To find their place in society, it is important for a person to maintain communication, exchange ideas, express their desires and leave feedback. To do this, we use our main tool - language. There are hundreds of different languages in the world. Each of them has its own story, background, melody and rhythm. Many of us have ever wondered what are the most popular and widely spoken languages in the world? This collection will help you learn about them.
Mandarin
Mandarin is spoken by almost a billion people and is one of the 6 official languages of the UN. There are 1200 million variants of this language. It is spoken in northern and southwestern China. Mandarin belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family. Despite its position at the top of the list, it is by no means an easy language. Mandarin has several dialects, and each has many tones, resulting in each region having its own distinct variant of the language. 
English language
Believe it or not, English is at the top of the list of the world's most widely spoken and popular languages. It follows immediately after Mandarin, occupying the 2nd position. English is spoken by more than 430 million people worldwide. It is also one of the six official languages of the UN. pertaining to Indo-European language family, this Germanic language is the global lingua franca. Unlike Mandarin, which is mainly spoken in a specific geographic region, English language is the first language in many countries of the world. It is distributed across all continents and is used by almost a billion people as a second language. One way or another, many people at least partially know this common language. 
Spanish
Spanish is also on the UN list of official languages. He dropped from 2nd position to 3rd only recently. Spanish is spoken by over 410 million people. This Romance language was born from the Indo-European family and is used as mother tongue in Latin America and Equatorial Guinea, in addition to Spain. Spanish is so popular and widespread that many Spanish words are also used in English. 
Hindi
Hindi is one of the official languages of India. It is a Sanskritized branch of the Hindustani language with Indo-Aryan and Indo-European roots. It is spoken by millions of native Indians. Hindi is very similar to Urdu, the native language of Pakistan. A large number of Hindi dialects are spread throughout India, with 180 million speakers of this language. The Hindi language is also spreading through Bollywood films, which use it as the lingua franca. 
Bengali
Bengali, or Bangla, is the native language of Bangladesh, as well as West Bengal, southern Assam and Tripura in India. National anthems Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka, as well as national songs India - it was all written in Bengali. This language has a long history of development from Indo-Aryan dialects and Sanskrit. While Bangla still retains originality, it has also absorbed some of the words. foreign languages. Some prominent literary works written in Bengali, including works by Rabindranath Tagore. Approximately 210 million people speak it, making Bengali one of the world's most popular languages. 
Portuguese
This Romance language with Indo-European roots is spoken by more than 220 million people. Portuguese is the official language in Brazil, Mozambique and is spoken in several other places. Portuguese is spoken in many countries around the world. 
Russian language
Russian is in 7th place in the list of the most popular and widespread languages in the world. This Slavic language of Indo-European origin is one of the six official languages of the UN. Russian is spoken by more than 150 million people, not only in Russian Federation, but also in other countries of the former USSR, the Baltic countries and even in the United States. A huge number of outstanding works of literature and films have been created in Russian. 
Urdu
Considered one of the most harmonious languages in the world, Urdu has common roots with the Hindi language, which is spoken by more than 100 million people, mainly in Pakistan and in 6 states of India. The language bears a close resemblance to Hindi and is associated with Muslims. Urdu also belongs to the languages of the Indo-European and Indo-Aryan families. Poetry and songs in this language are revered in all corners of the world. 
Indonesian
This Austronesian language, spoken in Malaysia and Indonesia, belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian family. It is spoken by over 160 million people and is the official language of Indonesia. 
Japanese
Japanese completes the list of the most popular languages in the world. Approximately 125 million people speak this language. It is used mainly in Japan, but also in some other parts of the world where Japanese immigrants live.
Languages are constantly evolving, absorbing new words, phrases and style from other languages, especially English. But in essence, each language has its own story, representing it in its own unique way.
The term "Chinese" has many meanings. The Chinese language (or Chinese languages) refers to one of the two main branches of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The ambiguity of the term is due to the fact that on a large territory occupied by the so-called. "sinitic" languages, used large group various dialects of Chinese. These dialects vary quite a lot even within a short distance from each other; nevertheless, their genetic connection is unequivocally traced. Therefore, in linguistics, the question of whether these varieties of Chinese are languages or dialects remains open.
Scope of use
An early informal oral form of communication ( guanhua) on a northern Chinese basis presumably began to take shape with the transfer of the Chinese capital in 1266 to the site of modern Beijing (then called Zhongdu, then Dadu) before the start of the Yuan Dynasty. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the official standard, which in 1909 received the name " goyu" (from the Japanese term " kokugo(国語)" - "state language") and later renamed Putonghua in the People's Republic of China, began to include not only the written, but also the oral norm.
To determine the degree of proficiency in Putonghua, since 1994, the PRC has introduced the Putonghua Proficiency Exam (Chinese exercise 普通话水平测试, pinyin: pǔtōnghuà shuǐpíng cèshì (PSC)), which quickly gained popularity as China increasingly urbanized. There are several levels of Mandarin proficiency assigned after passing the exam:
However, many Chinese are able to understand Mandarin to some degree without even being able to speak it.
Genealogical and areal information
Chinese (Putonghua) belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family; in a broad sense, Chinese is one of its two main branches, which is sometimes called "sinitic". It is mainly distributed in the Beijing region, the capital of the PRC, but is also used throughout China as the state language. In addition, it is one of the 4 official languages of Singapore.
Sociolinguistic Information
Chinese in a broad sense holds the record for the number of speakers in the world: 1,074,000,000 speakers in the PRC, among which 896,000,000 speak it as their mother tongue (70% of them speak the standard dialect) and 178,000,000 as a second language. The total number of speakers in the world is 1,107,162,230 people.
With a large number of hardly mutually intelligible dialects, Standard Chinese is a supra-dialectal variant of the language, the state language of the People's Republic of China and the language of interethnic communication among the peoples of China. It is used in all spheres of life in China, and is one of the official languages of the UN.
Based on the Chinese language, there is a Russian-Chinese pidgin - the so-called. "Kyakhta language", which borrows Russian vocabulary, but uses the rules of Chinese grammar.
Typological parameters
Type (degree of freedom) of expression of grammatical meanings
For minor members of a sentence in Chinese, a strict word order is fixed:
It is worth noting that word order is tied not so much to the grammatical or syntactic characteristics of secondary members, but to their semantics:
Language features
Graphic
Speakers of all dialects of the Chinese language use hieroglyphic (ideographic) logosyllabic writing (a way of graphic representation of sounding speech, in which each sign conveys one syllable), developed from pictographic signs. There is a romanization system for putonghua - pinyin, as well as a system for transcribing Chinese into Russian - the Palladium system.
Phonological
In Mandarin, depending on the nature of the change in the frequency of the main voice tone over time, 4 tones are distinguished: 1st ( smooth), 2nd ( ascending), 3rd ( descending-ascending) and 4th ( descending) tones (in the practice of teaching Chinese in Russian schools they are sometimes described as melodious, asking, satisfied and abusive intonation). Tone acts as one of the main distinctive sound means to distinguish between lexical meanings. Examples: 失 shī("to lose") - 十 shi("ten") - 史 shǐ("history") - 事 shim("a business"); 媽 ma("mother") - 麻 ma("hemp") - 马 mǎ("horse") - 骂 ma("scold") .
Statistical studies have shown that the functional "load" of tones in Mandarin is about as high as that of vowels.
Putonghua is characterized by combinatorial transformations of tones that occur during word formation when syllables with a certain tone are combined: tones can change or neutralize. Such transformations can be both regular and irregular. So, the syllable 一 yī"one" in an isolated position is pronounced under the 1st tone, but in a phrase before syllables of the 1st, 2nd or 3rd tone it is pronounced under the 4th tone (for example, 一 yī + 年 nian goes into yinian), and before the 4th tone syllable - under the 2nd (for example, 一 yī + 定 dìng goes into yidìng) .
Morphological
Syntactic
Count words
A feature of the structure of the noun phrase in Mandarin is the presence of counter words, which necessarily appear before the noun when combined with a numeral, demonstrative pronoun or a quantifier (with the exception of cases where a noun denotes a measure of something; such a noun may well itself act as a classifier). The choice of a classifier is determined by the noun itself; there are several dozen classifiers in the language.
Types of classifiers:
- counting words (measures of length, weight, etc.; collective ( aggregate) - stack, herd; "containers" - box, bottle);
- abstract ("several");
- body parts (with a meaning like "___, full of something"), etc.
Classifier ge refers to noun phrases denoting people, but in modern Mandarin ge is moving towards the status of a universal classifier, and many speakers use it for other non-human noun phrases.
Topic-comment structure
One of characteristic features The syntax of the Chinese language is that, in addition to a number of traditional syntactic roles (subject, direct object, etc.), communicative units are distinguished in the sentence structure - topic and comment.
Phrase particles
In Chinese, as in an analytic language, particles are widely used to express morphological (for example, verbal form), syntactic (for example, belonging - see the section “Marking locus in a possessive noun phrase”), discursive and other meanings.
Among the particles of interest are the so-called "sentence-ending".
Notes
- BBC Russian service will transfer broadcasting to the Internet
- Zavyalova O. I. Chinese language // Great Russian Encyclopedia. T. 14. - M .: BRE Publishing House, 2009.
In the East it is a dark matter or when the Chinese language was created. Ch.2 (Mandarin)
Officially, China is home to 56 nationalities, each with its own language and culture. The vast majority of the population, approximately 91 percent, is attributed to the Han nation - actually Chinese. The Han language is very diverse. It consists of many hundreds of mutually incomprehensible dialects.
The Han dialects differ from each other much more than, say, the individual languages of the Romance group. In general, they began to study Chinese (Han) dialects only in the 30s of the 20th century. And by the beginning of the 60s, they were somehow systematized and classified with grief in half.
According to modern ideas, Han (Chinese proper) is divided into ten dialect groups: North Chinese dialects (in Western terminology "Mandarin dialects"), dialects: Wu, Gan, Xiang, Ming, Hakka, Yue, Jin, Huizhou, Pinghua.
The Ming dialect group is considered the most diverse. Unlike other dialect groups, which consist of many mutually incomprehensible dialects functioning in each district, within a given group, many hundreds of mutually incomprehensible dialects function in each village.
The work, however, is far from complete. Some so-called "areas of great linguistic diversity" have not yet been studied, the dialects existing there have not been described. Well, some dialects, such as Danzhou and Shaoju Tuhua, defy classification.
In general, China is a country of gigantic linguistic diversity. As mentioned in the first part, until 1909, formally official language om in the Qin Empire was the Manchu language. For the first time after the conquest of China by the Manchus, all official documents of the empire were written in this language. However, its use gradually decreased, and already in the 18-19 centuries, few people understood the Manchu language even among the courtiers.
So what language was used to manage the vast empire? With the help of the so-called "Mandarin" language. The name comes from the Portuguese word "mandarin", meaning officials Chinese empire. The Chinese themselves used the term "guhua" to refer to this language, literally "the language of officials."
(Mandarin official)
The "bureaucratic language" in the Chinese Empire did not have any official status. However, his knowledge was necessary for the promotion of officials in career ladder. The language did not have firm rules. According to legend, in 1728, the Yongzhen Emperor, due to a specific pronunciation, did not understand anything from the reports of officials from the provinces of Guangdong and Fujian, and issued a decree on the creation of "academies of correct pronunciation." However, these academies did not last long.
Traditionally, "Mandarin" was based on the dialect of the city of Nanjing. However, in the 19th century, elements from the capital Beijing dialect, which gradually came to the forefront, penetrated into it. However, according to some reports, as early as the beginning of the 20th century, the status of "Nanjing Mandarin" was higher than that of "Beijing Mandarin". With the help of the "Mandarin language" office work was carried out, officials from different provinces of the country communicated in it. To ordinary people even from neighboring Chinese provinces it was impossible to communicate with each other.
In 1909, at sunset imperial dynasty Qing, declared the state language "guoyui", literally "national language", had yet to be created. About the creation national language' will be discussed in the next section.
(to be continued)