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Fourteen words that helped define the year. Learn a new word every day. This article is about the Sinitic languages excluding the Greater Bai languages. For other languages in China, see Languages of China. For the standard language, see Standard Chinese. This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources.

Regions with a native Chinese-speaking majority. Regions where Chinese is not native but an official or educational language. This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Chinese languages form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be variants of a single language. The earliest Chinese written records are Shang dynasty-era oracle bone inscriptions, which can be dated to 1250 BCE.

The phonetic categories of Old Chinese can be reconstructed from the rhymes of ancient poetry. After applying the linguistic comparative method to the database of comparative linguistic data developed by Laurent Sagart in 2019 to identify sound correspondences and establish cognates, phylogenetic methods are used to infer relationships among these languages and estimate the age of their origin and homeland. The first written records appeared over 3,000 years ago during the Shang dynasty. As the language evolved over this period, the various local varieties became mutually unintelligible. In reaction, central governments have repeatedly sought to promulgate a unified standard. 1250 BCE in the late Shang dynasty.

Its spoken varieties have evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Up to the early 20th century, most Chinese people only spoke their local variety. For most of this period, this language was a koiné based on dialects spoken in the Nanjing area, though not identical to any single dialect. After much dispute between proponents of northern and southern dialects and an abortive attempt at an artificial pronunciation, the National Language Unification Commission finally settled on the Beijing dialect in 1932. The national language is now used in education, the media, and formal situations in both Mainland China and Taiwan.