Everything You Should Know About Chinese Language and Culture

Chinese culture is one of the world’s earliest civilizations, arising thousands of years ago. The region over which the culture dominates covers a vast East Asian region and is exceptionally diverse, with practices and customs varying greatly between locations.

Chinese civilization is regarded as the predominant culture of East Asia. With China being one of the most ancient civilizations, Chinese society greatly influences Asia’s philosophy, manners, and attitudes. Chinese language, art, architecture, music, dancing, poetry, martial arts, food, philosophy, business protocol, faith, governments, and history have a global impact. At the same time, its rituals and festivities are also observed and followed by people around the globe.

China’s major ethnic group, the Han Chinese is an East Asian ethnic group. They make up approximately 92% of the population of the People’s Republic of China, 95% of Taiwan, 76% of Singapore, around 23% of Malaysia, and about 17% of the global people, making them the world’s biggest ethnic group, totaling above 1.3 billion people.

Even though the Chinese are such a large and influential group, most people still don’t know a lot about them. So today we will be telling you everything you need to know about the Chinese language and culture. Meanwhile, if you plan to visit China, you will need document translation in Chinese!

Chinese is a group of East Asian languages that form a branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages. Chinese languages are spoken by the Han Chinese and various minority groups in China. About 1.2 billion people (about 16% of the world’s population) speak some kind of Chinese as their mother tongue.

The varieties of Chinese are usually considered by natives to be regional dialects of the Chinese language, without attention to whether they are commonly understandable. 

Standard Chinese is a regulated form of spoken Chinese based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. It is the official language of China and Taiwan, and one of the four official languages of Singapore. It is also one of the six accepted languages of the United Nations. Speakers of otherwise obscure dialects share the written form of the language based on Chinese letters.

The oldest Chinese written documents are Shang dynasty-era fortune teller engravings, which can be traced back to 1250 BCE. During the Northern and Southern dynasties era, the Chinese went through many changes and split into several variations following geographic and governmental division. The imperial courts of the Ming and Qing dynasties worked using a common language based on the Nanjing dialect of Mandarin. 

Standard Chinese was selected in the 1930s and is now the official language of both the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan. In Hong Kong and Macau, because of the colonial and oral history, the language used in education, the media, formal speech, and ordinary life is Cantonese. However, the official Chinese language has grown quite important and is being taught in academies.

The Chinese language has spread to nearby countries as well. Vietnam was included in the Han empire in 111 BCE, marking the start of a term of Chinese power that lasted almost continuously for a thousand years. Chinese Buddhism expanded over East Asia and with it the knowledge of documents and books in Chinese.

Later Korea, Japan, and Vietnam formed powerful states modeled on Chinese traditions, with ancient Chinese as the language of government and research, a status it would hold until the 19th century in Korea and Japan, and the 20th century in Vietnam. Scholars from diverse areas could talk, albeit only on paper, using written Chinese.

Examples of some loan words in English include “tea”, “dim sum”, and “kumquat”. Visit us at Australian Translation Services for translations.

There are currently two arrangements for Chinese letters. The traditional method, used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau, and Chinese communities outside mainland China, takes its pattern from regulated forms dating to the Han dynasty. The Simplified Chinese character method, introduced by the People’s Republic of China in 1954 to help mass education, simplifies the most difficult traditional letters. Singapore, which has a sizable Chinese population, was the second country to use simplified characters officially. However, it has also become the norm for Chinese in Malaysia.

A well-educated Chinese today knows roughly 4,000 to 6,000 characters; around 3,000 characters are needed to read a newspaper. The Chinese government describes literacy amongst workers as awareness of 2,000 characters, though this would be only practical literacy. School-children typically study around 2,000 characters, whereas teachers may learn up to 10,000. A dictionary, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including rare and obsolete characters; less than a fourth of these characters are now ordinarily used.

With the rising influence and importance of China’s economy globally, Mandarin education is earning demand in institutes in the United States. It has become an increasingly common subject of learning amongst the young in the Western world, as in the UK.

In 1991 2,000 international learners were taking China’s official Chinese Proficiency Test, while in 2005, the number of applicants had risen to 117,660. By 2010, 750,000 people had taken the Chinese Proficiency Test. By 2017, 6.5 million candidates had taken the Chinese Proficiency Test.

According to the Modern Language Association, there were 550 elementary, junior high, and senior high schools providing Chinese courses in the United States in 2015, which signified a 100% increase in two years. At the same time, registration in Chinese language classes at the college level had a rise of 51% from 2002 to 2015. On the other hand, the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages had figures implying that 30,000 – 50,000 students were reading Chinese in 2015. Learn more about language translation here.