91-624: [REDACTED] Look up fāngyán or fángyán in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. Fangyan may refer to: Regional varieties of Chinese (Chinese: 方言 ; pinyin: fāngyán ) Fangyan (book) , Han dynasty dictionary by Yang Xiong Fangyan, Zhejiang , town in Yongkang, Zhejiang, China Fangyan Formation , geological formation in Zhejiang Topics referred to by
182-461: A common language based on Mandarin varieties , known as Guānhuà ( 官話 / 官话 'officer speech'). While never formally defined, knowledge of this language was essential for a career in the imperial bureaucracy. In the early years of the Republic of China , Literary Chinese was replaced as the written standard by written vernacular Chinese , which was based on northern dialects. In the 1930s,
273-488: A rime dictionary published in 601, noted wide variations in pronunciation between regions, and was created with the goal of defining a standard system of pronunciation for reading the classics. This standard is known as Middle Chinese , and is believed to be a diasystem , based on a compromise between the reading traditions of the northern and southern capitals. The North China Plain provided few barriers to migration, which resulted in relative linguistic homogeneity over
364-697: A second language . In April 2009, Prime Minister of Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina argued in front of the United Nations General Assembly that the Bengali language should be made one of the official languages of the UN. This was backed by a resolution adopted unanimously by the assembly of the Indian state of West Bengal in December. Hindi is the fourth most spoken native language in
455-500: A tone split conditioned by syllabic onsets. Syllables with voiced initials tended to be pronounced with a lower pitch, and by the late Tang dynasty , each of the tones had split into two registers conditioned by the initials, known as "upper" ( 阴 / 陰 yīn ) and "lower" ( 阳 / 陽 yáng ). When voicing was lost in all dialects except in the Wu and Old Xiang groups, this distinction became phonemic, yielding eight tonal categories, with
546-695: A 1999 resolution, the General Assembly requested the secretary-general to "appoint a senior Secretariat official as coordinator of questions relating to multilingualism throughout the Secretariat." The first such coordinator was Federico Riesco of Chile , appointed on 6 September 2000. Following Riesco's retirement, Miles Stoby of Guyana was appointed Coordinator for Multilingualism, effective 6 September 2001. In 2003, Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed Shashi Tharoor of India as Coordinator for Multilingualism. This responsibility
637-678: A classification of Li Rong , distinguishing three further groups: Some varieties remain unclassified, including the Danzhou dialect (northwestern Hainan ), Mai (southern Hainan), Waxiang (northwestern Hunan ), Xiangnan Tuhua (southern Hunan), Shaozhou Tuhua (northern Guangdong), and the forms of Chinese spoken by the She people ( She Chinese ) and the Miao people . She Chinese, Xiangnan Tuhua, Shaozhou Tuhua and unclassified varieties of southwest Jiangxi appear to be related to Hakka. Most of
728-457: A combination of innovations and retention of distinctions from Middle Chinese: Chinese finals may be analysed as an optional medial glide , a main vowel and an optional coda. Conservative vowel systems, such as those of Gan dialects , have high vowels /i/ , /u/ and /y/ , which also function as medials, mid vowels /e/ and /o/ , and a low /a/ -like vowel. In other dialects, including Mandarin dialects, /o/ has merged with /a/ , leaving
819-480: A compound word or phrase. This process is so extensive in Shanghainese that the tone system is reduced to a pitch accent system much like modern Japanese . The tonal categories of modern varieties can be related by considering their derivation from the four tones of Middle Chinese , though cognate tonal categories in different dialects are often realized as quite different pitch contours. Middle Chinese had
910-509: A compulsory subject in all Kenyan and Tanzanian schools and is increasingly being used in eastern Burundi. With between 150 and 200 million speakers, the Swahili lexicon is similar to that of other eastern Bantu languages such as Comorian , which have differing levels of mutual intelligibility. Swahili is already used unofficially in many UN organizations as the UN has an office in Nairobi (
1001-548: A final and a tone . In general, southern varieties have fewer initial consonants than northern and central varieties, but more often preserve the Middle Chinese final consonants. Some varieties, such as Cantonese, Hokkien and Shanghainese , include syllabic nasals as independent syllables. In the 42 varieties surveyed in the Great Dictionary of Modern Chinese Dialects , the number of initials (including
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#17327723006931092-416: A marker, usually the same as the attributive marker, though some varieties use a different marker. All varieties have transitive and intransitive verbs. Instead of adjectives, Chinese varieties use stative verbs , which can function as predicates but differ from intransitive verbs in being modifiable by degree adverbs. Ditransitive sentences vary, with northern varieties placing the indirect object before
1183-498: A primary division between northern groups (Mandarin and Jin) and all others, with Min as an identifiable branch. Because speakers share a standard written form , and have a common cultural heritage with long periods of political unity, the varieties are popularly perceived among native speakers as variants of a single Chinese language, and this is also the official position. Conventional English-language usage in Chinese linguistics
1274-665: A reduced pitch range that is determined by the preceding syllable. Most morphemes in Chinese varieties are monosyllables descended from Old Chinese words, and have cognates in all varieties: Southern varieties also include distinctive substrata of vocabulary of non-Chinese origin. Some of these words may have come from Tai–Kadai and Austroasiatic languages. Chinese varieties generally lack inflectional morphology and instead express grammatical categories using analytic means such as particles and prepositions . There are major differences between northern and southern varieties, but often some northern areas share features found in
1365-851: A single mid vowel with a wide range of allophones . Many dialects, particularly in northern and central China, have apical or retroflex vowels, which are syllabic fricatives derived from high vowels following sibilant initials. In many Wu dialects , vowels and final glides have monophthongized , producing a rich inventory of vowels in open syllables. Reduction of medials is common in Yue dialects . The Middle Chinese codas, consisting of glides /j/ and /w/ , nasals /m/ , /n/ and /ŋ/ , and stops /p/ , /t/ and /k/ , are best preserved in southern dialects, particularly Yue dialects such as Cantonese. In some Min dialects, nasals and stops following open vowels have shifted to nasalization and glottal stops respectively. In Jin, Lower Yangtze Mandarin and Wu dialects,
1456-460: A six-way contrast in unchecked syllables and a two-way contrast in checked syllables. Cantonese maintains these eight tonal categories and has developed an additional distinction in checked syllables. (The latter distinction has disappeared again in many varieties.) However, most Chinese varieties have reduced the number of tonal distinctions. For example, in Mandarin, the tones resulting from
1547-575: A standard national language with pronunciation based on the Beijing dialect was adopted, but with vocabulary drawn from a range of Mandarin varieties, and grammar based on literature in the modern written vernacular. Standard Chinese is the official spoken language of the People's Republic of China and Taiwan, and is one of the official languages of Singapore. It has become a pluricentric language , with differences in pronunciation and vocabulary between
1638-471: A third tone changes to a second tone when followed by another third tone. Particularly complex sandhi patterns are found in Wu dialects and coastal Min dialects. In Shanghainese, the tone of all syllables in a word is determined by the tone of the first, so that Shanghainese has word rather than syllable tone. In northern varieties, many particles or suffixes are weakly stressed or atonic syllables. These are much rarer in southern varieties. Such syllables have
1729-577: A three-way tonal contrast in syllables with vocalic or nasal endings. The traditional names of the tonal categories are 'level'/'even' ( 平 píng ), 'rising' ( 上 shǎng ) and 'departing'/'going' ( 去 qù ). Syllables ending in a stop consonant /p/ , /t/ or /k/ ( checked syllables ) had no tonal contrasts but were traditionally treated as a fourth tone category, 'entering' ( 入 rù ), corresponding to syllables ending in nasals /m/ , /n/ , or /ŋ/ . The tones of Middle Chinese, as well as similar systems in neighbouring languages, experienced
1820-620: A velar or glottal initial: Plural personal pronouns may be marked with a suffix, noun or phrase in different varieties. The suffix men 们 / 們 is common in the north, but several different suffixes are use elsewhere. In some varieties, especially in the Wu area, different suffixes are used for first, second and third person pronouns. Case is not marked, except in varieties in the Qinghai–Gansu sprachbund . The forms of demonstratives vary greatly, with few cognates between different areas. A two-way distinction between proximal and distal
1911-643: A verb cognate with yǒu 有 , which can also be used as a transitive verb indicating possession. Most varieties use a locative verb cognate to zài 在 , but Min, Wu and Yue varieties use several different forms. Official languages of the United Nations The official languages of the United Nations are the six languages used in United Nations (UN) meetings and in which the UN writes all its official documents. For
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#17327723006932002-810: A whole. As with the Romance languages descended from Latin , the ancestral language was spread by imperial expansion over substrate languages 2000 years ago, by the Qin and Han empires in China, and the Roman Empire in Europe. Medieval Latin remained the standard for scholarly and administrative writing in Western Europe for centuries, influencing local varieties much like Literary Chinese did in China. In both cases, local forms of speech diverged from both
2093-516: A wide area. Contrastingly, the mountains and rivers of southern China contain all six of the other major Chinese dialect groups, with each in turn featuring great internal diversity, particularly in Fujian . Until the mid-20th century, most Chinese people spoke only their local language. As a practical measure, officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using
2184-662: A zero initial) ranges from 15 in some southern dialects to a high of 35 in Chongming dialect , spoken in Chongming Island , Shanghai . The initial system of the Fuzhou dialect of northern Fujian is a minimal example. With the exception of /ŋ/ , which is often merged with the zero initial, the initials of this dialect are present in all Chinese varieties, although several varieties do not distinguish /n/ from /l/ . However, most varieties have additional initials, due to
2275-546: Is an official language in nine countries and one autonomous territory. In 2008, the President of Portugal announced that the then eight leaders of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP) had agreed to take the necessary steps to make Portuguese an official language. The media branch of the UN, UN News, already includes translations into Portuguese. Swahili is a lingua franca throughout eastern Africa and
2366-800: Is different from Wikidata All article disambiguation pages All disambiguation pages Varieties of Chinese There are hundreds of local Chinese language varieties forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family , many of which are not mutually intelligible . Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast part of mainland China. The varieties are typically classified into several groups: Mandarin , Wu , Min , Xiang , Gan , Jin , Hakka and Yue , though some varieties remain unclassified. These groups are neither clades nor individual languages defined by mutual intelligibility, but reflect common phonological developments from Middle Chinese . Chinese varieties have
2457-780: Is especially prevalent in the African Great Lakes region. Swahili, known as Kiswahili by its speakers, is an official language of Tanzania , Kenya , Rwanda , the Democratic Republic of the Congo , is an official language of the African Union and is officially recognized as a lingua franca of the East African Community . It is one of the most commonly spoken languages in Africa, is
2548-462: Is most common, but some varieties have a single neutral demonstrative, while others distinguish three or more on the basis of distance, visibility or other properties. An extreme example is found in a variety spoken in Yongxin County , Jiangxi, where five grades of distance are distinguished. Attributive constructions typically have the form NP/VP + ATTR + NP, where the last noun phrase
2639-470: Is similarly used as a literary form by speakers of all varieties. Dialectologist Jerry Norman estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese. These varieties form a dialect continuum , in which differences in speech generally become more pronounced as distances increase, although there are also some sharp boundaries. However, the rate of change in mutual intelligibility varies immensely depending on region. For example,
2730-644: Is the fifth most spoken language in the world . Many Lusophones have advocated for greater recognition of their language, which is widely spoken across four continents: Portugal (original place) in Europe ; Brazil (the largest lusophone nation) in South America ; Angola , Mozambique , Cape Verde , Guinea-Bissau , Equatorial Guinea , São Tomé and Príncipe in Africa ; Timor-Leste and Macau in Asia . It
2821-456: Is the head and the attributive marker is usually a cognate of de 的 in the north or a classifier in the south. The latter pattern is also common in the languages of Southeast Asia. A few varieties in the Jiang–Huai, Wu, southern Min and Yue areas feature the old southern pattern of a zero attributive marker. Nominalization of verb phrases or predicates is achieved by following them with
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2912-566: Is to use dialect for the speech of a particular place (regardless of status), with regional groupings like Mandarin and Wu called dialect groups . Other linguists choose to refer to the major groups as languages. However, each of these groups contains mutually unintelligible varieties. ISO 639-3 and the Ethnologue assign language codes to each of the top-level groups listed above except Min and Pinghua, whose subdivisions are assigned five and two codes respectively. Some linguists refer to
3003-599: Is written in the Devanagari script and Urdu is written in the Nastaʿlīq script . Hindi has more than 550 million speakers in India alone, of whom 422 million are native, 98.2 million are second language speakers, and 31.2 million are third language speakers. Hindi is the lingua franca of the northern part of India , along with Pakistan (as Urdu), with its importance as a global language increasing day by day. In 2007, it
3094-477: The Organisation internationale de la francophonie which is exclusively French speaking and has 54 members. All other international bodies in commerce, transport and sport have tended to the adoption of one or a few languages as the means of communication. This is usually English and French (see: list of international organisations which have French as an official language ). Regional groups have adopted what
3185-764: The Arcadia Conference , the Cairo Conference , the Tehran Conference , the Yalta Conference and the Potsdam Conference . These conferences were meant to coordinate and plan the post-war world, including how to promote world peace in the aftermath of the war , how to facilitate global communication through an international auxiliary language (such as Esperanto) or an existing group of languages, and how to handle
3276-699: The French Empire . Spanish was selected due to the large number of first-language speakers in Latin America and the former Spanish Empire . There was an effort to select Esperanto as an additional language of the League, but that was rejected. In the 1940s, as the conclusion of World War II was nearing, the Allies held a multitude of conferences , including the London Declaration ,
3367-605: The General Assembly to add another official language, various individuals and states have informally raised the possibility of adding a new official language to accommodate more of the world's population. It has been noted that the six official languages are mostly spoken in the Northern Hemisphere and therefore many of the proposed languages are spoken in the Southern Hemisphere . Most of
3458-612: The Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area , Chinese varieties require an intervening classifier when a noun is preceded by a demonstrative or numeral. The inventory of classifiers tends to be larger in the south than in the north, where some varieties use only the general classifier cognate with ge 个 / 個 . First- and second-person pronouns are cognate across all varieties. For third-person pronouns, Jin, Mandarin, and Xiang varieties have cognate forms, but other varieties generally use forms that originally had
3549-853: The UN Security Council . Unofficially, the UN held its operations in English and French; however, the Charter provided (in Article 111 ) that the five languages be equally authoritative. In 1946, the first session of the United Nations General Assembly adopted rules of procedure concerning languages that purported to apply to "all the organs of the United Nations, other than the International Court of Justice ", formally setting out five (5) official languages and two (2) working languages (English and French). The following year,
3640-539: The United Nations Secretariat uses only two working languages : English and French. The six official languages spoken at the UN are the first or second language of 2.8 billion people on the planet, less than half of the world population. The six languages are official languages in almost two-thirds of United Nations member states (over 120 states). In 1920, the League of Nations was one of
3731-680: The decolonization of Africa and Asia . Additionally, these conferences led to the establishment of the United Nations as the successor of the League of Nations. In 1945, this culminated in the Charter of the UN , its constituent document signed at the San Francisco Conference , which did not expressly provide for official languages. The Charter was initially enacted in five languages (English, French, Mandarin, Russian, and Spanish). The United Nations selected these original five languages because in addition to being utilized by
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3822-852: The tree model to Chinese. Scholars account for the transitional nature of the central varieties in terms of wave models . Iwata argues that innovations have been transmitted from the north across the Huai River to the Lower Yangtze Mandarin area and from there southeast to the Wu area and westwards along the Yangtze River valley and thence to southwestern areas, leaving the hills of the southeast largely untouched. Some dialect boundaries , such as between Wu and Min, are particularly abrupt, while others, such as between Mandarin and Xiang or between Min and Hakka, are much less clearly defined. Several east-west isoglosses run along
3913-709: The 2010s and led to the United Nations news and media website ( https://news.un.org/en/ ) to begin including translations of its content into Hindi , Portuguese , and Swahili in 2018. In 2020, UN Portuguese Language Day was created in addition to the UN Language Day's associated with the six official languages. In June 2022, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution on multilingualism that encouraged UN organizations to disseminate important communication and messages in official as well as non-official languages, similar to
4004-463: The Beijing dialect distinguishes mā ( 妈 / 媽 'mother'), má ( 麻 'hemp'), mǎ ( 马 / 馬 'horse) and mà ( 骂 / 罵 'to scold'). The number of tonal contrasts varies between dialects, with Northern dialects tending to have fewer distinctions than Southern ones. Many dialects have tone sandhi , in which the pitch contour of a syllable is affected by the tones of adjacent syllables in
4095-596: The Economic and Social Council. In 2001, the United Nations drew criticism for relying too heavily on English, and not enough on the other five official languages and Spanish-speaking member nations formally brought this to the attention of the secretary-general. Additionally, there was a movement to consider adding official languages or creating a grouping of semi-official languages for languages with over 50 million speakers. This did not happen. Secretary General Kofi Annan responded to these criticisms that full parity of
4186-508: The GA. Thus all six official languages were also working languages. Arabic was made an official and working language of "the General Assembly and its Main Committees", whereas the other five languages had status in all GA committees and subcommittees (not just the main committees). The Arab members of the UN had agreed to pay the costs of implementing the resolution, for three years. In 1980,
4277-523: The General Assembly got rid of this final distinction, making Arabic an official and working language of all its committees and subcommittees, as of 1 January 1982. At the same time, the GA requested the Security Council to include Arabic among its official and working languages, and the Economic and Social Council to include Arabic among its official languages, by 1 January 1983. As of 1983,
4368-768: The Huai and Yangtze Rivers. A north-south barrier is formed by the Tianmu and Wuyi Mountains . Most assessments of mutual intelligibility of varieties of Chinese in the literature are impressionistic. Functional intelligibility testing is time-consuming in any language family, and usually not done when more than 10 varieties are to be compared. However, one 2009 study aimed to measure intelligibility between 15 Chinese provinces. In each province, 15 university students were recruited as speakers and 15 older rural inhabitants recruited as listeners. The listeners were then tested on their comprehension of isolated words and of particular words in
4459-477: The Latin alphabet supplanted Latin itself, and states eventually developed their own standard languages . In China, Literary Chinese was predominantly used in formal writing until the early 20th century. Written Chinese, read with different local pronunciations, continued to serve as a source of vocabulary for the local varieties. The new standard written vernacular Chinese , the counterpart of spoken Standard Chinese,
4550-840: The League of Nations, they were also the de facto official languages of the major Allied nations , including the Big Four : the British Empire , the United States , the Soviet Union and the Republic of China plus French which was the language of France and the French colonies . These nations: the UK, the US, the USSR, Republic of China, and France, became the five Permanent Members of
4641-447: The Security Council (like the General Assembly) recognized six official and working languages: Arabic, English, French, Mandarin, Russian, and Spanish. In the Economic and Social Council , as of 1992, there were six official languages (Arabic, English, French, Mandarin, Russian and Spanish) of which three were working languages (English, French, and Spanish). Later, Arabic , Mandarin , and Russian were added as working languages in
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#17327723006934732-414: The United Nations Office at Nairobi ), in addition to other major UN global offices in New York City , Vienna , and Geneva ). The media branch of the UN, UN News, already includes translations into Swahili. In September 2011, during a meeting with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon , Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan expressed a desire to see Turkish become an official UN language. In
4823-402: The United Nations to select a language to be official, a majority of the 193 members need to vote in favor of it. Afterward, it is up to the respective country (or countries) of the new language to help financially support translation and interpretation services. Five languages were chosen in 1946 as official languages around when the United Nations was founded: ( Modern Standard ) Arabic
4914-499: The United Nations" and requested that the secretary-general "ensure that vacancy announcements specified the need for either of the working languages of the Secretariat, unless the functions of the post required a specific working language". In 2008 and 2009, resolutions of the General Assembly have urged the Secretariat to respect the parity of the six official languages, especially in the dissemination of public information. The secretary-general's most recent report on multilingualism
5005-435: The coastal area from Zhejiang to eastern Guangdong . Standard Chinese takes its phonology from the Beijing dialect, with vocabulary from the Mandarin group and grammar based on literature in the modern written vernacular . It is one of the official languages of China and one of the four official languages of Singapore . It has become a pluricentric language , with differences in pronunciation and vocabulary between
5096-517: The context of sentences spoken by speakers from all 15 of the provinces surveyed. The results demonstrated significant levels of unintelligibility between areas, even within the Mandarin group. In a few cases, listeners understood fewer than 70% of words spoken by speakers from the same province, indicating significant differences between urban and rural varieties. As expected from the wide use of Standard Chinese , speakers from Beijing were understood more than speakers from elsewhere. The scores supported
5187-719: The dialects of the Southern zone are derived from a standard used in the Yangtze valley during the Han dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD), which he called Old Southern Chinese, while the Central zone was a transitional area of dialects that were originally of southern type, but overlain with centuries of Northern influence. Hilary Chappell proposed a refined model, dividing Norman's Northern zone into Northern and Southwestern areas, and his Southern zone into Southeastern (Min) and Far Southern (Yue and Hakka) areas, with Pinghua transitional between Southwestern and Far Southern areas. The long history of migration of peoples and interaction between speakers of different dialects makes it difficult to apply
5278-464: The direct object and southern varieties using the reverse order. All varieties have copular sentences of the form NP1 + COP + NP2, though the copula varies. Most Yue and Hakka varieties use a form cognate with xì 係 'to connect'. All other varieties use a form cognate with shì 是 , which was a demonstrative in Classical Chinese but began to be used as a copula from the Han period. All varieties form existential sentences with
5369-421: The first international institutions to promote the concept of international official languages to foster communication and spur global diplomacy in the aftermath of the brutality of World War I . The League of Nations selected English, French, and Spanish as official languages with English and French being the working languages . English and French were chosen due to the global reach of the British Empire and
5460-419: The greatest differences in their phonology , and to a lesser extent in vocabulary and syntax . Southern varieties tend to have fewer initial consonants than northern and central varieties, but more often preserve the Middle Chinese final consonants. All have phonemic tones , with northern varieties tending to have fewer distinctions than southern ones. Many have tone sandhi , with the most complex patterns in
5551-407: The inclusion of Hindi as an official language of the UN. Indonesian is the official and national language of Indonesia . It is a standardized variety of Malay , an Austronesian language that has been used as a lingua franca in the multilingual Indonesian archipelago for centuries. Indonesia is the fourth most populous nation in the world, with over 279 million inhabitants of which
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#17327723006935642-403: The languages previously dominant in these areas, and forms of the language spoken in different regions began to diverge. During periods of political unity there was a tendency for states to promote the use of a standard language across the territory they controlled, in order to facilitate communication between people from different regions. The first evidence of dialectal variation is found in
5733-500: The literary standard and each other, producing dialect continua with mutually unintelligible varieties separated by long distances. However, a major difference between China and Western Europe is the historical reestablishment of political unity in 6th century China by the Sui dynasty , a unity that has persisted with relatively brief interludes until the present day. Meanwhile, Europe remained politically decentralized, and developed numerous independent states. Vernacular writing using
5824-432: The local varieties as languages, numbering in the hundreds. The Chinese term fāngyán 方言 , literally 'place speech', was the title of the first work of Chinese dialectology in the Han dynasty , and has had a range of meanings in the millennia since. It is used for any regional subdivision of Chinese, from the speech of a village to major branches such as Mandarin and Wu. Linguists writing in Chinese often qualify
5915-428: The lower-pitched allophones occur with initial voiced consonants. (Traditional Chinese classification nonetheless counts these as different tones.) Most Wu dialects retain the tone categories of Middle Chinese, but in Shanghainese several of these have merged. Many Chinese varieties exhibit tone sandhi , in which the realization of a tone varies depending on the context of the syllable. For example, in Standard Chinese
6006-480: The main routes of migration and communication in southern China. The first scientific classifications, based primarily on the evolution of Middle Chinese voiced initials, were produced by Wang Li in 1936 and Li Fang-Kuei in 1937, with minor modifications by other linguists since. The conventionally accepted set of seven dialect groups first appeared in the second edition (1980) of Yuan Jiahua 's dialectology handbook: The Language Atlas of China (1987) follows
6097-662: The majority speak Indonesian, which makes it one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. Indonesian is considered the 11th most commonly spoken language by Ethnologue , as of 2022. Indonesian is also prominent on the internet, with one estimate ranking it sixth by number of Internet users. As a standardised register of Malay, Indonesian is also mutually intelligible with the Malay spoken in Malaysia , Brunei , and Singapore . The Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture (Kemendikbud) has increasingly promoted Indonesian as an international language, with one targets aiming for official UN language status by 2045. Portuguese
6188-423: The media branch of the United Nations, UN News ( https://news.un.org ), includes website translations into Hindi, Portuguese, and Swahili in addition to the 6 official languages. Other UN documents and websites are also translated into Bengali (referred to as Bangla), French Creole , Indonesian / Malay , Turkish , and Urdu , but not on an official or consistent basis. While there are no formal proposals before
6279-451: The principal UN organs. For example, the General Conference of UNESCO has ten official languages including Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, and Portuguese. The Universal Postal Union has just one official language, French. IFAD has four official languages: Arabic, English, French, and Spanish. The next largest international grouping after the UN is the Commonwealth of Nations which is exclusively English speaking and has 56 members, and
6370-474: The proposed languages are world languages and rank as Level 0 (International) on the Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (EGIDS) and tend to be lingua francas that are either supra-regional or supercentral according to the global language system theory. Bengali is the fifth most spoken native language in the world , with over 237 million native speakers, after Mandarin , Spanish , English and Hindi and additional 41 million speak it as
6461-458: The same term [REDACTED] This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the title Fangyan . If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article. Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fangyan&oldid=1134314696 " Category : Disambiguation pages Hidden categories: Articles containing Chinese-language text Short description
6552-406: The second session of the General Assembly adopted permanent rules of procedure, Resolution 173 (II). The part of those rules relating to language closely followed the 1946 rules, except that the 1947 rules did not purport to apply to other UN organs, just the General Assembly. Meanwhile, a proposal had been in the works to add Spanish as a third working language in addition to English and French. This
6643-647: The semi-official policies proposed to Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon . These languages included Bengali , Hindi , Persian , Portuguese , Swahili , and Urdu and the GA recognizes the efforts of the UN to use non-official languages too. In July 2022, UN Swahili Language Day was created. Portuguese and Swahili are the only non-official UN languages to have a UN Language Day. League of Nations Official + Working Languages League of Nations Official Languages UN Official + Working Languages UN Official Languages Translation of UN News Website Available Translation Available + UN Language Day dedicated As of June 2018,
6734-427: The six official languages was unachievable within current budgetary restraints, but he nevertheless attached great importance to improving the linguistic balance and worked to increase parity between the existing 6 official languages. On 8 June 2007, resolutions concerning human resources management at the UN, the General Assembly had emphasized "the paramount importance of the equality of the six official languages of
6825-542: The six official languages. The UN provides simultaneous interpretation from any official language into the other five official languages, via the United Nations Interpretation Service . The six official languages are also used for the dissemination of official documents. Generally, the texts in each of the six languages are equally authoritative. Most UN councils use all six languages as official and working languages; however, as of 2023
6916-527: The south, and vice versa. The usual unmarked word order in Chinese varieties is subject–verb–object , with other orders used for emphasis or contrast. Modifiers usually precede the word they modify, so that adjectives precede nouns. Instances in which the modifier follows the head are mainly found in the south, and are attributed to substrate influences from languages formerly dominant in the area, especially Kra–Dai languages . Nouns in Chinese varieties are generally not marked for number. As in languages of
7007-433: The split of Middle Chinese rising and departing tones merged, leaving four tones. Furthermore, final stop consonants disappeared in most Mandarin dialects, and such syllables were distributed amongst the four remaining tones in a manner that is only partially predictable. In Wu, voiced obstruents were retained, and the tone split never became phonemic: the higher-pitched allophones occur with initial voiceless consonants, and
7098-535: The stops have merged as a final glottal stop , while in most northern varieties they have disappeared. In Mandarin dialects final /m/ has merged with /n/ , while some central dialects have a single nasal coda, in some cases realized as a nasalization of the vowel. All varieties of Chinese, like neighbouring languages in the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area , have phonemic tones . Each syllable may be pronounced with between three and seven distinct pitch contours, denoting different morphemes. For example,
7189-405: The term to distinguish different levels of classification. All these terms have customarily been translated into English as dialect , a practice that has been criticized as confusing. The neologisms regionalect and topolect have been proposed as alternative renderings of fāngyán . The usual unit of analysis is the syllable, traditionally analysed as consisting of an initial consonant ,
7280-591: The texts of the Spring and Autumn period (771–476 BC). Although the Zhou royal domain was no longer politically powerful, its speech still represented a model for communication across China. The Fangyan (early 1st century AD) is devoted to differences in vocabulary between regions. Commentaries from the Eastern Han (25–220 AD) provide significant evidence of local differences in pronunciation. The Qieyun ,
7371-497: The three forms. Standard Chinese is much more widely studied than any other variety of Chinese, and its use is now dominant in public life on the mainland. Outside of China and Taiwan, the only varieties of Chinese commonly taught in university courses are Standard Chinese and Cantonese . Local varieties from different areas of China are often mutually unintelligible, differing at least as much as different Romance languages and perhaps even as much as Indo-European languages as
7462-507: The three forms. It is also one of the six official languages of the United Nations . At the end of the 2nd millennium BC, a form of Chinese was spoken in a compact area along the lower Wei River and middle Yellow River . Use of this language expanded eastwards across the North China Plain into Shandong , and then southwards into the Yangtze River valley and the hills of south China. Chinese eventually replaced many of
7553-481: The varieties of Mandarin spoken in all three northeastern Chinese provinces are mutually intelligible, but in the province of Fujian, where Min varieties predominate, the speech of neighbouring counties or even villages may be mutually unintelligible. Proportions of first-language speakers Classifications of Chinese varieties in the late 19th century and early 20th century were based on impressionistic criteria. They often followed river systems, which were historically
7644-585: The vocabulary of the Bai language of Yunnan appears to be related to Chinese words, though many are clearly loans from the last few centuries. Some scholars have suggested that it represents a very early branching from Chinese, while others argue that it is a more distantly related Sino-Tibetan language overlaid with two millennia of loans. Jerry Norman classified the traditional seven dialect groups into three zones: Northern (Mandarin), Central (Wu, Gan, and Xiang) and Southern (Hakka, Yue, and Min). He argued that
7735-596: The world , after Mandarin , Spanish , and English . It is one of the official languages of India and Fiji (as Fiji Hindi ) and its related dialects are still being spoken by small minorities in Nepal . It is mutually intelligible to a high degree with Urdu which is official and spoken in Pakistan and together they are often considered the same language, referred to as Hindustani or Hindi–Urdu. Although very similar verbally, they do have different written scripts; Hindi
7826-403: The year, one for each official language, with the goal of celebrating linguistic diversity and learning about the importance of cross-cultural communication. In 2020 Portuguese Language Day was added and in 2022 Swahili Language Day was added. The days and their historical significance are: UN independent agencies have their own sets of official languages that sometimes are different from that of
7917-484: Was adopted in Resolution 262 (III), passed on 11 December 1948. In 1968, Russian was added as a working language of the General Assembly so that, of the GA's five official languages, four (all but Mandarin) were working. In 1973, the General Assembly made Mandarin a working language and switched to using simplified Chinese characters . They also added Arabic as both an official language and working language of
8008-542: Was in addition to Tharoor's role as under-secretary-general for communications and public information, head of the Department of Public Information . The current Coordinator for Multilingualism is Catherine Pollard of Guyana . She replaces Kiyo Akasaka of Japan , who was also under-secretary-general for communications and public information. In 2010, the UN's Department of Public Information announced an initiative of six "language days" to be observed throughout
8099-503: Was issued on 4 October 2010. In response, on 19 July 2011, the General Assembly adopted Resolution No. A/RES/65/311 on multilingualism, calling on the secretary-general, once again, to ensure that all six official languages are given equally favourable working conditions and resources. The resolution noted with concern that the multilingual development of the UN website had improved at a much slower rate than expected. The drive to improve parity and focus on multilingualism continued throughout
8190-513: Was later voted to be an additional official language in 1973. These languages are used at meetings of various UN organs , particularly the General Assembly (Article 51 of its Rules of Procedure), the Economic and Social Council and the Security Council (Article 41 of its Rules of Procedure). Each representative of a country may speak in any one of these six languages or may speak in any language and provide interpretation into one of
8281-487: Was reported that the government of India would "make immediate diplomatic moves to seek the status of an official language for Hindi at the United Nations". According to a 2009 press release from its Ministry of External Affairs , the Government of India has been "working actively" to have Hindi recognized as an official language of the UN. In 2015, Nepal 's Vice President Parmananda Jha stated his firm support for
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