Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese are the two main writing systems used in China. Mandarin is the official language of the People’s Republic of China, while Cantonese is the predominant language of southern China.
However, Mandarin and Cantonese are not the only languages spoken in China. There are also dozens of other languages spoken within the country, many of which have their own writing systems.
In a previous blog post, we discussed the fact that Chinese has two writing systems: Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese. What about Mandarin and Cantonese? Mandarin is the official language of the People’s Republic of China, while Cantonese is the predominant language of southern China.
For example, Xiang is a language spoken in central China that uses its own writing system. The Xiang script is quite different from both Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese and is not well understood by speakers of either system.
Additionally, Zhuang is a language spoken in southern China that also uses its own script. The Zhuang script is also quite different from both Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese and is not well understood by speakers of either system.
It should be noted that there are some similarities between the two written systems. Both Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese use characters to represent words. They also share some common characters, such as 丨 (yin), 丿 (yuan), 子 (zi), 不 (bu), 通 (tong), 火 (huo), 炮 (pao), etc. However, there are also many differences between them.
For example, Traditional Chinese uses more strokes to write certain words than Simplified Chinese does. Additionally, Traditional Chinese characters sometimes have more than one meaning, while Simplified Chinese characters only have one meaning.