Talk:Chinese language

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This article is written in American English, which has its own spelling conventions (color, defense, traveled) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus.

Chinese language is a former featured article candidate. Please view the links under Article milestones below to see why the nomination was archived. For older candidates, please check the archive.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
January 19, 2004	Refreshing brilliant prose	Not kept
July 24, 2004	Featured article candidate	Not promoted
April 28, 2005	Peer review	Reviewed

Current status: Former featured article candidate

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Lead NPOV

Creating a new heading for 209.2.228.41's NPOV concerns raised here, where they would like the article lead to initially define Chinese as something like

a coevolutionary linguistic entity with highly mutually unintelligible varieties

—which I feel is too novel a phraseology for an article with such a large scope. But I appreciate their concerns, and am not quite sure what to do about it. Remsense诉 20:44, 20 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I would really like to get this banner off the top of this article. IP 209..41, is there any formulation where we use the term "group of languages" in the first sentence that would be acceptable? It's simply an issue of prose. Remsense诉 07:44, 11 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hokkien and Hakka

Both hokkien and hakka are official in taiwan. Both are sinitic languages. Should it be added into the "Official status" section of the template? Guotaian (talk) 15:59, 14 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah why not. Rynoip (talk) 05:32, 7 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Infobox

@Vampyricon et al., after thinking about it, I strongly suggest we switch back to {{Infobox language}}. The notion that removing significant parameters of expected and important information is acceptable if is what it takes to use the language family box, is one I don't really agree with. Especially given the fact that this article, vis à vis Sinitic languages, exists primary from the lens of a "macrolanguage" rather than a family. Frankly, I don't think it's fair to omit the information about Braille, writing systems, and language codes. Remsense诉 03:58, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I've actually gone and added a tiny hack to {{Infobox language}} so that it says "Varieties" instead of "Dialects" now. Remsense诉 05:14, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Semi protection?

This article is being constantly vandalised by IP edits, I strongly suggest for this article to be semi protected. Rynoip (talk) 01:23, 2 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Infobox corrections

Per Article 152 of the Federal Constitution of Malaysia and National Language Act 1963/67, only English is a recognized language in Malaysia and not Chinese. Despite there being an education system in the Chinese language in the country, that doesn't make it an officially recognized language.

The "states" and "official language" sections should also be restored to match the standard in other infoboxes as before, with a separate list for Cantonese and Mandarin for the latter. What is the point in making this different? - Moalli (talk) 02:54, 2 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

There's no "standard"—every article and infobox is generally written according to what works best for it. In any case, I've moved Malaysia to |states=. Removing Malaysia from the infobox entirely would be a criminal omission, so let's not do it because we give up on solving a very basic problem of placement. Remsense ‥ 论 03:00, 2 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

That is a workable compromise. However, I believe we should still restore the official language sections to be the list format as it was before. Why use bullet points when all other languages using Template:Infobox language have a list format? - Moalli (talk) 03:10, 2 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]