The number of frequently used Chinese characters is decreasing,
a new survey of the Ministry of Education and the State Language
Commission shows.
To understand 90 percent of the content in Chinese publications,
people have to learn only about 900 Chinese characters and 11,000
phrases, according to the survey on the current situation of
Chinese language.
The survey is based on 900 million characters in more than 8.9
million text files chosen from newspapers, magazines, TV stations
and the Internet.
The report, the first of its kind issued in China, also shows
that a large number of characters, which were rarely used in the
past, now appear more often in publications.
Among the first 7,000 characters ranked according to frequency
of usage in the research, about 615 are not in the existing
7,000-character table of the standard Chinese that was made
nearly20 years ago.
Among the words used on the Internet, more than 55 percent are
symbols or letters, exceeding Chinese characters, according to the
survey.
The survey also shows that many of the 100 languages used by
various ethnic minorities of China are at the brink of
extinction.
(Xinhua News Agency May 23, 2006)
