Written Chinese

Written Chinese (Chinese: 中文; pinyin: Zhōngwén) comprises Chinese characters used to represent the Chinese languages. Chinese characters do not constitute an alphabet or a compact syllabary. Rather, the writing system is logosyllabic: a character generally corresponds to one syllable of spoken Chinese, and may be either be a word on its own, or a part of a polysyllabic word. The characters themselves are often composed of parts that may represent physical objects, abstract notions, or pronunciation. Literacy requires the memorization of a great number of characters: college-educated Chinese speakers know about 4,000. The large number of Chinese characters has in part led to the adoption of Western alphabets or other complementary systems as auxiliary means of representing Chinese.

Various current Chinese characters have been traced back to the late Shang dynasty c. 1200–1050 BCE, but the process of creating characters is thought to have begun some centuries earlier in the Late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, c. 2500–2000 BCE. After a period of variation and evolution, Chinese characters were standardized under the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE). Over the millennia, these characters have evolved into well-developed styles of Chinese calligraphy. As the varieties of Chinese diverged, a situation of diglossia developed, with speakers of mutually unintelligible varieties able to communicate through writing using Classical Chinese. In the early 20th century, Classical Chinese was replaced in this role by written vernacular Chinese, corresponding to Standard Chinese, a form based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. Although most other varieties of Chinese are not written, there are traditions of written Cantonese, written Shanghainese and written Hokkien, among others.

Some Chinese characters have been adopted into writing systems of other neighbouring East Asian languages, but are currently used only to some extent in Japanese and to a lesser extent in Korean, as Vietnamese is now written using Latin alphabetic script.