汉语是中国使用人数最多的语言，也是世界上作为第一语言使用人数最多的语言。中国除汉族使用汉语外，回族、满族等也基本使用或转用汉语，其他民族都有自己的语言，许多民族都不同程度地转用或兼用汉语。
Also see:
- Chinese Dialects And Accents
- Chinese Names
- Chinese Sibling Terminology
- Why Mao Changed His Name — transition to the pinyin romanization system
This language provides examples of:
- Alternate Character Reading:
- Some characters have multiple meanings or sounds, used differently in different words. Sort of like the English stock or lead or maybe minute. Some of this can be attributed to differences with literary and colloquial readings of Chinese characters, where historically, the literary dialectical readings from the more prestigious regions are loaned to other areas. An important note is that most of them are nowhere near as extreme as the reading differences in Japan were. The dialects do share a common origin after all (unlike Japanese, which applied the local readings that are completely unrelated to China to the Chinese characters), and it is still possible to see some resemblances between the different readings.
- While dialects are mutually unintelligible, their writing systems mostly involve the same Chinese characters. Thus, it is possible for a character, or better yet, a name, to be pronounced differently in different regional dialects. Note that it is also possible for a character to be read in multiple ways within that dialect (again, in different contexts), usually due to the same reason of literary and colloquial differences as above.
- Hanyu Pinyinnote has shades of this too - it uses the Latin alphabet to represent the pronunciation of Chinese words. In most cases, this is fairly straight forward: for example ping and ban are pronounced pretty much as you'd expect. However, there are a few letters which are used to represent non-English sounds - sounds like ci or quan aren't pronounced at all like their spelling might suggestnote .
- Some characters have multiple meanings or sounds, used differently in different words. Sort of like the English stock or lead or maybe minute. Some of this can be attributed to differences with literary and colloquial readings of Chinese characters
- Broken Base: The supporters of Traditional versus Simplified characters. The simplified supporters like the fact that they can write a paragraph in half the time and not have the characters turn into illegible inkblots when the font gets too small, while the traditionalists like the hints to meaning and pronunciation that the oldstyle characters contain and the link to history that it provides. Which one is easier to learn and remember is the subject of much debate—which will not be done here. Also, as the simplification scheme is promulgated by the mainland communist government, the people of Taiwan/overseas Chinese take slight offense due to political/ideological reasons instead of anything linguistic.
- Insistent Terminology: The official Chinese term for Traditional characters in Taiwan means "Standard/Orthodox characters", while elsewhere in the Sinophone world they are generally referred to as "Complex characters" (as the character used, 繁, carries the connotation of "frustratingly" complex). Some Simplified supporters insist on using the term "Complex" in English as well, considering the term "Traditional" a misnomer, as some characters had been made more elaborate over time and that many Simplified characters are based on traditionally used abbreviated forms.
- Common Knowledge: There's a stereotype that Chinese has no word for "no." This is technically true but semantically false. Chinese does not have an explicit all-purpose negative response that can be used to answer any question, but it does have ways to express negative responses... it's that they all use the Chinese word for "not". If someone were to ask you, "Are you hungry" in English, you'd probably just reply, "No," but in Chinese they'd ask "你饿了吗?" / "Nǐ è le ma?" and you'd reply "不饿" / "Bù è," "not hungry." (In that sense, Chinese actually has no word for "Yes" either; the opposite answer would be "是" / "Shì," which is "Be / Is / Are / Am.") Additionally, in colloquial speech, "不" is sometimes used stand-alone when the verb being modified can be inferred.
- Common Tongue: As indicated by two of the names cited below, Mandarin serves this purpose in a linguistically diverse China.
- Four Is Death: Either the Old Chinese (the ancestor of all Chinese/Sinitic langauges, including Mandarin) or the Middle Chinese (which also descended from Old Chinese) language is the Trope Maker.
- Foreigners Write Backwards: As mentioned above, Chinese can be written vertically, with columns read top-to-bottom from right to left. Seals may even be read in a circle, as shown by the first image at the Other Wiki. The flexibility behind the writing direction is largely associated with the block-styled construction of individual characters.
- Fun With Homophones:
- Mandarin Chinese (as well as other Chinese/Sinitic languages) has a lot of homophones, though communication usually isn't a problem thanks to extensive use of contexts and the writing system. Case in point, the Cihai dictionary lists that the syllable of yì has 149 different characters associated with the sound, each with their own character and meaning. More than just that, most common Chinese puns would extend the range to the other tones, leading to even more possibilities, making it an absolute gold mine of puns.
- Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den (施氏食狮史/施氏食獅史, pinyin: Shī Shì shí shī shǐ) is a well-known 92 characters-long Classical Chinese poem by Yuen Ren Chao. The poem is best known for that fact that every single syllable in the poem uses the sound shi (with different tones) when read in Mandarin. The poem is an example of a one-syllable article poem that fully exploits the number of homophones in Chinese, creating a work that would be completely and utterly incomprehensible when transliterated, but understandable when written in its original form.
- I Have Many Names: The most common are Putonghua ("Common Speech") and Guoyu ("National Language"), used on the Mainland and Taiwan, respectively. In parts of the diaspora, Huayu ("Chinese Language", Hua being a name for Chinese culture) is common. Finally, the word "Mandarin" is a rendering of Guanhua, "the speech of officials" from a time when it was the language of government functionaries based around Beijing.
- Loads And Loads Of Characters: The writing system has over 40,000 characters with a college grad knowing about 5,000. You only need 200 to 500 or so for a basic conversation or skimming a newspaper. As described above, there are rules for deducing the pronunciation of an unknown character, though they are not completely foolproof.
- In fact, there are characters that have no pronunciation, like 込 (used in Japanese).
- New Media Are Evil: Many old fogeys have claimed the advent of pinyin-based character inputting has led to a loss of literacy among the younger generation. Whether or not the use of this technology actually has any impact on literacy skills has not been proven.
- Pronoun Trouble: Primarily in translation since the (spoken) third-person is gender-neutral.
- In written Chinese "he" and "she" are fairly intuitive, with the left-side radical being "woman" for "she" and "person" for "he" while sharing the same root/base. However, the word for "it" does not resemble the others in any way— as it was originally the Chinese word for "others" (aside- in Traditional Chinese, even "you" is gender-specific).
- When the overzealous language reformers made up genitive third-person pronouns, they also made up a ta for animals; a ta for all inanimate it, and a ta for gods.
- On the other hand, when translating into Mandarin, you could say Pronoun Trouble is averted for many of the same reasons. If you know 4 syllables: 我 wǒ - I/me, 你 nǐ - you, 他 tā - he/him, 们 men (plural suffix for making we/us, (all of) you, and they/them), then you know every pronoun you commonly neednote . And if we throw in the possessive suffix 的 de, we can also express 'mine', 'ours', 'yours', 'his/hers/its' and 'theirs' as wellnote .
- Chs/Pun: Those four tones and the sheer number of true homophones make for loads and loads of these. There's an entire class of jokes called xiehouyu whose punchlines often rely on wordplay.
- The character for "spring" written upside-down is sometimes seen around the Chinese New Year because this was traditionally considered the start of spring. As it happens, the words for upside-down (倒) and "to arrive" (到) are homophones (dào). So "spring" upside-down = "Spring has arrived."
- A ridiculous number of Chinese superstitions are based on homophones. Some examples include: Four Is Death, as mentioned above; pears should never be served at a wedding because the Mandarin for pear (梨, lí) sounds the same as the word for separation (离, also part of the compound word meaning "divorce"); and fish is usually eaten for New Year's Eve dinner as the word for fish (鱼, yú) and the word for surplus (余), i.e. you ended the year with more than you started, are homophones.
- Speaking of the fish, if you are having fish with a driver or a fisherman for a meal, DO NOT mention the word “翻”(flip) or letting them flip the fish to the other side. Doing so will imply that the driver will have a car accident or the fisherman will suffered a unfortunate case of shipwreck.
- These are also exploited to avoid censorship: homophones and near-homophones are used to get around government filtering on certain character combinations. The government sometimes cottons on to particularly widespread workarounds, but all in all it's a game of cat and mouse in which the Chinese Internet is always two to three steps ahead of the censors(including the use of emojis, though some are just for fun).
- The censorship goes way back to the early Chinese history. Chinese people are not allow to write or pronounce the characters within the name of the current or former emperors of the dynasty, your officials, and your forefathers (for those who wonders why there isn't two emperors in Chinese history that share the same name). There is even a joke about such tradition: when a low-rank official putting up the notice saying the commoner can lit the lanterns for three days due to the festival. However, since his superior's has “登”（a homophone with "灯"， or lanterns), he modified the notice to "set fire for three days", which derives an idiom "只许州官放火，不许百姓点灯"（The governors can set the fire, but commoners can't lit the lanterns）, which means the ruling class can do something illegal while the commoner cannot.
- They Changed It Now It Sucks:
- Some supporters of the traditional characters consider Simplified Chinese to be an example, despite the fact that traditional characters are perfectly legible to those who have learned simplified (with a bit of practice) and vice versa.
- When it comes to the spoken language, linguists have noted that Mandarin Chinese has strayed quite a bit away from older forms of Chinese languages (such as Middle Chinese), resulting in Mandarin speakers being unable to fully appreciate older works of poetry and folk songs... while Han Chinese groups that speak other "dialects" often can, because these "dialects" are, in many cases, actually closer to older Chinese languages. There is no lack of Chinese people who would rant about this issue if given the chance to.
- And on the mainland, the second round of simplified characters was eventually withdrawn, after causing 9 years of widespread confusion and disagreement. (More info here.)
- What Could Have Been: Throughout the 20th century (especially the former half of it) many political and intellectual figures of China would bring up the idea that characters be abolished in favor of a syllabary, akin to the Japanese kana scripts, or the Western alphabet. Whereas most of them acknowledged that characters formed an important part of Chinese culture, they argued that the fact that it takes forever to learn them would mean that China was never to become a fully literate country. Some also claimed that characters were difficult and time-consuming to type on a typewriter (which, by the way, is actually possible) and thus present an obstacle in the way of the country's development. In the latter half of the 20th century (up through about 1995 or so), the technological arguments became even more intense, as the difficulty electronic computers had with handling any Sinitic-influenced language (including even Japanese and Korean, but Chinese had it the worst due to the lack of alternate writing systems) seemed to make the issue of being "left behind" dramatically more urgent, though by this time there was also pushback against "western influence". Mao Zedong himself was personally of the opinion that pinyin would eventually replace characters as the sole means of writing Chinese but he did not do much to actually make that happen. These days, however, nobody seems to talk about it anymore: China is almost as literate as the countries of the West (about 90% of population is able to read and write and illiteracy is basically unheard of among teenagers; it should be noted that almost all of the most illiterate countries in the world actually use the Western alphabet) and computers of the 21st century easily have enough memory and processing power to support full Sinitic character sets (though their method of input has had an influence on the language, too).
