Modern Standard Chinese and Its Simplified Script Reform

Modern Standard Chinese, based on the Beijing Mandarin dialect, belongs to the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family, distinct from and only partially mutually intelligible with other major Chinese varieties including Cantonese, Shanghainese and Hokkien, which linguists sometimes classify as separate languages within the same family despite the shared written tradition and political convention of calling them all dialects of one Chinese language.

The People's Republic of China introduced simplified Chinese characters in the 1950s and 1960s, reducing the stroke count of many traditional characters to promote literacy, a reform adopted in mainland China and Singapore while Taiwan, Hong Kong and most overseas Chinese communities retained traditional characters, producing today's split between two written standards representing the same underlying language. This site's row for Classical Chinese, distinct from this one, covers the older literary register used for the Confucian, Taoist and Buddhist canon; modern simplified Chinese instead reflects contemporary spoken and administrative usage, including the Chinese Communist Party's own extensive body of ideological and, at times, explicitly anti-religious publication.