The Chinese Language is a member of the Sino-tibetan family of languages. It is related to Tibetan? and Burmese? but (contrary to popular belief) not at all to Korean,Vietnamese?,Thai? or Japanese, though these languages (like other Asian languages) were strongly influenced by Chinese in the course of history.
"The Chinese Language" is, however, a fiction. The term "Chinese" is employed to denote both the language spoken by Confucius and the one Mao Zedong used in authoring his works, the language people in Beijing use in daily life as well as the conversational language of Hongkong. These sub-languages differ considerably. To the casual observer, this difference may seem so big as to render the usage of an umbrella term to collectively refer to them preposterous.
Nevertheless, there are good reasons for using a collective name: Confucius and Mao were of the same ethnic group, the Han people; Mao's language is what Confucius' language has evolved to in a continuous process of language evolution, and both the dialect of Beijing and the dialect of Hongkong stem from the same linguistic source.
The most important reason to use the term "Chinese", however, is: All these sub-languages share the same writing system, the famous Chinese Characters. Though at Confucius' time the characters were written in a more archaic manner than they are today, one can easily transcribe these characters into their modern form. The result will contain characters rarely used today, some words may be used in a different way than they are today, but still a present-day Chinese could read and understand the transcription. The cleft between written Beijing dialect and written Hongkong dialect is even smaller: Newspapers printed in Beijing are read throughout China. This works, because characters encode meaning, not pronunciation. The same character would be pronounced quite differently if read by a present-day Beijing based Chinese, a citizen of Hongkong or a contemporary of Confucius, but all would understand it to mean about the same.
Hence one could say that the characters are what makes the Chinese language an entity. If some day an alphabetic system should supplant them, "the Chinese language" would cease to exist.
The rest of this article will concentrate on present-day Chinese. As mentioned above, Chinese comprises a number of dialects. Usually, one distinguishes between the major and some minor dialects. The major dialects are:
The minor dialects include, e.g., the Shanghai? dialect which is said to be unintelligible to anybody except the people of Shanghai.
All these dialects share a number of properties:
Each syllable carries a distinct meaning, and in Ancient Chinese comprised a word all by itself. But since the modern dialects feature only a very limited set of syllables (as compared to European languages), each syllable would be imbued with a lot of totally different meanings (imagine assigning the several 100,000 words of English to only a few hundred syllables!). As a remedy, the concept of tonality, which is shared by all present-day dialects, comes into play: Each basic syllable can be pronounced in a variety of different pitches (the number of these varies between dialects) to provide an additional means of syllable distinction. To state it clearly: The different tones aren't just a funny kind of inflection or a way of expressing emotional nuances. The same cluster of consonants and vowels, when pronounced in two different tones, constitutes two totally different syllables, having totally different meanings.
The tone system, however, doesn't completely solve the above-mentioned problem: A syllable, even if pronounced in the correct pitch, still can have a variety of meanings. Therefore, most Chinese words consist of two or more syllables, each with the same or a similiar meaning, which disambiguate each other. For example, the word for "to see" in Mandarin is actually composed of the words for "to look" and "to perceive". Taken in isolation, the two syllables would be ambiguous, but their combination makes clear what is meant.
The Chinese Writing system is ideographic, i.e. each character expresses a concept. Originally, the characters were actually little pictures depicting what was meant. This, however, proved inconvenient (as you can imagine - try to depict "philosophy"!). There are still a number of characters which can be traced back to such pictorial characters, but most characters used today follow a different composition scheme: They are built up from two parts, one of which indicates the kind of concept the character describes, whereas the other hints at the pronunciation (though these hints are often quite useless and sometimes misleading). For example, the character for "mother" ('ma', 1. pitch, in Mandarin) consists of one component meaning "female" and another one meaning "horse" - now this doesn't mean Chinese view mothers as female horses! The first component (or "radical") simply tells that the character denotes a female entity, whereas the second acts as a pronunciation guide by refering to the word for "horse", which is also pronounced 'ma', though in a different pitch.
This design principle is exploited by Chinese dictionaries: Full characters are ordered according to their initial radical (for which there are only about 200 possibilities) and the number of strokes they consist of (a more detailed discussion of this can be found in the entry on ideographic writing systems).
Also, this principle is exploited by everybody learning to write Chinese: The vast number of Chinese characters can be memorized a lot easier, if they are mentally decomposed into their constituting radicals. The question, how many characters there are, is subject of a heated discussion: In the 18th century, European scholars claimed the total tally to be about 80,000. This number, however, is exaggerated: The most conscise dictionary (the Kangxi Dictionary) lists about 40,000 characters. Of these, most aren't used anymore today. Popular estimates say, that about 3,000 characters are needed to read a Chinese newspaper, and 4,000 to 5,000 constitute a decent education.
Finally, it must be conceded, that the above claim that all Chinese dialects used the same characters is a bit of a white lie. Today, there are two writing systems in existence: One is the Traditional Writing System, used in Hongkong, Taiwan and by Overseas Chinese. The Peoples's Republic of China (also Singapore) uses the Simplified Writing System, which uses simplified forms for some of the more complicated characters. This makes it easier to learn, but entails some disadvantages, since the Chinese Classics, which are (needless to say) written using the Traditional System, have to be transcribed into simplified characters to be understandable.
The Chinese characters are also used to write the Chinese numerals.
All dialects share the same grammatic system, which is different from the one employed by European languages: All words have only one grammatical form, neither conjugation nor declension nor a tense system exist. Concepts like "plural" or "past tense" have to be expressed in a syntactical way:
Tenses are indicated by adverbs of time ("yesterday", "later") and a number of particles indicating, e.g., completion of an action. Particles are also used to form questions: The syntax of questions is exactly the same as in declarative statements (basically, SUBJECT - VERB - OBJECT). Only the appended particle makes it a question. Plural meaning most of the time has to be inferred from context, since the Chinese language doesn't provide any other means of expressing this concept (apart from giving exact numbers, which is, of course, possible).
Despite some additional grammatical "oddities" (from a Western point of view), Chinese grammar is a lot simpler than any European one.
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