Posted
on April 20, 2015
The
United Nations has two working languages, English and French, and six
official languages, Arabic, English, French, Russian, Spanish,
and Chinese.
In
2010 UNESCO established a language day for each of the six official
languages. These language days celebrate multilingualism (speaking
more than one language) and cultural diversity. They are supposed to
entertain and inform.
Today
was chosen to celebrate Chinese to pay tribute to the legendary
figure Cangjie, who was supposed to have invented Chinese characters
around 5,000 years ago. The legend states that the Yellow Emperor was
dissatisfied with the rope-tying method of keeping records and asked
Canjie to create characters for writing.
“ The Chinese language” is actually a group of languages that, according to some linguists, are even more different from one another than French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese are! Mandarin is by far the most spoken (and, I assume, the one that the U.N. Celebrates), with around 960 native speakers. Here are a few other Chinese languages:
Wu – around 80 million native speakers
Min – around 70 million native speakers
Yue – around 60 million native speakers
– Yue includes Cantonese
Altogether,
with between 7 to 13 different forms of Chinese and a larger number
of dialects, about 1.2 billion people (about 16% of the world's
population) speak Chinese as their native language.
Chinese
speakers are spread out all over Asia and the world, with significant
numbers in China, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, the U.S., Canada,
Indonesia, Philippines, and elsewhere.
Chinese
is tonal. That means that a word like “ma” can have multiple
meanings depending on the tone, the high or low pitch, or the change
of pitch. Check out this Introduction to Tones!
Also
on this date:
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ahead:
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out my Pinterest boards for:
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