Oriental Languages available

Chinese The Chinese language is a member of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Although Chinese is often regarded as a single language, regional variations in dialect, grammar and vocabulary are comparable to those of Romance languages. However, all of the spoken varieties of Chinese share a common formal written language, Vernacular Chinese, written using a nearly identical set of Chinese characters. About one-fifth of the world speaks some form of Chinese as its native language, making it the language with the most native speakers. The Chinese language, spoken in the form of standard Mandarin, is the official language of the People's Republic of China in mainland China and the Republic of China on Taiwan, as well as one of four official languages of Singapore, and one of six official languages of the United Nations. Spoken in the form of standard Cantonese, Chinese is one of the two official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macao (together with Portuquese). Chinese (unlike Westerners) make a sharp distinction between Written language and Spoken language. One uniform script and written standard continues to be used for all the spoken varieties of Chinese. The seven main groups of "languages" or "dialect groups" within Chinese are: Mandarin, Wu (includes Shanghainese), Xiang, Gan, Hakka, Cantonese (or Yue), and Min (which linguists further divide into 5 to 7 subdivisions on its own, which are all mutually unintelligible). There is also standard Mandarin, the official standard used by the Peolple's Republic of China, the Republic of China (Taiwan) and Singapore. Standard Mandarin is based on Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing, and it's intended to transcend all Chinese-speakers as a common language of communication. It is therefore the common Chinese language (as this is often called) that is the language of government, of the media, and of instruction in schools.