This page has been archived and is no longer updated. Find out more about page archiving. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. This article is chinese steamed bun 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.