What is the common language in China?

Mandarin and standardized Chinese characters.

The Law of the State on the Common Language and Characters clearly stipulates that Putonghua is the common language and characters in China, and standardized Chinese characters are the common characters in China. This standard is common throughout the country, including ethnic autonomous areas and areas where ethnic minorities live in concentrated communities. Common language, a term in the field of literature, is a language stipulated by the state. The common language in China is Mandarin and standard Chinese characters.

Chinese is different from Mandarin. The purpose of popularizing Putonghua is to eliminate dialect barriers and facilitate social communication. As one of the working languages of the United Nations, Putonghua has become an important bridge for cultural exchanges between China and foreign countries.

Standardized Chinese characters refer to simplified Chinese characters and inherited Chinese characters officially published by the state in the form of Simplified Chinese Characters List and General Standardized Chinese Characters List. Traditional Chinese characters and variant Chinese characters belong to nonstandard Chinese characters.

The development of Chinese characters:

The emergence of Chinese character-making system can be traced back to the period of the Yellow Emperor, which is what we often call Cangjie character-making. According to legend, Cang Xie is a historian of Xuanyuan Huangdi. He wants to collect and sort out the graphic symbols that have evolved for a long time, and finally standardize and systematize them. In any case, the first merit of Chinese characters belongs to him. It has laid a solid foundation for the development of Chinese civilization, so it has also been honored as a "sage of word creation" by later generations.

What we now know as "Oracle Bone Inscriptions" refers to the Chinese characters carved on the bones of tortoise shells in Shang Dynasty, also known as "Wen Qi". These handed down scripts were mainly used for divination and recording at that time.

In the Shang Dynasty, Oracle Bone Inscriptions may not be the main way of recording, and there may be other characters carved on wooden boards or bamboo slips, but it is too old to preserve Oracle Bone Inscriptions, which is not perishable. There were few words engraved on metal utensils, because metal was scarce at that time and did not become a common carrier of words.

With the development of smelting technology and the progress of civilization, people began to carve words on metal utensils. Maybe people in the Zhou Dynasty felt that lettering on Oracle Bone Inscriptions was not very elegant. At that time, a large number of bronzes appeared, and bronzes were often used to worship ancestors. Metal began to be the carrier of words, but at the same time, words were also engraved on Oracle Bone Inscriptions.

Because the handed down characters are more common in Zhong Ding, it is called "Zhong Dingwen"; Because it is engraved on bronze, it is also called "bronze inscription". The bronze inscriptions in this period also became the representative of the characters in the Zhou Dynasty.

Like Shang Dynasty, metal was probably not a writing tool in Zhou people in this period. According to Oracle Bone Inscriptions's analysis, historians speculate that the earliest bamboo slips appeared not later than the Shang Dynasty, and the mainstream writing carrier in this period should be bamboo slips. Although bamboo slips are relatively easy to preserve, they can't stand the ravages of time. The earliest bamboo slips in existence are those unearthed from the tomb of Ceng Houyi (Ceng Houyi, the monarch of the vassal state in the early Warring States), whose main record is funeral.

During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, the rule of the Zhou royal family weakened, the society changed dramatically, and the gap between countries gradually emerged because of the war. The warlord regime also simplified, changed and diversified Chinese characters.

Reference to the above contents: Baidu Encyclopedia-People's Republic of China (PRC) * * * and the National Common Language and Character Law.