History

Chinese Language, language of the Chinese, or Han, people, the majority ethnic group of China. It is the official language of China and one of the official languages of Singapore. Of China's more than 1 billion people, approximately 95 percent speak Chinese, as opposed to the non-Chinese languages-such as Tibetan, Mongolian, Lolo, Miao, and Tai-spoken by minorities. Large emigrant communities, such as those in Southeast Asia, North and South America, and the Hawaiian Islands, also speak Chinese. More people speak Chinese than any other language in the world.

As the dominant language of East Asia, Chinese has greatly influenced the writing systems and vocabularies of neighboring languages not related to it by origin, such as the Japanese language, the Korean language and the Vietnamese language. It has been estimated that until the 18th century more than half of the world's printed books were Chinese. Courtesy Encarta

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