What is the history of Chinese language?

It is widely known that Chinese language should be a part of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Old Chinese was the common language during the early and middle Zhou Dynasty, texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shījīng, the history of the Shūjīng, and portions of the Yìjīng. The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters provide hints to the old Chinese pronunciations. Some of the Chinese languages pronunciations are borrowed from the Japanese, the Vietnamese and the Korean. It possessed a rich sound system in which aspiration or rough breathing differentiated the consonants. The source also notes that southern dialects of Chinese have more monosyllabic words than the Mandarin Chinese dialects.

Middle Chinese was the language used during Southern and Northern Dynasties and the Suí, Táng, and Sòng dynasties. It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the "Qièyùn" rime book, and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the "Guǎngyùn" rime book.

The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex.

Most Chinese people, from the north to the south, east to west, use various Mandarin dialects as their home language. The popularity of Mandarin throughout the Northern China is largely due to North China's plains. The geographical difference is the main cause of linguistic diversity.

What is the “Mandarin”?

Mandarin is a standardized form of spoken, which is also considered as the official Chinese language. It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is part of a larger group of North-Eastern and South-Western dialects. In fact, the Standard Mandarin Chinese is also considered as one of the six official languages of the United Nations.

Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between seven and thirteen main regional groups of Chinese. Among those the most spoken is Mandarin, followed by Wu, Cantonese and Min. Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some dialects may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility.

What are loanwords in Chinese language?

Like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizeable amount of words from other cultures. Direct phonetic borrowing of foreign words has gone on since ancient times. There are words borrowed along the Silk Road, Buddhist scriptures, or from migrants to the north. Affected by geographical characters, the words showed some specialties on tone, pronunciation, etc.

Modern new words are translated into Chinese mainly in three ways which are free translation, phonetic translation and a combination of both. Today, it is much more common to use existing Chinese morphemes to develop new words in order to represent imported concepts, such as technical expressions and international scientific vocabulary due to the structural differences from Western languages. Any Latin or Greek etymologies are dropped and converted into the corresponding meaning-carrying Chinese characters, making them more comprehensible for Chinese but introducing more difficulties in understanding foreign texts.
Foreign words, mainly proper nouns, continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transcription. In addition, along the same period the Japanese language also made a great influence on the Chinese language. The Japanese terms are indistinguishable from the native Chinese words. Often there have been disputes over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or the Chinese developed them first.

What is about education on Chinese language?

As in the past years China has impacted the various aspect of the world, causing the importance of learning Mandarin Chinese have grown considerably. Therefore, many educational institutions abroad have started to offer Chinese Mandarin courses. In 1991, there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test, while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.