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The generic term "Chinese" refers to several languages of the Sino-Tibetan family. With more than 1,200 million native speakers, it is the largest linguistic community in the world.
The origins of Chinese literature date back several thousand years. The language is one of six official languages of the United Nations.
As a spoken language (yu), the differences between the dialects are comparable to those existing between Romance languages such as French and Spanish, some dialects being mutually inintelligible. The most important group of spoken dialects is Mandarin, which comprises dialects spoken in northern and southwestern China. Its standardized form is called Putonghua ("common speech") in the People's Republic of China (Continental China) and Guoyu ("national language") in the Republic of China (Taiwan). Today, most educated people in the P.R. of China and in Taiwan speak Mandarin, at least as a second language.
As a written language (wen), Chinese may be regarded as a single language, since formal texts can be read without much difficulty by speakers of any dialect. Note that this is not always the case when it comes to texts written in a colloquial register (in particular, written colloquial Cantonese is largely unreadable for speakers of Mandarin).
Chinese is written in its own, quite complex script.
Chinese is an analytical language. Most words in modern Chinese are multisyllable, and usually each syllable matches one character. Its is a tone language, which means that tones or pitches are used to distinguish words (more specifically, syllables) from each other. Because of the difficulty of transcribing consonant clusters into Chinese, it is more common to coin new words than to incorporate foreign words directly.
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