THE CHINESE LANGUAGE: THE GLOBAL, HISTORICAL, AND LINGUISTIC ASPECTS

 According to statistics, the number of Chinese language speakers exceeds 1.4 billion, including 50 million people who have Chinese as their second language.
It is estimated that other than Mandarin, dialects in China are spoken by 1.2 billion people. The ten most popular dialects are: Mandarin, Min, Wu, Jin, Yue, Gan, Kejia (Hakka), Xiang, Pinghua, and Hui.
Whether Chinese has the same parts of speech as the Indo-European languages has been the subject of much debate. This encyclopedia has a chapter on ‘Chinese: Parts of Speech’ by Candice Cheung Chi-Hang of the City University of Hong Kong that offers a comprehensive survey of the major parts of speech in Chinese, aiming to establish the parts of speech that are found both in Chinese and in the Indo-European languages, and those found only in Chinese.