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- China's many different ethnic groups speak many different languages, collectively called Zhōngguó Yǔwén (中国语文), literally "speech and writing of China" which mainly span six linguistic families. Most of them are dissimilar morphologically and phonetically and are mutually unintelligible. Zhongguo Yuwen includes the many different Han Chinese language variants (commonly simply called Chinese) as well as non-Han minority languages such as Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur and Zhuang. Chinese language policy in mainland China is heavily influenced by Soviet nationalities policy and officially encourages the development of standard spoken and written languages for each of the nationalities of China. However, in this schema, Han Chinese are considered a single nationality, and official policy of the People's Republic of China (PRC) treats the different varieties of the Chinese spoken language differently from the different national languages. For example, while official policies in mainland China encourage the development and use of different orthographies for the national languages and their use in educational and academic settings, the same is not true for the different Chinese spoken languages, despite the fact that they are more different from each other than, for example, the Romance languages of Europe. Putonghua or Standard Mandarin is the official national spoken language (except in Hong Kong and Macau), although autonomous regions and special administrative regions have additional official languages. For example, Tibetan has official status within the Tibet Autonomous Region and Mongolian has official status within the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region. Unofficially, there are large economic, social and practical incentives to be functional in Putonghua, a standardised form of the Mandarin group of dialects spoken in northern and southwestern China, which serves as a lingua franca among the different groups within mainland China. In addition, it is also considered increasingly prestigious and useful to have some ability in English, which is a required subject for persons attending university. During the 1950s and 1960s, Russian had some social status among elites in mainland China as the international language of socialism. The Economist, issue April 12, 2006, reported that up to one fifth of the population is learning English. Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, estimated that the total English-speaking population in China will outnumber the native speakers in the rest of the world in two decades.
- 中国的语言文字是指在中国范围内各个民族所使用的语言和文字的总称。
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