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China's first contact with the English language occurred between Chinese and English traders, and the first missionary schools to teach English were established in Macau in the 1630s. Between 1911 and 1949, English was popular, and it was taught in missionary schools and thirteen Christian colleges.
There are several hundred languages in China. The predominant language is Standard Chinese, which is based on Beijingese, but there are hundreds of related Chinese languages, collectively known as Hanyu ( simplified Chinese: 汉语; traditional Chinese: 漢語; pinyin: Hànyǔ, 'Han language'), that are spoken by 92% of the population.
The College English Test ( Chinese: 全国大学英语四、六级考试 ), better known as CET, is a national English as a foreign language test in the People's Republic of China. It examines the English proficiency of undergraduate and postgraduate students in China. It is meant to ensure that Chinese undergraduates and postgraduates reach ...
Chinese eventually replaced many of the languages previously dominant in these areas, and forms of the language spoken in different regions began to diverge. During periods of political unity there was a tendency for states to promote the use of a standard language across the territory they controlled, in order to facilitate communication ...
English is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family, whose speakers, called Anglophones, originated in early medieval England. [4] [5] [6] The namesake of the language is the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the island of Great Britain.
Zhonglish, a term for Chinese influenced by English, is a portmanteau of Zhōngwén (中文; 'Chinese language') and "English". Some peculiar Chinese English cannot be labeled Chinglish because it is grammatically correct, and Victor Mair calls this emerging dialect "Xinhua English or New China News English", based on the Xinhua News Agency.
Standard Chinese is the standard language of China (where it is called 普通话; pǔtōnghuà) and Taiwan, and one of the four official languages of Singapore (where it is called either 华语; 華語; Huáyǔ or 汉语; 漢語; Hànyǔ ). Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin.
Words of Chinese origin have entered European languages, including English. Most of these were direct loanwords from various varieties of Chinese.However, Chinese words have also entered indirectly via other languages, particularly Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese, that have all used Chinese characters at some point and contain a large number of Chinese loanwords.