中文 Literal meaning Chinese text showTranscriptions The varieties of spoken Chinese citation needed in Eastern China and Taiwan Chinese, the Chinese languages, or the Sinitic languages (汉语/漢語 Hànyǔ; 华语/華語 Huáyǔ; 中文 Zhōngwén) is a language family consisting of languages which are mostly mutually unintelligible to varying degrees.3 Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over one billion people, 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, although this identification is considered inappropriate by some linguists and Sinologists.4 Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between 7 and 13 main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (50 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. Standard Chinese (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu) is a standardized form of spoken Chinese based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin Chinese, referred to as 官话/官話 Guānhuà or 北方话/北方話 Běifānghuà in Chinese. Standard Chinese is the official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC, also known as 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 in Guangdong Province and Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Min Nan, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (known as Hokkien in Singapore and Malaysia). There are also sizeable Hakka and Shanghainese diaspora, for example in Taiwan, where most Hakka communities maintain diglossia by being conversant in Taiwanese and Standard Chinese. Contents hide 1 Varieties of Chinese 1.1 Standard Chinese and diglossia 1.2 Linguistics 1.3 Language and nationality 2 Writing 2.1 Chinese characters 3 History 4 Influences 5 Phonology 6 Phonetic transcriptions 6.1 Romanization 6.2 Other phonetic transcriptions 7 Grammar and morphology 7.1 Tones and homophones 8 Vocabulary 9 Loanwords 9.1 Modern borrowings and loanwords 10 Education 11 See also 12 References 13 Footnotes 14 Further reading 15 External links edit Varieties of Chinese Main article: Varieties of Chinese See also: List of Chinese dialects A map below depicts the linguistic subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within China itself. The traditionally recognized seven main groups, in order of population size arecitation needed: Name↓ Abbreviation↓ Pinyin↓ Local Romanization↓ Simp.↓ Trad.↓ Total Speakers↓ Mandarin Notes: includes Standard Chinese Guan; 官 Guānhuà Pinyin: Guānhuà 官话 官話 c. 1.365 billion Běifānghuà Pinyin: Běifānghuà 北方话 北方話 Wu Notes: includes Shanghainese Wu; 吴/吳 Wúyǔ Long-short: Ng nyiu or Ghu nyiu 吴语 吳語 c. 90 million Yue Notes: includes Cantonese & Taishanese Yue; 粤/粵 Yuèyǔ Jyutping: Jyut6 jyu5; Yale: Yuht yúh 粤语 粵語 c. 70 million Min Notes: includes Hokkien, Taiwanese & Teochew Min; 闽/閩 Mǐnyǔ POJ: Bân gú; BUC: Mìng ngṳ̄ 闽语 閩語 c. 50 million Xiang Xiang; 湘 Xiāngyǔ Romanization: Shiāen'ỳ 湘语 湘語 c. 35 million Hakka Kejia; 客家 Kèjiāhuà Hakka Pinyin: Hak-kâ-fa or Hak-kâ-va 客家话 客家話 c. 35 million Kèhuà Hakka Pinyin: Hak-fa or Hak-va 客话 客話 Gan Gan; 贛 Gànyǔ Romanization: Gon ua 赣语 贛語 c. 31 million Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguistsby whom?: Name↓ Abbreviation↓ Pinyin↓ Local Romanization↓ Simp.↓ Trad.↓ Total Speakers↓ Jin Notes: from Mandarin Jin; 晋/晉 Jìnyǔ None 晋语 晉語 45 million Huizhou Notes: from Wu Hui; 徽 Huīzhōuhuà None 徽州话 徽州話 ~3.2 million Pinghua Notes: from Yue Ping; 平 Guǎngxī Pínghuà None 广西平话 廣西平話 ~5 million There are groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (儋州话/儋州話), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡话/鄉話), not to be confused with Xiang (湘), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (韶州土话/韶州土話), spoken in northern Guangdong. The Dungan language, spoken in Central Asia, is very closely related to Mandarin. However, it is politically not generally considered "Chinese" since it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by Dungan people outside China who are not considered ethnic Chinese. In general, the above language-dialect groups do not have sharp boundaries, though Mandarin is the predominant Sinitic language in the North and the Southwest, and the rest are mostly spoken in Central or Southeastern China. Frequently, as in the case of the Guangdong province, native speakers of major variants overlapped. As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear how the speeches of various parts of China should be classified. The Ethnologue lists a total of 14, but the number varies between seven and 17 depending on the classification scheme followed. For instance, the Min variety is often divided into Northern Min (Minbei, Fuchow) and Southern Min (Minnan, Amoy-Swatow); linguists have not determined whether their mutual intelligibility is small enough to sort them as separate languages. Generally, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may only be marginally intelligible to close neighbours. For instance, Wuzhou is about 120 miles upstream from Guangzhou, but its dialect is more like that of Guangzhou than is that of Taishan, 60 miles southwest of Guangzhou and separated by several rivers from it (Ramsey, 1987). edit Standard Chinese and diglossia Main article: Standard Chinese Putonghua / Guoyu, often called "Mandarin", is the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China (Taiwan), and Singapore (where it is called "Huayu"). It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The government intends for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. In mainland China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature: it is common for a Chinese to be able to speak two or even three varieties of the Sinitic languages (or “dialects”) together with Standard Chinese. For example, in addition to putonghua a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese and, if they did not grow up there, his or her local dialect as well. A native of Guangzhou may speak Cantonese and putonghua, a resident of Taiwan, both Taiwanese and putonghua/guoyu. A person living in Taiwan may commonly mix pronunciations, phrases, and words from Mandarin and Taiwanese, and this mixture is considered normal under many circumstances. In Hong Kong, Mandarin is beginning to take its place beside English and Cantonese, the other official languages.citation needed edit Linguistics Linguists often view Chinese as a language family, though owing to China's socio-political and cultural situation, and the fact that all spoken varieties use one common written system, it is customary to refer to these generally mutually unintelligible variants as "the Chinese language". The diversity of Sinitic variants is comparable to the Romance languages. From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches technically. However, the idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and cultural self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. Most Chinese and Chinese linguists refer to Chinese as a single language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family. Chinese itself has a term for its unified writing system, Zhongwen (中文), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (汉语/漢語, "spoken languages of the Han Chinese")—this term could be translated to either "language" or "languages" since Chinese possesses no grammatical numbers. For centuries in China, owing to the widespread use of a written standard in Classical Chinese, there is much less necessity to maintain a uniform speech-and-writing continuum, as indicated by the employment of two separate character morphemes 语/語 yu and 文 wen. The character morphemes used in written Chinese are logographs that convey semantics graphically rather than phonologically, although some logographs are compounds conveying both semantic meaning (the "radical") and phonological information. Ethnic Chinese often consider these spoken variations as one single language for reasons of nationality and as they inherit one common cultural and linguistic heritage in Classical Chinese. Han native speakers of Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese, for instance, may consider their own linguistic varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese as one—albeit internally very diverse—ethnicity. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmented and disunified than it actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. Additionally, in Taiwan, it is closely associated with Taiwanese independence, where some supporters of Taiwanese independence promote the local Taiwanese Minnan-based spoken language. Within the People's Republic of China and Singapore, it is common for the government to refer to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) beside Standard Chinese as fangyan (“regional tongues”, often translated as "dialects"). Modern-day Chinese speakers of all kinds communicate using one formal standard written language, although this modern written standard is modeled after Mandarin, generally the modern Beijing dialect. edit Language and nationality The term sinophone, coined in analogy to anglophone and francophone, refers to those who speak the Chinese language natively, or prefer it as a medium of communication. The term is derived from Sinae, the Latin word for ancient China. edit Writing Main article: Written Chinese The relationship between the Chinese spoken and written language is rather complex. Its spoken varieties evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period, although written records have been discovered as far back as the 14th to 11th centuries BCE Shang dynasty oracle bones using the oracle bone scripts. The Chinese orthography centers on Chinese characters, hanzi, which are written within imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus the number "one", yi in Mandarin, jat in Cantonese and chi̍t in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("一"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as 冇 and 係 for Cantonese and Hakka, which are considered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere. Use of it is considered highly informal, and does not extend to many formal occasions. In Hunan, women in certain areas write their local language in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by many a dialect of Mandarin, is nowadays written in Cyrillic, and was previously written in the Arabic alphabet. The Dungan people live outside China. edit Chinese characters Main article: Chinese character Chinese characters evolved over time from earlier forms of hieroglyphs. The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic radicals. Only the simplest characters, such as ren 人 (human), ri 日 (sun), shan 山 (mountain; hill), shui 水 (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar Xǔ Shèn in the Hàn Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80–90% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that indicates the pronunciation. There are about 214 radicals recognized in the Kangxi Dictionary. Modern characters are styled after the regular script (楷书／楷書 kǎishū) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (篆书／篆書 zhuànshū), cursive script (草书／草書 cǎoshū) and clerical script (隶书／隸書 lìshū). Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. "Preface to the Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavilion" by Wang Xizhi, written in semi-cursive style There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia) outside mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty. The Simplified Chinese character system, developed by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common caoshu shorthand variants. Singapore, which has a large Chinese community, is the first—and at present the only—foreign nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. The Internet provides the platform to practice reading the alternative system, be it traditional or simplified. A well-educated Chinese reader today recognizes approximately 5,000–7,000 characters; approximately 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. A large unabridged dictionary, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; fewer than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used. edit History History of China History of China ANCIENT 3 Sovereigns and 5 Emperors Xia Dynasty 2100–1600 BCE Shang Dynasty 1600–1046 BCE Zhou Dynasty 1045–256 BCE Western Zhou Eastern Zhou Spring and Autumn Period Warring States Period IMPERIAL Qin Dynasty 221 BCE–206 BCE Han Dynasty 206 BCE–220 CE Western Han Xin Dynasty Eastern Han Three Kingdoms 220–280 Wei, Shu & Wu Jin Dynasty 265–420 Western Jin 16 Kingdoms 304–439 Eastern Jin Southern & Northern Dynasties 420–589 Sui Dynasty 581–618 Tang Dynasty 618–907 ( Second Zhou 690–705 ) 5 Dynasties & 10 Kingdoms 907–960 Liao Dynasty 907–1125 Song Dynasty 960–1279 Northern Song W. Xia Southern Song Jin Yuan Dynasty 1271–1368 Ming Dynasty 1368–1644 Qing Dynasty 1644–1911 MODERN Republic of China 1912–1949 People's Republic of China 1949–present Republic of China (Taiwan) 1945–present Related articles show This box: view · talk · edit Main article: History of the Chinese language Most linguists classify all varieties of modern spoken Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, termed Proto-Sino-Tibetan, from which the Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman languages descended. The relation between Chinese and other Sino-Tibetan languages is an area of active research, as is the attempt to reconstruct Proto-Sino-Tibetan. The main difficulty in this effort is that, while there is enough documentation to allow one to reconstruct the ancient Chinese sounds, there is no written documentation that records the division between Proto-Sino-Tibetan and ancient Chinese. In addition, many of the older languages that would allow us to reconstruct Proto-Sino-Tibetan are very poorly understood and many of the techniques developed for analysis of the descent of the (fusional) Indo-European languages from PIE do not apply to Chinese, an isolating language because of "morphological paucity" especially after Old Chinese.5 Categorization 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 1900s; most present systems rely heavily on Karlgren's insights and methods. 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 artifacts, the poetry of the Shījīng, the history of the Shūjīng, and portions of the Yìjīng (I Ching). 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. Old Chinese was not wholly uninflected. It possessed a rich sound system in which aspiration or rough breathing differentiated the consonants, but probably was still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qīng dynasty philologists. Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably 蜜 mì "honey", 獅 shī "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mǎ "horse", 犬 quǎn "dog", and 鵝 é "goose". The source says the reconstructions of old Chinese are tentative, and not definitive so no conclusions should be drawn. The reconstruction of Old Chinese can not be perfect so this hypothesis may be called into question.6 The source also notes that southern dialects of Chinese have more monosyllabic words than the Mandarin Chinese dialects. Middle Chinese was the language used during Southern and Northern Dynasties and the Suí, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the "Qiēyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the "Guǎngyùn" rime book. Linguists are more confident of having reconstructed how Middle Chinese sounded. The evidence for the pronunciation of Middle Chinese comes from several sources: modern dialect variations, rhyming dictionaries, foreign transliterations, "rhyming tables" constructed by ancient Chinese philologists to summarize the phonetic system, and Chinese phonetic translations of foreign words. However, all reconstructions are tentative; some scholars have argued that trying to reconstruct, say, modern Cantonese from modern Cantopop rhymes would give a fairly inaccurate picture of the present-day spoken language. The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. Most Chinese people, in Sìchuān and in a broad arc from the north-east (Manchuria) to the south-west (Yunnan), use various Mandarin dialects as their home language. The prevalence of Mandarin throughout northern China is largely due to north China's plains. By contrast, the mountains and rivers of middle and southern China promoted linguistic diversity. Until the mid-20th century, most southern Chinese only spoke their native local variety of Chinese. As Nanjing was the capital during the early Ming Dynasty, Nanjing Mandarin became dominant at least until the later years of the Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies (正音书院／正音書院; Zhèngyīn Shūyuàn) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited. This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all young and middle-aged citizens of mainland China and on Taiwan. Cantonese, not Mandarin, was used in Hong Kong during the time of its British colonial period (owing to its large Cantonese native and migrant populace) and remains today its official language of education, formal speech, and daily life, but Mandarin is becoming increasingly influential after the 1997 handover. Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in the 19th century.7 edit Influences Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on unrelated languages such as Korean and Japanese. Korean and Japanese both have writing systems employing Chinese characters (hanzi), which are called Hanja and Kanji, respectively. The Vietnamese term for Chinese writing is Hán tự. It was the only available method for writing Vietnamese until the 14th century, used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese élites. From the 14th to the late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chữ nôm, a modified Chinese script incorporating sounds and syllables for native Vietnamese speakers. Chữ nôm was completely replaced by a modified Latin script created by the Jesuit missionary priest Alexander de Rhodes, which incorporates a system of diacritical marks to indicate tones, as well as modified consonants. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Việt (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese. In South Korea, the Hangul alphabet is generally used, but Hanja is used as a sort of boldface. In North Korea, Hanja has been discontinued. Since the modernization of Japan in the late 19th century, there has been debate about abandoning the use of Chinese characters, but the practical benefits of a radically new script have so far not been considered sufficient. Derived Chinese characters or Sawndip are used to write Zhuang songs, even though Zhuang is not a Chinese dialect. Since the 1950s, the Zhuang language has been written in a modified Latin alphabet.8 Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of loanwords from Chinese. Fifty percent or more of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin,9 likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese10 and Vietnamese vocabulary. Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of 茶 (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 茄汁 (Jyutping: ke2 zap1) and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 金橘 (Jyutping: gam1 gwat1). edit Phonology This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. Main article: Chinese spoken language The phonological structure of each syllable consists of a nucleus consisting of a vowel (which can be a monophthong, diphthong, or even a triphthong in certain varieties) with an optional onset or coda consonant as well as a tone. There are some instances where a vowel is not used as a nucleus. An example of this is in Cantonese, where the nasal sonorant consonants /m/ and /ŋ/ can stand alone as their own syllable. Across all the spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda, but syllables that do have codas are restricted to /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, /p/, /t/, /k/, or /ʔ/. Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Mandarin, are limited to only two, namely /n/ and /ŋ/. Consonant clusters do not generally occur in either the onset or coda. The onset may be an affricate or a consonant followed by a semivowel, but these are not generally considered consonant clusters. The number of sounds in the different spoken dialects varies, but in general there has been a tendency to a reduction in sounds from Middle Chinese. The Mandarin dialects in particular have experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds and so have far more multisyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. The total number of syllables in some varieties is therefore only about a thousand, including tonal variation, which is only about an eighth as many as English.11 All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones. A few dialects of north China may have as few as three tones, while some dialects in south China have up to 6 or 10 tones, depending on how one counts. One exception from this is Shanghainese which has reduced the set of tones to a two-toned pitch accent system much like modern Japanese. A very common example used to illustrate the use of tones in Chinese are four tones of Standard Chinese applied to the syllable "ma." The tones correspond to these five characters: This article contains Ruby annotation. Without proper rendering support, you may see transcriptions in parentheses after the character instead of ruby glosses. 妈／媽(mā) "mother"—high level 麻(má) "linen" or "numb"—high rising 马／馬(mǎ) "horse"—low falling-rising 骂／罵(mà) "scold"—high falling 吗／嗎(ma) "question particle"—neutral Listen to the tones This is a recording of the four main tones. Fifth, or neutral, tone is not included. Problems listening to this file? See media help. edit Phonetic transcriptions The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. Early Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt to describe the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted in some rudimentary Latin transcription systems, based on the Nanjing Mandarin dialect. edit Romanization See also: Chinese language romanisation in Singapore and Romanization of Mandarin Chinese Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages due to the lack of a native phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century. Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Chinese is Hanyu Pinyin, often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore and Taiwan. Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across America, Australia and Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones of new words. In school books that teach Chinese, the Pinyin romanization is often shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside. The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recentlywhen? was widely used in Taiwan. When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade-Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade-Giles' extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng (pinyin), and with Taipei than T'ai²-pei³ (Wade-Giles). Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison: Mandarin Romanization Comparison Characters Wade-Giles Hanyu Pinyin Notes 中国／中國 Chung¹-kuo² Zhōngguó "China" 北京 Pei³-ching¹ Běijīng Capital of the People's Republic of China 台北 T'ai²-pei³ Táiběi Capital of the Republic of China (Taiwan) 毛泽东／毛澤東 Mao² Tse²-tung¹ Máo Zédōng Former Communist Chinese leader 蒋介石／蔣介石 Chiang³ Chieh⁴-shih² Jiǎng Jièshí Former Nationalist Chinese leader (better known to English speakers as Chiang Kai-shek, with Cantonese pronunciation) 孔子 K'ung³ Tsu³ Kǒng Zǐ "Confucius" Other systems of romanization for Chinese include Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the French EFEO, the Yale (invented during WWII for U.S. troops), as well as separate systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages or dialects. edit Other phonetic transcriptions Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The 'Phags-pa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of pre-modern forms of Chinese. Zhuyin (also called bopomofo), a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools to aid standard pronunciation. Although bopomofo characters are reminiscent of katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system. A comparison table of zhuyin to pinyin exists in the zhuyin article. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles: Pinyin table Zhuyin table There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system. edit Grammar and morphology Main article: Chinese grammar See also: Chinese classifiers Chinese is often described as a "monosyllabic" language. However, this is only partially correct. It is largely accurate when describing Classical Chinese and Middle Chinese; in Classical Chinese, for example, perhaps 90% of words correspond to a single syllable and a single character. In the modern varieties, it is still usually the case that a morpheme (unit of meaning) is a single syllable; contrast English, with plenty of multi-syllable morphemes, both bound and free, such as "seven", "elephant", "para-" and "-able". Some of the conservative southern varieties of modern Chinese still have largely monosyllabic words, especially among the more basic vocabulary. In modern Mandarin, however, most nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely disyllabic. A significant cause of this is phonological attrition. Sound change over time has steadily reduced the number of possible syllables. In modern Mandarin, there are now only about 1,200 possible syllables, including tonal distinctions, compared with about 5,000 in Vietnamese (still largely monosyllabic) and over 8,000 in English.12 This phonological collapse has led to a corresponding increase in the number of homophones. As an example, the small Langenscheidt Pocket Chinese Dictionary13 lists 7 words pronounced shī , 6 pronounced shí, 4 pronounced shǐ, and 11 pronounced shì (each word pronounced /ʂɨ/, in tones 1 through 4, respectively). Each such word has a different meaning and is written with a different character, and thus in writing, all can be used without problem. In speaking, however, tremendous ambiguity would result if all of these words could be used, and in fact, the vast majority have been replaced with some other word. As an example, consider the six tone-2 words: 十 "ten"; 实 "real, actual"; 识 "know (a person), recognize"; 石 "stone"; 时 "time"; 食 "food". Only the first one, 十 "ten", normally appears as such when spoken; the rest are normally replaced with, respectively, 实际 shíjì (lit. "actual-connection"); 认识 rènshi (lit. "recognize-know"); 石头 shítou (lit. "stone-head"); 时间 shíjiān (lit. "time-interval"); 食物 shíwù (lit. "food-thing"). In each case, the homophone was disambiguated by adding another word, typically either a synonym or a generic word of some sort (for example, "head", "thing"), whose purpose is simply to indicate which of the possible meanings of the other, homophonic syllable should be selected. Note also that 十 实 识 石 时 食 were pronounced /dʑip/, /ʑit/, /ɕik/, /dʑjek/, /dʑī/, /ʑik/ respectively in Early Middle Chinese, according to William Baxter's transcription – each one different from all the others. Furthermore, when one of the above words forms part of a compound, the disambiguating syllable is dropped and the resulting word is still disyllabic. For example, 石 shí alone, not 石头 shítou, appears in compounds meaning "stone-", for example, 石膏 shígāo "plaster" (lit. "stone cream"), 石灰 shíhuī "lime" (lit. "stone dust"), 石窟 shíkū "grotto" (lit. "stone cave"), 石英 shíyīng "quartz" (lit. "stone flower"), 石油 shíyóu "petroleum" (lit. "stone oil"). Most modern varieties of Chinese have the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character compounds. In some cases, monosyllabic words have become disyllabic without compounding, as in 窟窿 kulong from 孔 kong; this is especially common in Jin. Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest blocks of the language. While many of these single-syllable morphemes (字, zì) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cí (词／詞), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí (“word”) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. For example: Yun 雲—“cloud” (traditional) Yun 云—“cloud” (simplified) Han-bao-bao/Hanbao 漢堡包／漢堡—“hamburger” (traditional) Han-bao-bao/Hanbao 汉堡包／汉堡—"hamburger" (simplified) Wo 我—“I, me” Ren 人—“people” Di-qiu 地球—“earth (globosity)” Shan-dian 閃電—“lightning” (traditional) Shan-dian 闪电—"lightning" (simplifed) Meng 夢—“dream” (traditional) Meng 梦—"dream" (simplified) All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology—i.e., changes in form of a word—to indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has very few grammatical inflections—it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (他 as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century, and both characters are pronounced in exactly the same way. They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le 了 (perfective), hai 还／還 (still), yijing 已经／已經 (already), and so on. Chinese features Subject-Verb-Object word order, and like many other languages in East Asia, makes frequent use of the topic-comment construction to form sentences. Chinese also has an extensive system of classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. Other notable grammatical features common to all the spoken varieties of Chinese include the use of serial verb construction, pronoun dropping and the related subject dropping. Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess differences. edit Tones and homophones Official modern Mandarin has only 400 spoken monosyllables but over 10,000 written characters, so there are many homophones only distinguishable by the four tones. Even this is often not enough unless the context and exact phrase or cí is identified. The mono-syllable jī, first tone in Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: 鸡／雞 chicken, 机／機 machine, 基 basic, 击／擊 (to) hit, 饥／饑 hunger, and 积／積 product. In speech, the glyphing of a monosyllable to its meaning must be determined by context or by relation to other morphemes (for example, "some" as in the opposite of "none"). Native speakers may state which words or phrases their names are found in, for convenience of writing: 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyīng, Jiālíng Jiāng de jiā, Yīngguó de yīng "My name is Jiāyīng, the Jia for Jialing River and the ying for the short form in Chinese of UK." Southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Hakka preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese and have more tones. The previous examples of jī, have more distinct pronunciations in Cantonese (romanized using jyutping): gai1, gei1, gei1, gik1, gei1, and zik1 respectively. For this reason, southern varieties tend to need to employ fewer multi-syllabic words. edit Vocabulary The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are characters. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, a compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including bone oracle versions. The Zhonghua Zihai (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The CC-CEDICT project (2010) contains 97,404 contemporary entries including idioms, technology terms and names of political figures, businesses and products. The 2009 version of the Webster's Digital Chinese Dictionary (WDCD),14 based on CC-CEDICT, contains over 84,000 entries. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumed Hanyu Da Cidian, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms. The latest 2007 5th edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian 现代汉语词典／現代漢語詞典, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 65,000 entries and defines 11,000 head characters. edit Loanwords See also: Translation of neologisms into Chinese and Transcription into Chinese characters Like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizable number of loanwords from other cultures. Most Chinese words are formed out of native Chinese morphemes, including words describing imported objects and ideas. However, direct phonetic borrowing of foreign words has gone on since ancient times. Words borrowed from along the Silk Road since Old Chinese include 葡萄 "grape", 石榴 "pomegranate" and 狮子／獅子 "lion". Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩萨／菩薩 "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 胡同 "hutong". Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄 "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of North India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as 琵琶 "pípa", the Chinese lute, or 酪 "cheese" or "yoghurt", but from exactly which source is not always clear. edit Modern borrowings and loanwords Modern neologisms are translated into Chinese primarily in three ways: free translation (calque, by meaning), phonetic translation (by sound) and a combination of the above two (partially transcriptive with a careful selection of meaning-encoding characters). Today, it is much more common to use existing Chinese morphemes to coin new words in order to represent imported concepts, such as technical expressions and international scientific vocabulary, owing to the structural differences from Western languages. Any Latin or Greek etymologies are dropped and converted into the corresponding meaning-carrying Chinese characters (for example, anti- typically becomes "反", literally opposite), making them more comprehensible for Chinese but introducing more difficulties in understanding foreign texts. For example, the word telephone was loaned phonetically as 德律风／德律風 (Shanghainese: télífon təlɪfoŋ, Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later 电话／電話 (diànhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include 电视／電視 (diànshì "electric vision") for television, 电脑／電腦 (diànnǎo "electric brain") for computer; 手机／手機 (shǒujī "hand machine") for cellphone, and 蓝牙／藍牙 (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. 網誌 (wǎng zhì "internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 汉堡包／漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo, "Hamburg bun") for "hamburger". Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as 拖拉机／拖拉機 (tuōlājī, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马利奥／馬利奧 for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾／奔騰 (bēnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and 赛百味／賽百味 (Sàibǎiwèi "better-than hundred tastes") for Subway restaurants. Foreign words, mainly proper nouns (names of people, places), continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, "Israel" becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè), "Paris" becomes 巴黎 (pinyin: bālí). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including 沙发／沙發 shāfā "sofa", 马达／馬達 mǎdá "motor", 幽默 yōumò "humor", 逻辑／邏輯 luójí "logic", 时髦／時髦 shímáo "smart, fashionable" and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ "hysterics". The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghainese dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. For example, 沙发／沙發 and 马达／馬達 in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor". Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transcription. From French came 芭蕾 (bāléi "ballet"), 香槟 (xiāngbīn, "champagne"), via Italian 咖啡 (kāfēi "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed, such as the above-mentioned 沙发／沙發 (shāfā "sofa"), 幽默 (yōumò "humour"), and 高尔夫／高爾夫 (gāoěrfū "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪斯科 (dísīkè "disco"), 可乐／可樂 (kělè "cola") and 迷你 (mínǐ "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon 卡通 (cartoon), 基佬 (gay people), 的士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, for example, 粉丝／粉絲 (fěnsī "fans"), 黑客 (hēikè "hacker", literally "black guest"), 部落格 (bùluōgé "blog", literally "interconnected tribes") in Taiwanese Mandarin. Another result of the English influence on Chinese is the appearance in Modern Chinese texts of so-called 字母词 zìmǔcí ("lettered words") spelled with letters from foreign alphabets. This has appeared in magazines, newspapers, on web sites and on TV: 三G手机 "3rd generation cell phones" (三 sān "three" + G "generation" + 手机 shǒujī "mobile phones"), IT界 "IT industry", HSK (hànyǔ shuǐpíng kǎoshì, 汉语水平考试), GB (guóbiāo, 国标), CIF价 (Cost, Insurance, Freight + 价 jià "price"); e家庭 "electronic home" (家庭 jiātīng "home"); W时代 "wireless generation" (时代 shídài "generation"); 的士call, TV族, 后РС时代 "post-PC era" (后 hòu "after/post" + PC "personal computer" + 时代 shídài "epoch"), and so on. Since the 20th century, another source has been Japan. Using existing kanji, which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language, the Japanese re-moulded European concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, jīngjì (经济／經濟, keizai), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was narrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this toing-and-froing process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese share a corpus linguistic of terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European languages. edit Education See also: Chinese as a Foreign or Second Language With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and has become an increasingly popular subject of study amongst the young in the Western world, as in the UK.15 In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test (comparable to the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.16 edit See also China portal Language portal Chinese character Chinese exclamative particles Chinese honorifics Chinese classifier Chinese dialects Chinese number gestures Chinese numerals Chinese punctuation Classical Chinese grammar Four-character idiom Han unification Haner language HSK test Languages of China Regional differences in the Chinese language North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics Nü shu edit References DeFrancis, John (1984). The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0-8248-1068-6. Hannas, William C. (1997). Asia's Orthographic Dilemma. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0-8248-1892-X. Norman, Jerry (1988). Chinese. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-29653-6. Qiu, Xigui (2000). Chinese Writing. Society for the Study of Early China and Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. ISBN 1-55729-071-7. Ramsey, S. Robert (1987). The Languages of China. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01468-X. edit Footnotes ^ http://www.china-language.gov.cn/ (Chinese) ^ http://mandarin.org.sg/html/home.htmdead link ^ * David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. “The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.” Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. “The Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.” Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. “The modern Chinese dialects are really more like a family of language." John DeFrancis. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984), p.56. "To call Chinese a single language composed of dialects with varying degrees of difference is to mislead by minimizing disparities that according to Chao are as great as those between English and Dutch. To call Chinese a family of languages is to suggest extralinguistic differences that in fact do not exist and to overlook the unique linguistic situation that exists in China." ^ Mair, Victor H. (1991). "What Is a Chinese "Dialect/Topolect"? Reflections on Some Key Sino-English Linguistic Terms" (PDF). Sino-Platonic Papers. ^ Analysis of the concept "wave" in PST. ^ Encyclopedia Britannica s.v. "Chinese languages": "Old Chinese vocabulary already contained many words not generally occurring in the other Sino-Tibetan languages. The words for ‘honey' and ‘lion,' and probably also ‘horse,' ‘dog,' and ‘goose,' are connected with Indo-European and were acquired through trade and early contacts. (The nearest known Indo-European languages were Tocharian and Sogdian, a middle Iranian language.) A number of words have Austroasiatic cognates and point to early contacts with the ancestral language of Muong-Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer"; Jan Ulenbrook, Einige Übereinstimmungen zwischen dem Chinesischen und dem Indogermanischen (1967) proposes 57 items; see also Tsung-tung Chang, 1988 Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese;. ^ *Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4 ^ Zhou, Minglang: Multilingualism in China: The Politics of Writing Reforms for Minority Languages, 1949–2002 (Walter de Gruyter 2003); ISBN 3-11-017896-6; pp. 251–258. ^ Sohn, Ho-Min. The Korean Language (Section 1.5.3 "Korean vocabulary", p. 13), Cambridge University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-521-36943-6 ^ Shibatani, Masayoshi. The Languages of Japan (Section 7.2 "Loan words", p.142), Cambridge University Press, 1990. ISBN 0521369185 ^ DeFrancis (1984) p.42 counts Chinese as having 1,277 tonal syllables, and about 398 to 418 if tones are disregarded; he cites Jespersen, Otto (1928) Monosyllabism in English; London, p.15 for a count of over 8000 syllables for English. ^ DeFrancis (1984) p.42 counts Chinese as having 1,277 tonal syllables, and about 398 to 418 if tones are disregarded; he cites Otto Jespersen (Monosyllabism in English, London, 1928, p.15) for a count of over 8,000 syllables for English. ^ Terrell, Peter, ed (2005). Langenscheidt Pocket Chinese Dictionary. Berlin and Munich: Langenscheidt KG. ISBN 1-58573-057-2. ^ *Dr. Timothy Uy and Jim Hsia, Editors, Webster's Digital Chinese Dictionary – Advanced Reference Edition, July 2009 ^ "How hard is it to learn Chinese?". BBC News. January 17, 2006. Retrieved April 28, 2010. ^ (Chinese) "汉语水平考试中心：2005年外国考生总人数近12万",Gov.cn Xinhua News Agency, January 16, 2006. . edit Further reading Shang wu yin shu kuan (1903). English and Chinese pronouncing dictionary. Harvard University. Retrieved 2011-6-27. ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawai’i Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X. ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9. Chinese Phrase Book, sinoplanet, 2009 Chinese for everyone: for all ages and learning styles. Marie- Laure de Shazer (2007), International edition. edit External links Chinese language edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Classical Chinese texts – Chinese Text Project Keys to the Chinese Language: Book II—Google Books Chinese language Tree Dear Dim Sum | Daily small bites Chinese lessons showv · d · eChinese language(s) showv · d · eChinese language loan vocabularies showv · d · eLanguages of Asia showv · d · eOfficial languages of the United Nations Categories: Chinese language | Sinology | Isolating languages Log in / create account Article Discussion Read Edit View history Main page Contents Featured content Current events Random article Donate to Wikipedia Interaction Help About Wikipedia Community portal Recent changes Contact Wikipedia Toolbox Print/export Languages Afrikaans አማርኛ العربية Aragonés Azərbaycanca বাংলা Bân-lâm-gú Беларуская ‪Беларуская (тарашкевіца)‬ Bikol Central Boarisch བོད་ཡིག Bosanski Brezhoneg Български Català Чӑвашла Cebuano Česky Cymraeg Dansk Deutsch ދިވެހިބަސް Dolnoserbski Eesti Ελληνικά Español Esperanto Euskara فارسی Fiji Hindi Føroyskt Français Frysk Gaeilge Gaelg Galego 贛語 Hak-kâ-fa Хальмг 한국어 Hawai`i Հայերեն हिन्दी Hornjoserbsce Hrvatski Ido Ilokano Bahasa Indonesia Íslenska Italiano עברית Basa Jawa Kalaallisut ಕನ್ನಡ ქართული Қазақша Kernowek Къэбэрдеибзэ / Qabardjajəbza Kiswahili Kongo ລາວ Latina Latviešu Lietuvių Líguru Limburgs Lojban Magyar Македонски മലയാളം मराठी مصرى Bahasa Melayu Монгол Nāhuatl Nederlands 日本語 Нохчийн ‪Norsk (bokmål)‬ ‪Norsk (nynorsk)‬ Occitan پنجابی ភាសាខ្មែរ Plattdüütsch Polski Português Qırımtatarca Reo Mā`ohi Română Runa Simi Русиньскый Русский Саха тыла संस्कृत Scots Seeltersk Sesotho Shqip Simple English Slovenčina Slovenščina Српски / Srpski Srpskohrvatski / Српскохрватски Suomi Svenska Tagalog தமிழ் Татарча/Tatarça తెలుగు ไทย Тоҷикӣ Türkçe Türkmençe Twi Українська اردو ئۇيغۇرچە / Uyghurche‎ Vahcuengh Tiếng Việt Võro Walon 文言 Winaray 吴语 ייִדיש Yorùbá 粵語 Žemaitėška 中文 This page was last modified on 18 July 2011 at 15:07. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. See Terms of use for details. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization. Contact us Privacy policy About Wikipedia Disclaimers Wikimedia Foundation Powered by MediaWiki
  English to Chinese translation
  中国语文
  从维基百科，自由的百科全书

  除非另有说明，本文中的中文文本的书面（简体中文/繁体中文，汉语拼音）格式。在简体和繁体中文脚本相同的情况下，对中国来说是一次写入。

  本文包含中文文本。如果没有适当的渲染支持，您可能会看到问号，箱子，或其他符号，而不是中文字符。
  中国
  汉语/汉语，华语/华语或中文
  Hànyǔ（中国）用汉字写在
  Hanyu.png
  口语在中华人民共和国（中国，俗称中国），中国的中华民国，俗称台湾，新加坡，马来西亚，美国，菲律宾，澳大利亚，印度尼西亚，毛里求斯，秘鲁，并与其他地区华人社区
  地区：中国内地，香港，澳门，台湾，新加坡（多数）
  （少数民族）：东南亚和其他地区的华人社区
  种族的汉人和回族人
  扬声器约1.3亿
  汉藏语系

  Sinitic
  中国

  标准表格
  国语
  方言
  国语
  金
  惠州市
  吴
  湖南
  Jiangxinese
  客家
  乐（包括广东话，台山）
  平华
  韶
  北闵
  东闵（包括Fuchow）
  中央敏
  莆仙
  闽南（包括厦门，台湾）
  潮州（包括汕头，潮州，揭阳，汕尾/梅州市的部分地区）
  书写系统中文字符，拼音，注音富豪，Xiao'erjing
  官方地位
  在联合国的官方语言

  中华人民共和国中国

  香港
  澳门

  中国的中华民国（台湾）
  新加坡（官方的，但不是国家语言）
  在毛里求斯的认可少数民族语言
  美国（少数人及​​辅助）
  受中国：民族语言规范委员会1
  在我国：国家语言委员会
  在新加坡：推广普通话理事会/讲华语运动2
  语言代码
  ISO 639-1 ZH
  ISO 639-2志（二）ZHO（T）
  ISO 639-3 ZHO - Macrolanguage
  个别代码：
  CDO - 董敏
  cjy - 金玉
  CMN - 普通话
  CPX - 莆仙
  CZH - 惠州
  czo - 钟敏
  甘 - 甘
  陈克勤 - 客家
  HSN - 香
  贝MNP - 闵
  南 - 闽南
  wuu - 武
  岳 - 岳
  OCH - 旧中国
  LTC - 晚中东中国
  文学LZH - 中国
  Linguasphere 79 - AAA级
  新地图Sinophone World.PNG
  Sinophone世界地图。

  信息：
  国家确定的中国作为一个初级的，行政的，或母语
  国家超过500万中国音箱W / W / O识别
  国家有超过100万中国扬声器W /或W / O识别
  国家超过50万中国音箱W / W / O识别
  国家超过10万中国音箱W / W / O识别
  主要会讲中文的定居点
  注意：此页面可能包含在Unicode的国际音标注音符号。
  中国的语言（口语）
  传统的中国汉语
  简体中国汉语
  显示改编
  替代的中文名称
  传统的中国华语
  简体中国华语
  显示改编
  中国的语

  pre 4 minuta

  Thumb_dark_man
  Manana

  星架坡，又叫星加坡（加讀架）、星架波同新加坡（加讀架），正式名新加坡共和國（英文