modern Chinese
Current PRC language
Modern Chinese refers to the Chinese language as spoken and written from roughly the early 20th century onward, distinguished from Classical Chinese by its vernacular grammar and vocabulary.
The term usually means Mandarin, the standardized national language based on Beijing dialect: She's studying modern Chinese at university.
Modern Chinese uses simplified characters in mainland China and traditional characters in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
- contemporary literatureRecent era's published works
- May Fourth Movement1919 Chinese political awakening
- phoneticsStudy of speech sounds
- tonesDistinct sound qualities
- syntaxRules for arranging words
pop culture · lexicon · colonial influences · nationalism · morphemes · simplified characters · loanwords · diglossia · traditional characters · linguistic purism · heritage preservation · bilingualism · education policy · semantics · idioms · pragmatics · pinyin · cross-cultural exchange
- Mandarinpinyin, tones, Hanzi, traditional characters, neutral tone
- Chinese dictionariesdictionaries, entries, definitions, headwords, pinyin
- CJK LanguagesJapanese, Korean, Mandarin, Cantonese, hanzi
modern, modernism, modernist, modernize, modernization, modernity, postmodern, Chinese, China