Chinese

Chinese, or the Sinitic languages, is the branch of the Sino-Tibetan family spoken across China proper, comprising hundreds of local varieties that are often mutually unintelligible. The greatest diversity is packed into the mountainous southeast. At the end of the second millennium BC this speech was confined to the middle Yellow River and lower Wei valleys; it then spread across the North China Plain and into the Yangtze basin and the southern hills.

Its earliest records are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from about 1250 BC, followed by Zhou bronze texts and the Confucian and other classics that fixed Literary Chinese as the common written standard.

The Qieyun rime dictionary of 601 codified the literary pronunciation later called Middle Chinese, while under the Ming and Qing dynasties officials conducted administration in a Mandarin-based common speech known as Guanhua.