What are the characteristics of the study of ancient and new generation minority languages in China?

Language is an important feature of a nation. There are many nationalities in the west of China, so there are many languages, with the following characteristics:

1. More than 100 languages belong to the four major language families.

Every nation must communicate internally and with other nations through language, so every nation has at least one language, and some can speak several languages. Hui people in China use Chinese, while Manchu people used to have their own language, and then they gradually used Chinese. The other 53 ethnic minorities all have their own languages. When New China was founded, 56 ethnic groups in China actually used more than 100 languages.

According to the characteristics of languages, languages can be divided into different "language families". More than 100 languages spoken by ethnic minorities in western China belong to 4 language families.

The first is the Sino-Tibetan language family. This is the language with the largest number of speakers among the four major language families in China. China is the hometown of Sino-Tibetan language family, and both Chinese and Tibetan belong to Sino-Tibetan language family. The language used by most people in China belongs to Sino-Tibetan language family.

The second is Altaic language family. This is the second largest language family in China, with 3 language families and 18 languages. The languages of this language family are mainly distributed in Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Gansu and Qinghai provinces.

The third is the South Asian language family. China's Wa, De 'ang and Brown languages belonging to the South Asian language family are all distributed in the southwest of Yunnan Province.

The fourth is the Indo-European language family. The languages belonging to the Indo-European family are Russian and Tajik, and a few people say that they are all distributed in Xinjiang.

In addition, the family of Beijing dialect in China has not been finally determined.

The languages of some ethnic groups are different due to different regions, and there are "dialects". For example, there are three dialects in Tibetan; Miao languages in Hunan, Sichuan, Guizhou and Yunnan all have their own dialect characteristics. The number of words in Yi language is different in Yunnan, Guizhou and Sichuan. Therefore, the standardization of minority languages is a very important task.

Twenty or thirty kinds of characters belong to four types.

The 56 ethnic groups in China have more than 100 languages, but only some ethnic groups have their own scripts. Because language is formed at the same time as human society, with a nation, there will be a national language. Writing is a written symbol that records and transmits language, and it is a sign that human beings have entered a civilized era. Writing is much later than language, which is the product of cultural development to a certain stage.

In China, due to the unbalanced social development of different ethnic groups, the time for different ethnic groups to produce characters has arrived. In addition, some ethnic groups directly use other ethnic languages in their communication with other ethnic groups, so by the time of the founding of New China, some ethnic groups had not yet formed their own languages, and some ethnic groups were even in the stage of carving wood and tying ropes.

Before the founding of New China, only about 20 ethnic groups in China had their own scripts. These ethnic groups include Han, Mongolian, Tibetan, Uygur, Korean, Kazak, Xibe, Dai, Uzbek, Kirgiz, Tatar, Russian, Yi, Naxi, Miao, Jingpo, Lisu, Lahu and Lahu.

In the west, the situation of minority languages is also varied. Among them, Dai people have four different forms of pinyin characters; Naxi people have hieroglyphics Dongba and syllable Goba; The writing of Xibe nationality is very similar to Manchu; Before the liberation of Miao nationality, there was a pinyin Miao Wen; Jingpo, Lisu, Lahu and Wa all use Latin alphabet or its variants. These characters were created by foreigners, mainly missionaries, after the Opium War. They are unscientific and only used by some Christians. In some areas, Zhuang and Dong people have used "vernacular characters" with Chinese characters as phonetic symbols, which are generally called "sawndip" and "Fangdong characters". Shui people have "Shui Shu", which looks like ancient Chinese characters with some hieroglyphs, while Bai people borrowed "Bai Wen" from pinyin Chinese characters.

The Constitution of China stipulates that "all ethnic groups have the freedom to use and develop their own spoken and written languages". After the founding of New China, the state helped the Zhuang, Buyi, Miao, Lisu, Hani, Wa, Dong and other ethnic groups to improve or create scripts. At present, there are more than 30 minority languages spoken in China.