Spoken and Written Languages

The Han people have their own spoken and written languages. Chinese belongs to the Han-Tibetan language family. It is the most commonly used language in China, and one of the most commonly used languages in the world. Written Chinese emerged in its embryonic form of carved symbols approximately 6,000 years ago. The Chinese characters used today evolved from those used in bone and tortoise shell inscriptions more than 3,000 years ago and the bronze inscriptions produced soon after. Drawn figures were gradually reduced to patterned strokes, pictographs were reduced to symbols, and the complicated graphs became simpler. Early pictographs and ideographs were joined by pictophonetic characters. In fact, there are six categories of Chinese characters: pictographs, self-explanatory characters, associative compounds, pictophonetic characters, phonetic loan characters, and mutually explanatory characters. Chinese words are monosyllabic. A large proportion of Chinese characters are composed of an ideogramatic element combined with a phonetic element. Many non-Chinese sometimes get the feeling that there are an unlimited number of Chinese characters. How many Chinese characters are there exactly? The Qing Dynasty Kang Xi Dictionary, completed in 1716, contains more than 47,000 characters. The eight-volume Hanyu Da Cidian (Chinese Lexicon) published in 1986-1990 contains over 56,000 characters. However, only about 3,000 characters are in common use. In addition to their functional value as symbols for records and communications, Chinese characters have an aesthetic value as calligraphy.