This article is about the Sinitic chinese bun recipe 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. Historically, the Chinese language has spread to its neighbors through a variety of means. Northern Vietnam was incorporated into the Han empire in 111 BCE, marking the beginning of a period of Chinese control that ran almost continuously for a millennium. Although they used Chinese solely for written communication, each country had its own tradition of reading texts aloud, the so-called Sino-Xenic pronunciations. Borrowed Chinese morphemes have been used extensively in all these languages to coin compound words for new concepts, in a similar way to the use of Latin and Ancient Greek roots in European languages.

Jerry Norman estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese. Until the late 20th century, Chinese emigrants to Southeast Asia and North America came from southeast coastal areas, where Min, Hakka, and Yue dialects are spoken. Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect, the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The governments of both China and Taiwan intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. In China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature.

Due to their traditional cultural ties to Guangdong province and colonial histories, Cantonese is used as the standard variant of Chinese in Hong Kong and Macau instead. Because of the difficulties involved in determining the difference between language and dialect, other terms have been proposed. Most Chinese people consider the spoken varieties as one single language because speakers share a common culture and history, as well as a shared national identity and a common written form. Syllables in the Chinese languages have some unique characteristics.