The Emory College Language Center
Chinese - image of the summer palace gardens in Beijing

Introduction

"Welcome to Chinese at Emory", a video message by professor Hong Li

Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. The most widespread form of Chinese is Mandarin, which may be regarded as modern standard Chinese. It is spoken as a first language by over 835 million people in central and northern China, as well as Taiwan, claiming more native speakers than any other language. An additional 100 million speak it as a second language. The Chinese writing system developed more than 4,000 years ago and consists of an individual character or ideogram for every syllable, each character representing a word or idea rather than a sound. Characters are written in columns read from top to bottom and from right to left, or in horizontal lines that read from left to right. In 1956 an alphabet based on Roman letters (Pinyin) was developed in mainland China. Its purpose, however, was the phonetic transcription of Chinese characters rather than the replacement of them.