What language is considered the main international language of world significance today? This is English. Even a schoolboy can easily answer such a question. But how many people know which language the most people speak? Surprisingly or not, it is Chinese that is recognized today as the language used by the largest number of the inhabitants of our planet. True, summing up the calculations, no one took into account that the Chinese language has many dialects. And sometimes they are so different that residents of remote provinces hardly understand each other.
They don’t understand you? Start writing
Everything would have been very bad if it were not for the existence of Mandarin, the state literary language. That’s exactly what everyone understands, without exception, so they can use literary when communicating. Those. when meeting on a train, two Chinese living in different provinces, for the sake of comfortable communication, must either switch to Mandarin, or … start texting. Surprisingly, despite the differences in pronunciation, Chinese characters are spelled the same everywhere. And, of course, they have the same meaning everywhere. The Chinese are very careful about their writing and do not want to give up on it.
Now about 20% of the world’s population use Chinese for communication. But even this factor does not contribute to the fact that the language was ranked as one of the official ones for the UN. At the moment, these are English, French, Spanish, Russian and Arabic. And the main thing is English. What influenced this choice? That many people use it? Not at all. Spanish, for example, is used by almost the same number of people, but no one considers it the first. In Russian schools, English is studied almost everywhere. French and German have receded into the background and are most often taught in specialized educational institutions. Spanish is even rarer, but is Chinese taught? They teach, but only in regions geographically close to China.
Many are confident that the importance and prevalence of the Chinese language in the world will increase significantly in the near future. And this is due not only to the fact that 20% of the world’s population speaks it. The economy of this country is currently recognized as the most intensively developing. There is even a joke: “Everything is done in China.” And this is true: Chinese products have flooded the world market and the demand for them is very high, i.e. the country makes good money on exports. In world politics, this state is far from the last place. Why, then, has their language still not become international?
Oh this Chinese
There are certain reasons for this. And the most important thing is the peculiarities of the Chinese language. It radically differs from European ones not only in sound, but also in the principle of constructing sentences. The Chinese language does not use the suffixes, prefixes, and endings that other languages use to express grammatical relations. This is done using word order, which is extremely unusual and rather difficult for native speakers of other languages. If it is not difficult for a Frenchman to master Spanish, since these languages have much in common, then Chinese will most likely be difficult for him. In addition, the native language of the Chinese is Tonal. Here the tone with which this or that syllable is pronounced is
of tremendous importance. When the tone changes, the meaning of the word can change dramatically. For native speakers of European languages, who are not used to the fact that tone somehow influences the meaning of words, it can be very difficult to capture these tonal differences. And in order to reproduce them in a conversation, you need to practice in order.
There is also a third reason why Chinese is not becoming international. It lies in the complexity of hieroglyphic writing. For an Englishman or a Frenchman, whose alphabet does not even have three dozen letters, it is very difficult to learn hieroglyphs, since there are quite a few of them. Difficulties arise with the computer set of such symbols. This is an extremely inconvenient activity.
Even though the Chinese developed and officially recognized pinyin (a special Latin for writing Chinese words), the difficulties did not diminish much, since pinyin must be used together with diacritics to express tonality.
The complex of the above factors forces the Chinese to study English en masse. Employees of Chinese companies, who have to interact with foreigners on duty, even take names that are familiar to the ear of counterparties and partners. Of course, all this greatly simplifies the interaction. At the same time, if we are talking about translation from Chinese or into Chinese, you need to contact a professional translation agency.
In addition, China is not a country to which the Hague Convention of 1961 applies, therefore, when submitting official documents to the state bodies of the PRC, consular legalization of documents is required.