A Short History of the Chinese Language
The oldest written records
Chinese has one of the longest written histories of any language. The earliest texts are inscriptions on oracle bones from the Shang dynasty, more than 3,000 years ago. Words in this early stage were almost always a single syllable, and the grammar was very simple. There were no question words and no word for “is”.
Old Chinese (until about the 3rd century AD)
Old Chinese is the language of Confucius and the classical texts of the Zhou, Qin and Han dynasties. In a sentence like “he is a scholar”, there was still no verb for “to be”. In questions, the question word came before the verb. Contact with peoples to the north and west brought a few loanwords, but only a small number. Around 100 AD, the scholar Xu Shen compiled the Shuowen Jiezi, the first great dictionary to explain the structure and meaning of Chinese characters.
Middle Chinese (4th–12th century)
In this period the word shì (是, “to be”) became a normal part of the sentence, and new grammatical patterns appeared, such as the passive with bèi (被). The spread of Buddhism from India brought a wave of new words and translations. Above all, the vocabulary changed from mostly one-syllable words to mostly two-syllable words, which is still typical of Chinese today. The rhyme dictionary Qieyun (601 AD) gives us the best picture of how Chinese sounded at that time.
Early Mandarin (13th–19th century)
From the 13th century the language of northern China changed rapidly. Several old consonant endings disappeared, and so did the old “entering tone”, a short tone ending in a stop. The rhyme book Zhongyuan Yinyun (1324) records this northern pronunciation. New words that every learner knows today also appeared, such as the plural ending -men (们) and the polite “you”, nín (您).
Modern Chinese (from 1919)
After the May Fourth Movement of 1919, writers turned away from classical literary Chinese and began writing the way people actually spoke. Modern Chinese borrowed many words and some grammar from Western languages. A common standard language, Pǔtōnghuà (Mandarin), developed, and the regional dialects have gradually moved closer to it.
Chinese today
In the 1950s, China introduced simplified characters and the pinyin system for writing Chinese with Latin letters. Today Chinese is the native language of more than a billion people, making it the most spoken first language in the world.
Source
“汉语史 (History of the Chinese Language)”, Baidu Baike, accessed October 2026.