There are 7 dialect groups in Chinese: Northern (北, the largest – over 800 million speakers), Wu (吴), Xiang (湘), Gan (赣), Hakka (客家), Yue (粤), Min (闽). Dialects differ phonetically (which makes inter-dialect communication difficult, although dialects are connected by regular sound correspondences), lexically, partly grammatically, but the basics of their grammar and vocabulary are the same. The means of communication between speakers of different dialects is the normative Chinese language, which in China is called Putonghua (普通话) and in other countries Guoyu (国语), with very few differences between them. If absolutely necessary, you can explain yourself by writing characters on paper or drawing them in the air with your hand. The literary language draws on northern dialects. The phonetic norm is Beijing pronunciation (however, in the Tang Dynasty, when most classical Chinese texts were produced, the norm was closer to the current Hakka dialect group).
Chinese writing
In Chinese writing, each character stands for a separate syllable and a separate morpheme. The total number of Chinese characters exceeds 40,000 (sometimes a figure of 70,000 characters is quoted). Most of the characters can be found only in the monuments of classical Chinese literature. A person who has mastered 1500 characters can be considered literate at the elementary level. 3000 characters are enough to read newspapers and non-specialized magazines. Nowadays Chinese characters exist in 2 variants: simplified, adopted in mainland China, and traditional – in Taiwan, Hong Kong and other countries. Traditionally, the Chinese wrote from top to bottom, and columns went from right to left. Nowadays, the PRC predominantly writes horizontally, from left to right, modeled after European languages; vertical writing continues to be used in Taiwan along with horizontal writing. However, in mainland China, vertical writing and pre-reform hieroglyphics are still used as a semantic reference to traditional Chinese culture – in art history publications, art periodicals, and the like.
Phonetics and grammar
The consonants and vowels of Chinese are organized into a limited number of toned syllables of fixed composition. There are 414 syllables in Mandarin, including tone variants – 1324 (there are 4 meaning-distinguishing tones in Mandarin, each syllable can have from 2 to 4 tone variants). Syllabification is morphologically meaningful, i.e. each syllable is a sound shell of a morpheme or a simple word. A morpheme is, as a rule, one-syllable. Some old one-syllable words are not syntactically independent – they are used only as components of complex and derivative words. Two-syllable (two-morphemic) words dominate. With the development of terminology, the number of more than two-syllable words grows. The Chinese language has almost no direct borrowings, but widely uses semantic borrowings, forming calques. Word formation is carried out by means of word formation, affixation and conversion. In Chinese, in many cases it is impossible to distinguish a compound word from a word combination. Formation is represented mainly by verb species suffixes. The plural form is inherent in nouns denoting persons and personal pronouns. One affix can be used for “group” formation, i.e. it can refer to a number of denominative words. Affixes are few in number, facultative in some cases, and have an agglutinative character.
Agglutination in Chinese does not serve to express relations between words, and the structure of the language remains predominantly isolating. Chinese syntax is characterized by nominative structure, relatively fixed word order: the definite always precedes the definite. A sentence may take the form of an active or passive construction; permutations of words are possible (within certain limits), which do not change their syntactic role. The Chinese language has a developed system of complex sentences formed by union and non-union composition and subordination. In early May 2004, the Taiwanese parliament passed a new writing law. Now all official documents must be written in horizontal lines only. As the speaker explained, the change is due to the fact that numbers and English words written in documents create chaos. The innovations will not affect fiction.