汉语

The Chinese Language

汉语是中国汉民族使用的语言。汉语历史悠久，在3000多年前就有了相当成熟的文字。

汉语是使用人数最多的一种语言，全世界大约有12亿人使用汉语。除中国大陆、台湾省和香港、澳门特区外，新加坡、马来西亚等国也有相当一部分人使用汉语，分布在世界各地的几千万华侨、华裔，也以汉语的各种方言①作为自己的母语。

汉语是中国人使用的主要语言，也是联合国的工作语言之一。汉语的标准语是“普通话”，在台湾省被称作“国语”，在新加坡、马来西亚等国被称作“华语”。汉语目前有七大类方言：北方话、吴语、湘语、赣（gàn）语、客家话、粤（yuè）语、闽（mǐn）语。汉语的普通话既是汉民族的共同语，也是汉民族的标准语。△

小注解

①方言：一种语言中跟标准语有区别的，只在一个地区使用的话，如汉语的粤方言、吴方言等。

Used by the Han people in China,the Chinese language has a long history,hvaing established a fairly mature written language more than 3,000 years ago.

The Chinese language has more than 1.2 billion users.In addition to the Chinese mainland,Taiwan Pvovince,Hong Kong and Macao special administrative regions,some people in Singapore and Malaysia use Chinese,and millions of overseas Chinese and foreign citizens of Chineses origin distributed around the world use various Chinese dialects① as native language.It is also one of the working languges of the United Nations.

The standard language of Chinese is putonghua(Mandarin) which is called guoyu(national language)in Taiwan Province and huayu(Chinese language)in Singapore and Malaysia.The Chinese language presently has sevendialects: northerndialect , Wudialect ,

Xiang or Hunan dialect,Gan dialect,Hakka,Yue orGuangdongdialect and Mindialect. Mand-

-arin is the standard language as well as the common one of the Han people.

Footnotes

①Dialect differs from the standard language and is only used in one area,such as Guangdong and Wu dialects of the Chinese language.