Languages of China in the context of "Chinese music"

Standard Chinese (simplified Chinese: 现代标准汉语; traditional Chinese: 現代標準漢語; pinyin: Xiàndài biāozhǔn hànyǔ; lit. 'modern standard Han speech') is a modern standard form of Mandarin Chinese that was first codified during the republican era (1912–1949). It is designated as the national lingua franca of China, one of the official languages of the United Nations and of Singapore, and one of the national languages of Taiwan. It is largely based on the Beijing dialect. Standard Chinese is a pluricentric language with local standards in mainland China, Taiwan and Singapore that mainly differ in their lexicon. Hong Kong written Chinese, used for formal written communication in Hong Kong and Macau, is a form of Standard Chinese that is read aloud with the Cantonese reading of characters.

Like other Sinitic languages, Standard Chinese is a tonal language with topic-prominent organization and subject–verb–object (SVO) word order. Compared with southern varieties, the language has fewer vowels, final consonants and tones, but more initial consonants. It is an analytic language, albeit with many compound words.

The Uyghur Cyrillic alphabet (Uyghur: Уйғур Кирил Йезиқи, Arabic alphabet: ئۇيغۇر يېڭى يېزىقى) is a Cyrillic-derived alphabet used for writing the Uyghur language, primarily by Uyghurs living in countries of the former Soviet Union. It is used to write Standard Soviet Uyghur.It was created around 1937 by the Government of the Soviet Union, which wanted an alternative to the Latin-derived alphabet it had devised some eleven years earlier, in 1926. The Soviets dropped their Latin script for Uyghur because they feared its local use would encourage Soviet Uyghurs to seek closer ties with Turkey, which had switched to a Latin-based alphabet in 1927–1928.

After the proclamation of the communist People's Republic of China in 1949, Russian linguists began helping the Chinese with codifying the various minority languages of China and promoting Cyrillic-derived alphabets. The Uyghurs of China thus also came to use the Cyrillic script for a period of time, until the Sino-Soviet split.