Chinese noodles

This page has been archived and is no longer updated. Chinese noodles out more about page archiving. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. This article is about the Sinitic languages excluding the Greater Bai languages.

For other languages in China, see Languages of China. For the standard language, see Standard Chinese. This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Regions with a native Chinese-speaking majority. Regions where Chinese is not native but an official or educational language.

This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Chinese languages form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be variants of a single language. The earliest Chinese written records are Shang dynasty-era oracle bone inscriptions, which can be dated to 1250 BCE. The phonetic categories of Old Chinese can be reconstructed from the rhymes of ancient poetry. After applying the linguistic comparative method to the database of comparative linguistic data developed by Laurent Sagart in 2019 to identify sound correspondences and establish cognates, phylogenetic methods are used to infer relationships among these languages and estimate the age of their origin and homeland.