Mandarin language is the mother tongue of mainland China, Taiwan and the Chinese in Singapore. More than 1 billion Chinese and non-Chinese worldwide are able to speak and write Mandarin language. It is the common language of most business transactions involving international trade. Mandarin language is also used widely among Chinese migrants in Southeast Asian countries, such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Brunei.

 

Evolution Of Mandarin Language

 

Since ancient days there are hundreds of Chinese dialects in China. Most of them share the same written form but not their spoken form. Written Chinese is made by thousands of distinctive Chinese characters with pictographs origin, such as a crescent for the moon, or a dotted circle for the sun. In later development new Chinese characters were created with non-pictorial ideograph, which could also represent abstract concepts. Characters were also combined to form new characters with new meanings.

In 1644 when the Manchu overthrew Ming dynasty, the new rulers were non-Chinese race with many dialects themselves. Among the Chinese dialects the new rulers decided on Peking Mandarin as the unifying language for governmental ease and political stability considerations. After the start of Chinese Republic in 1912, Mandarin was made the national language and was subsequently designated by the United Nation as one of its original official languages.

 

Simplified Chinese And Pinyin

 

During the last 50 years, the Chinese government promotes the use simplified Chinese to facilitate learning. Thousand of Chinese characters were eliminated or replaced by characters of lesser strokes. Pinyin, a phonetic system based on Roman letters, was also introduced to allow Chinese characters to be looked up by English alphabets. This is one great step for the development of Chinese computing, putting in place an easy Chinese input system.

Old Chinese characters can still be found in large dictionary, which contains 40,000 to 50,000 compound characters. Simplified Chinese narrows the collection to 5,000 characters. A Chinese child learns about 200 by the time he is ten years old. While the hundreds of spoken dialects are still very much alive today, almost all Chinese in China are able to read and write Mandarin language. China’s current market accessibility is making Mandarin language a popular language to study among non-Mandarin speaking.