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History of the Chinese Language
Most linguists classify all of the variations of Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, called Proto-Sino-Tibetan, similar to Proto Indo-European, from which the Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman languages descended. The relations between Chinese and the other Sino-Tibetan languages are still unclear and an area of active research, as is the attempt to reconstruct Proto-Sino-Tibetan. What follows is a modern revision of a classification system by the Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren.Chinese in the past
Old Chinese, sometimes known as 'Archaic Chinese', was the language common during the early and middle Zhou Dynasty (11th to 7th centuries B.C.), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artefacts, the poetry of the Shijing, the history of the Shujing, and portions of the Yijing (I Ching). The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters also provide hints to their Old Chinese pronunciations. Old Chinese was not wholly uninflected. It possessed a rich sound system in which aspiration or rough breathing differentiated the consonants. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qing dynasty philologists.Middle Chinese was the language used during the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties (7th through 10th centuries A.D.). It can be divided into an early period, to which the 'Qieyun' rhyme table (A.D. 601) relates, and a late period in the 10th, which the 'Guangyun' rhyme table reflects.
Chinese Nowadays
Most Chinese living in northern China, in Sichuan and in a broad arc from the Northeast (Manchuria) to the Southwest (Yunnan), use various Mandarin dialects as their home language. The prevalence of Mandarin throughout Northern China is largely the result of geography, namely the plains of north China. By contrast, the mountains and rivers of southern China have promoted linguistic diversity. The presence of Mandarin in Sichuan is largely due to a plague in the 12th century. This plague, which may have been related to the Black Death, depopulated the area, leading to later settlement from north China.Until the mid-20th century, most Chinese living in southern China did not speak any Mandarin. However, despite the mix of officials and commoners speaking various Chinese dialects, Nanjing Mandarin became dominant at least during the officially Manchu-speaking Qing Empire. Since the 17th century, the Empire had set up orthography academies (zhengyin shuyuan) in an attempt to make pronunciation conform to the Beijing standard (Beijing being the capital of Qing), but these attempts had little success. During the last 50 years of the Qing Dynasty, in the late 19th century, the Nanjing Mandarin standard was finally replaced in the imperial court by Beijing Mandarin. For the general population, although variations of Mandarin were already widely spoken in China then, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their regional dialects for every aspect of life. The new Beijing Mandarin court standard was thus fairly limited.
This situation changed with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC) of an elementary school education system committed to teaching Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken fluently by a majority of people in Mainland China and in Taiwan. In Hong Kong, the language of education and formal speech remains Cantonese, but Mandarin is becoming increasingly influential.