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Chinese (simplified Chinese: 汉语; traditional Chinese: 漢語; pinyin: Hànyǔ; lit. ‘Han language’ or 中文; Zhōngwén; ‘Chinese writing’) is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in Greater China. Approximately 1.3 billion people, or around 16% of the global population, speak a variety of Chinese as their first language.

Chinese languages form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be dialects of a single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered to be separate languages in a family. Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese, of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin with 66%, or around 800 million speakers, followed by Min (75 million, e.g. Southern Min), Wu (74 million, e.g. Shanghainese), and Yue (68 million, e.g. Cantonese). These branches are unintelligible to each other, and many of their subgroups are unintelligible with the other varieties within the same branch (e.g. Southern Min). There are, however, transitional areas where varieties from different branches share enough features for some limited intelligibility, including New Xiang with Southwestern Mandarin, Xuanzhou Wu Chinese with Lower Yangtze Mandarin, Jin with Central Plains Mandarin and certain divergent dialects of Hakka with Gan (though these are unintelligible with mainstream Hakka). All varieties of Chinese are tonal to at least some degree, and are largely analytic.

The earliest Chinese written records are oracle bone inscriptions dating from the Shang dynasty c. 1250 BCE. The phonetic categories of Old Chinese can be reconstructed from the rhymes of ancient poetry. During the Northern and Southern period, Middle Chinese went through several sound changes and split into several varieties following prolonged geographic and political separation. The Qieyun, a rime dictionary, recorded a compromise between the pronunciations of different regions. The royal courts of the Ming and early Qing dynasties operated using a koiné language known as Guanhua, based on the Nanjing dialect of Mandarin.

Standard Chinese is an official language of both the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China on Taiwan, one of the four official languages of Singapore, and one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin, and was first officially adopted in the 1930s. The language is written primarily using a logography of Chinese characters, largely shared by readers who may otherwise speak mutually unintelligible varieties. Since the 1950s, the use of Simplified characters has been promoted by the government of the People’s Republic of China, with Singapore officially adopting them in 1976. Traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and among Chinese-speaking communities overseas. Traditional characters are also in use in mainland China, despite them not being the first choice in daily use. For example, practising Chinese calligraphy requires the knowledge of traditional Chinese characters.

Linguists classify all varieties of Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family, together with Burmese, Tibetan and many other languages spoken in the Himalayas and the Southeast Asian Massif. Although the relationship was first proposed in the early 19th century and is now broadly accepted, reconstruction of Sino-Tibetan is much less developed than that of families such as Indo-European or Austroasiatic. Difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of inflection in many of them, and the effects of language contact. In addition, many of the smaller languages are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to reach and are often also sensitive border zones. Without a secure reconstruction of proto-Sino-Tibetan, the higher-level structure of the family remains unclear. A top-level branching into Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages is often assumed, but has not been convincingly demonstrated.

The first written records appeared over 3,000 years ago during the Shang dynasty. As the language evolved over this period, the various local varieties became mutually unintelligible. In reaction, central governments have repeatedly sought to promulgate a unified standard.

The earliest examples of Old Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones dated to c. 1250 BCE, during the late Shang. The next attested stage came from inscriptions on bronze artifacts of the Western Zhou period (1046–771 BCE), the Classic of Poetry and portions of the Book of Documents and I Ching. Scholars have attempted to reconstruct the phonology of Old Chinese by comparing later varieties of Chinese with the rhyming practice of the Classic of Poetry and the phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters. Although many of the finer details remain unclear, most scholars agree that Old Chinese differs from Middle Chinese in lacking retroflex and palatal obstruents but having initial consonant clusters of some sort, and in having voiceless nasals and liquids. Most recent reconstructions also describe an atonal language with consonant clusters at the end of the syllable, developing into tone distinctions in Middle Chinese. Several derivational affixes have also been identified, but the language lacks inflection, and indicated grammatical relationships using word order and grammatical particles.

Middle Chinese was the language used during Northern and Southern dynasties and the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties (6th–10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the Qieyun rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by rhyme tables such as the Yunjing constructed by ancient Chinese philologists as a guide to the Qieyun system. These works define phonological categories, but with little hint of what sounds they represent. Linguists have identified these sounds by comparing the categories with pronunciations in modern varieties of Chinese, borrowed Chinese words in Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean, and transcription evidence. The resulting system is very complex, with a large number of consonants and vowels, but they are probably not all distinguished in any single dialect. Most linguists now believe it represents a diasystem encompassing 6th-century northern and southern standards for reading the classics.

The complex relationship between spoken and written Chinese is an example of diglossia: as spoken, Chinese varieties have evolved at different rates, while the written language used throughout China changed comparatively little, crystallizing into a prestige form known as Classical or Literary Chinese. Literature written distinctly in the Classical form began to emerge during the Spring and Autumn period. Its use in writing remained nearly universal until the late 19th century, culminating with the widespread adoption of written vernacular Chinese with the May Fourth Movement beginning in 1919.

After the fall of the Northern Song dynasty and subsequent reign of the Jurchen Jin and Mongol Yuan dynasties in northern China, a common speech (now called Old Mandarin) developed based on the dialects of the North China Plain around the capital.
The 1324 Zhongyuan Yinyun was a dictionary that codified the rhyming conventions of new sanqu verse form in this language.
Together with the slightly later Menggu Ziyun, this dictionary describes a language with many of the features characteristic of modern Mandarin dialects.

Up to the early 20th century, most Chinese people only spoke their local variety.
Thus, as a practical measure, officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using a common language based on Mandarin varieties, known as 官话; 官話; Guānhuà; ‘language of officials’.
For most of this period, this language was a koiné based on dialects spoken in the Nanjing area, though not identical to any single dialect.
By the middle of the 19th century, the Beijing dialect had become dominant and was essential for any business with the imperial court.

In the 1930s, a standard national language, 国语; 國語; Guóyǔ; ‘national language’, was adopted. After much dispute between proponents of northern and southern dialects and an abortive attempt at an artificial pronunciation, the National Language Unification Commission finally settled on the Beijing dialect in 1932. The People’s Republic founded in 1949 retained this standard but renamed it 普通话; 普通話; pǔtōnghuà; ‘common speech’. The national language is now used in education, the media, and formal situations in both mainland China and Taiwan. Because of their colonial and linguistic history, the language used in education, the media, formal speech, and everyday life in Hong Kong and Macau is the local Cantonese, although the standard language, Mandarin, has become very influential and is being taught in schools.

Historically, the Chinese language has spread to its neighbors through a variety of means. Northern Vietnam was incorporated into the Han empire in 111 BCE, marking the beginning of a period of Chinese control that ran almost continuously for a millennium. The Four Commanderies were established in northern Korea in the first century BCE, but disintegrated in the following centuries. Chinese Buddhism spread over East Asia between the 2nd and 5th centuries CE, and with it the study of scriptures and literature in Literary Chinese. Later, strong central governments modeled on Chinese institutions were established in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, with Literary Chinese serving as the language of administration and scholarship, a position it would retain until the late 19th century in Korea and (to a lesser extent) Japan, and the early 20th century in Vietnam. Scholars from different lands could communicate, albeit only in writing, using Literary Chinese.

Although they used Chinese solely for written communication, each country had its own tradition of reading texts aloud, the so-called Sino-Xenic pronunciations. Chinese words with these pronunciations were also extensively imported into the Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese languages, and today comprise over half of their vocabularies. This massive influx led to changes in the phonological structure of the languages, contributing to the development of moraic structure in Japanese and the disruption of vowel harmony in Korean.

Borrowed Chinese morphemes have been used extensively in all these languages to coin compound words for new concepts, in a similar way to the use of Latin and Ancient Greek roots in European languages. Many new compounds, or new meanings for old phrases, were created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to name Western concepts and artifacts. These coinages, written in shared Chinese characters, have then been borrowed freely between languages. They have even been accepted into Chinese, a language usually resistant to loanwords, because their foreign origin was hidden by their written form. Often different compounds for the same concept were in circulation for some time before a winner emerged, and sometimes the final choice differed between countries. The proportion of vocabulary of Chinese origin thus tends to be greater in technical, abstract, or formal language. For example, in Japan, Sino-Japanese words account for about 35% of the words in entertainment magazines, over half the words in newspapers, and 60% of the words in science magazines.

Vietnam, Korea, and Japan each developed writing systems for their own languages, initially based on Chinese characters, but later replaced with the hangul alphabet for Korean and supplemented with kana syllabaries for Japanese, while Vietnamese continued to be written with the complex chữ Nôm script. However, these were limited to popular literature until the late 19th century. Today Japanese is written with a composite script using both Chinese characters called kanji, and kana. Korean is written exclusively with hangul in North Korea (although knowledge of the supplementary Chinese characters (called hanja) is still required), and hanja are increasingly rarely used in South Korea. As a result of former French colonization, Vietnamese switched to a Latin-based alphabet.

Examples of loan words in English include ‘tea’ from Hokkien 茶; tê, ‘dim sum’ from Cantonese 點心; dim2 sam1, and ‘kumquat’ from Cantonese 金橘; gam1gwat1.

Jerry Norman estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese. These varieties form a dialect continuum, in which differences in speech generally become more pronounced as distances increase, though the rate of change varies immensely. Generally, mountainous South China exhibits more linguistic diversity than the North China Plain. In parts of South China, a major city’s dialect may only be marginally intelligible to close neighbours. For instance, Wuzhou is about 190 kilometres (120 mi) upstream from Guangzhou, but the Yue variety spoken there is more like that of Guangzhou than is that of Taishan, 95 kilometres (60 mi) southwest of Guangzhou and separated from it by several rivers. In parts of Fujian the speech of neighbouring counties or even villages may be mutually unintelligible.

Until the late 20th century, Chinese emigrants to Southeast Asia and North America came from southeast coastal areas, where Min, Hakka, and Yue dialects are spoken.
The vast majority of Chinese immigrants to North America up to the mid-20th century spoke the Taishan dialect, from a small coastal area southwest of Guangzhou.

Local varieties of Chinese are conventionally classified into seven dialect groups, largely based on the different evolution of Middle Chinese voiced initials:

The classification of Li Rong, which is used in the Language Atlas of China (1987), distinguishes three further groups:

Some varieties remain unclassified, including the Danzhou dialect on Hainan, Waxianghua spoken in western Hunan, and Shaozhou Tuhua spoken in northern Guangdong.

Standard Chinese is the official standard language of China (where it is called 普通话; pǔtōnghuà) and Taiwan, and one of the four official languages of Singapore (where it is called either 华语; 華語; Huáyŭ or 汉语; 漢語; Hànyǔ). Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. The governments of both China and Taiwan intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore, it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools.

In China, diglossia has been a common feature. For example, in addition to Standard Chinese, a resident of Shanghai may speak Shanghainese; if they grew up elsewhere, then they are also likely to be fluent in the particular dialect of that local area. A native of Guangzhou may speak both Cantonese and Standard Chinese. In addition to Mandarin, most Taiwanese people also speak Taiwanese Hokkien (commonly 台語; ‘Taiwanese’), Hakka, or an Austronesian language. A Taiwanese may commonly mix pronunciations, phrases, and words from Mandarin and other languages of Taiwan, and this mixture is considered normal in daily or informal speech.

Due to their traditional cultural ties to Guangdong amid a history of outside colonization, Cantonese is used as a standard language in Hong Kong and Macau.

The designation of various Chinese branches remains controversial. Some linguists and most ordinary Chinese people consider all the spoken varieties as one single language, as speakers share a common national identity and a common written form. Others instead argue that it is inappropriate to refer to major branches of Chinese such as Mandarin, Wu and so on as “dialects” because the mutual unintelligibility between them is too great. However, calling major Chinese branches “languages” would also be wrong under the same criterion, since a branch such as Wu, itself contains many mutually unintelligible varieties, and could not be properly called a single language.

There are also viewpoints pointing out that linguists often ignore mutual intelligibility when varieties share intelligibility with a central variety (i.e. prestige variety, such as Standard Mandarin), as the issue requires some careful handling when mutual intelligibility is inconsistent with language identity.

The Chinese government’s official Chinese designation for the major branches of Chinese is 方言; fāngyán; ‘regional speech’, whereas the more closely related varieties within these are called 地点方言; 地點方言; dìdiǎn fāngyán; ‘local speech’.

Because of the difficulties involved in determining the difference between language and dialect, other terms have been proposed. These include topolect, lect, vernacular, regional, and variety.

Syllables in the Chinese languages have some unique characteristics. They are tightly related to the morphology and also to the characters of the writing system; and phonologically they are structured according to fixed rules.

The structure of each syllable consists of a nucleus that has a vowel (which can be a monophthong, diphthong, or even a triphthong in certain varieties), preceded by an onset (a single consonant, or consonant + glide; a zero onset is also possible), and followed (optionally) by a coda consonant; a syllable also carries a tone. There are some instances where a vowel is not used as a nucleus. An example of this is in Cantonese, where the nasal sonorant consonants /m/ and /ŋ/ can stand alone as their own syllable.

In Mandarin much more than in other spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda (assuming that a final glide is not analyzed as a coda), but syllables that do have codas are restricted to nasals /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, the retroflex approximant /ɻ/, and voiceless stops /p/, /t/, /k/, or /ʔ/. Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Standard Chinese, are limited to only /n/, /ŋ/, and /ɻ/.

The number of sounds in the different spoken dialects varies, but in general there has been a tendency to a reduction in sounds from Middle Chinese. The Mandarin dialects in particular have experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds and so have far more polysyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. The total number of syllables in some varieties is therefore only about a thousand, including tonal variation, which is only about an eighth as many as English.

All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones to distinguish words. A few dialects of north China may have as few as three tones, while some dialects in south China have up to 6 or 12 tones, depending on how one counts. One exception from this is Shanghainese which has reduced the set of tones to a two-toned pitch accent system much like modern Japanese.

A very common example used to illustrate the use of tones in Chinese is the application of the four tones of Standard Chinese, along with the neutral tone, to the syllable ma. The tones are exemplified by the following five Chinese words:

In contrast, Standard Cantonese has six tones. Historically, finals that end in a stop consonant were considered to be “checked tones” and thus counted separately for a total of nine tones. However, they are considered to be duplicates in modern linguistics and are no longer counted as such:

Chinese is often described as a ‘monosyllabic’ language. However, this is only partially correct. It is largely accurate when describing Old and Middle Chinese; in Classical Chinese, around 90% of words consist of a single character that corresponds one-to-one with a morpheme, the smallest unit of meaning in a language. In modern varieties, it usually remains the case that a morphemes are monosyllabic—in contrast, English has many multi-syllable morphemes, both bound and free, such as ‘seven’, ‘elephant’, ‘para-‘ and ‘-able’. Some of the more conservative modern varieties, usually found in the south, have largely monosyllabic words, especially with basic vocabulary. However, most nouns, adjectives and verbs in modern Mandarin are disyllabic. A significant cause of this is phonological attrition: sound changes over time have steadily reduced the number of possible syllables in the language’s inventory. In modern Mandarin, there are only around 1,200 possible syllables, including the tonal distinctions, compared with about 5,000 in Vietnamese (still a largely monosyllabic language), and over 8,000 in English.

Most modern varieties have the tendency to form new words through polysyllabic compounds. In some cases, monosyllabic words have become disyllabic formed from different characters without the use of compounding, as in 窟窿; kūlong from 孔; kǒng; this is especially common in Jin varieties. This phonological collapse has led to a corresponding increase in the number of homophones. As an example, the small Langenscheidt Pocket Chinese Dictionary lists six words that are commonly pronounced as shí in Standard Chinese:

In modern spoken Mandarin, however, tremendous ambiguity would result if all of these words could be used as-is. The 20th century Yuen Ren Chao poem Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den exploits this, consisting of 92 characters all pronounced shi. As such, most of these words have been replaced in speech, if not in writing, with less ambiguous disyllabic compounds. Only the first one, 十, normally appears in monosyllabic form in spoken Mandarin; the rest are normally used in the polysyllabic forms of

respectively. In each, the homophone was disambiguated by addition of another morpheme, typically either a near-synonym or some sort of generic word (e.g. ‘head’, ‘thing’), the purpose of which is to indicate which of the possible meanings of the other, homophonic syllable is specifically meant.

However, when one of the above words forms part of a compound, the disambiguating syllable is generally dropped and the resulting word is still disyllabic. For example, 石; shí alone, and not 石头; 石頭; shítou, appears in compounds as meaning ‘stone’ such as 石膏; shígāo; ‘plaster’, 石灰; shíhuī; ‘lime’, 石窟; shíkū; ‘grotto’, 石英; ‘quartz’, and 石油; shíyóu; ‘petroleum’. Although many single-syllable morphemes (字; zì) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllable compounds known as 词; 詞; cí, which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí can consist of more than one character–morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.

Examples of Chinese words of more than two syllables include 汉堡包; 漢堡包; hànbǎobāo; ‘hamburger’, 守门员; 守門員; shǒuményuán; ‘goalkeeper’, and 电子邮件; 電子郵件; diànzǐyóujiàn; ‘e-mail’.

All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages: they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure), rather than inflectional morphology (changes in the form of a word), to indicate a word’s function within a sentence. In other words, Chinese has very few grammatical inflections—it possesses no tenses, no voices, no grammatical number, and only a few articles. They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin, this involves the use of particles such as 了; le; ‘PFV’, 还; 還; hái; ‘still’, and 已经; 已經; yǐjīng; ‘already’.

Chinese has a subject–verb–object word order, and like many other languages of East Asia, makes frequent use of the topic–comment construction to form sentences. Chinese also has an extensive system of classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighboring languages such as Japanese and Korean. Other notable grammatical features common to all the spoken varieties of Chinese include the use of serial verb construction, pronoun dropping and the related subject dropping. Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess differences.

The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 50,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are in use and only about 3,000 are frequently used in Chinese media and newspapers. However, Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words. Because most Chinese words are made up of two or more characters, there are many more Chinese words than characters. A more accurate equivalent for a Chinese character is the morpheme, as characters represent the smallest grammatical units with individual meanings in the Chinese language.

Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and lexicalized phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, a compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including oracle bone versions. The Zhonghua Zihai (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The CC-CEDICT project (2010) contains 97,404 contemporary entries including idioms, technology terms and names of political figures, businesses and products. The 2009 version of the Webster’s Digital Chinese Dictionary (WDCD), based on CC-CEDICT, contains over 84,000 entries.

The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volume Hanyu Da Cidian, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms.

The 2016 edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 13,000 head characters and defines 70,000 words.

Like many other languages, Chinese has absorbed a sizable number of loanwords from other cultures. Most Chinese words are formed out of native Chinese morphemes, including words describing imported objects and ideas. However, direct phonetic borrowing of foreign words has gone on since ancient times.

Some early Indo-European loanwords in Chinese have been proposed, notably 蜜; mì; ‘honey’, 狮; 獅; shī; ‘lion’, and perhaps also 马; 馬; mǎ; ‘horse’, 猪; 豬; zhū; ‘pig’, 犬; quǎn; ‘dog’, and 鹅; 鵝; é; ‘goose’.
Ancient words borrowed from along the Silk Road during the Old Chinese period include 葡萄; pútáo; ‘grape’, 石榴; shíliu, shíliú; ‘pomegranate’, and 狮子; 獅子; shīzi; ‘lion’. Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛; Fó; ‘Buddha’ and 菩萨; 菩薩; Púsà; ‘bodhisattva’. Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 胡同; hútòng; ‘hutong’. Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄; ‘grape’, generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of northern India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as 琵琶; pípá, the Chinese lute, or 酪; lào, luò; ‘cheese or yogurt’, but from exactly which source is not always clear.

Modern neologisms are primarily translated into Chinese in one of three ways: free translation (calques), phonetic translation (by sound), or a combination of the two. Today, it is much more common to use existing Chinese morphemes to coin new words to represent imported concepts, such as technical expressions and international scientific vocabulary, wherein the Latin and Greek components usually converted one-for-one into the corresponding Chinese characters. The word ‘telephone’ was initially loaned phonetically as 德律风; 德律風; délǜfēng (Shanghainese télífon [təlɪfoŋ])—this word was widely used in Shanghai during the 1920s, but the later 电话; 電話; diànhuà; ‘electric speech’, built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include

Occasionally, compromises between the transliteration and translation approaches become accepted, such as 汉堡包; 漢堡包; hànbǎobāo; ‘hamburger’ from 汉堡; ‘Hamburg’ + 包; ‘bun’. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes (phono-semantic matching), such as 马利奥; 馬利奧; Mǎlì’ào for the video game character ‘Mario’. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾; 奔騰; bēnténg; ‘dashing-leaping’ for ‘Pentium’ and 赛百味; 賽百味; Sàibǎiwèi; ‘better-than hundred tastes’ for ‘Subway’.

Foreign words, mainly proper nouns, continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, ‘Israel’ becomes 以色列; Yǐsèliè, and ‘Paris’ becomes 巴黎; Bālí. A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including 沙发; 沙發; shāfā; ‘sofa’, 马达; 馬達; mǎdá; ‘motor’, 幽默; yōumò; ‘humor’, 逻辑; 邏輯; luóji, luójí; ‘logic’, 时髦; 時髦; shímáo; ‘smart”, ‘fashionable’, and 歇斯底里; xiēsīdǐlǐ; ‘hysterics’. The bulk of these words were originally coined in Shanghai during the early 20th century, and later loaned from there into Mandarin, hence their Mandarin pronunciations occasionally being quite divergent from the English. For example, in Shanghainese 沙发; 沙發; sofa and 马达; 馬達; ‘motor’ sound more like their English counterparts. Cantonese differs from Mandarin with some transliterations, such as 梳化; so1 faa3,2; ‘sofa’ and 摩打; mo1 daa2; ‘motor’.

Western foreign words representing Western concepts have influenced Chinese since the 20th century through transcription. From French, 芭蕾; bālěi and 香槟; 香檳; xiāngbīn were borrowed for ‘ballet’ and ‘champagne’ respectively; 咖啡; kāfēi was borrowed from Italian caffè; ‘coffee’. The influence of English is particularly pronounced: from the early 20th century, many English words were borrowed into Shanghainese, such as 高尔夫; 高爾夫; gāo’ěrfū; ‘golf’ and the aforementioned 沙发; 沙發; shāfā; ‘sofa’. Later, American soft power gave rise to 迪斯科; dísīkē; ‘disco’, 可乐; 可樂; kělè; ‘cola’, and mínǐ; ‘miniskirt’. Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English, such as 卡通; kaa1 tung1; ‘cartoon’, 基佬; gei1 lou2; ‘gay people’, 的士; dik1 si6,2; ‘taxi’, and 巴士; baa1 si6,2; ‘bus’. With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, for example, 粉丝; 粉絲; fěnsī; ‘fans’, 黑客; hēikè; ‘hacker’, and 博客; bókè; ‘blog’. In Taiwan, some of these transliterations are different, such as 駭客; hàikè; ‘hacker’ and 部落格; bùluògé; ‘interconnected tribes’ for ‘blog’.

Another result of English influence on Chinese is the appearance in of so-called 字母词; 字母詞; zìmǔcí; ‘lettered words’ spelled with letters from the English alphabet. These have appeared in colloquial usage, as well as in magazines and newspapers, and on websites and television:

Since the 20th century, another source of words has been kanji: Japan re-molded European concepts and inventions into 和製漢語, wasei-kango, ‘Japanese-made Chinese’, and many of these words have been re-loaned into modern Chinese. Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, 经济; 經濟; jīngjì; 経済, keizai in Japanese, which in the original Chinese meant ‘the workings of the state’, narrowed to ‘economy’ in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this loaning, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese share a corpus of linguistic terms describing modern terminology, paralleling the similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin and shared among European languages.

The Chinese orthography centers on Chinese characters, which are written within imaginary square blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns, despite alternative arrangement with rows of characters from left to right within a row and from top to bottom across rows (like English and other Western writing systems) having become more popular since the 20th century. Chinese characters denote morphemes independent of phonetic variation in different languages. Thus the character 一; ‘one’ is pronounced as yī in Standard Chinese, yat1 in Cantonese and it in Hokkien, a form of Min.

Most written Chinese documents in the modern time, especially the more formal ones, are created using the grammar and syntax of the Standard Chinese variants, regardless of dialectical background of the author or targeted audience. This replaced the old writing language standard of Literary Chinese before the 20th century. However, vocabularies from different Chinese-speaking areas have diverged, and the divergence can be observed in written Chinese.

Meanwhile, colloquial forms of various Chinese language variants have also been written down by their users, especially in less formal settings. The most prominent example of this is Written Cantonese, which has become quite popular in tabloids, instant messaging applications, and on the internet amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere.

Because some Chinese variants have diverged and developed a number of unique morphemes that are not found in Standard Mandarin (despite all other common morphemes), unique characters rarely used in Standard Chinese have also been created or inherited from archaic literary standard to represent these unique morphemes. For example, characters like 冇 and 係 are actively used in Cantonese and Hakka, while being archaic or unused in standard written Chinese.

The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system for most of its speakers until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. Early Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt to describe the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted in some Latin character transcription/writing systems, based on various variants of Chinese languages. Some of these Latin character based systems are still being used to write various Chinese variants in the modern era.

In Hunan, women in certain areas write their local Chinese language variant in Nüshu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by many a dialect of Mandarin, is nowadays written in Cyrillic, and was previously written in the Arabic script. The Dungan people are primarily Muslim and live mainly in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia; many Hui people, living mainly in China, also speak the language.

Each Chinese character represents a monosyllabic Chinese word or morpheme. In 100 CE, the famed Han dynasty scholar Xu Shen classified characters into six categories: pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Only 4% were categorized as pictographs, including many of the simplest characters, such as 人; rén; ‘human’, 日; rì; ‘the Sun’, 山; shān; ‘mountain’, and 水; shuǐ; ‘water’. Between 80% and 90% were classified as phonetic compounds such as 沖; chōng; ‘pour’, combining a phonetic component 中; zhōng with a semantic component of the radical 氵, a reduced form of 水; ‘water’. Almost all characters created since have been made using this format. The 18th-century Kangxi Dictionary classified characters under a now-common set of 214 radicals.

Modern characters are styled after the regular script. Various other written styles are also used in Chinese calligraphy, including seal script, cursive script and clerical script. Calligraphy artists can write in Traditional and Simplified characters, but they tend to use Traditional characters for traditional art.

There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. Traditional characters, used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau, and many overseas Chinese speaking communities, largely takes their form from received character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty and standardized during the Ming. Simplified characters, introduced by the PRC in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common cursive shorthand variants. Singapore, which has a large Chinese community, was the second nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia.

The Internet provides practice reading each of these systems, and most Chinese readers are capable of, if not necessarily comfortable with, reading the alternative system through experience and guesswork.

A well-educated Chinese reader today recognizes approximately 4,000 to 6,000 characters; approximately 3,000 characters are required to read a mainland newspaper. The PRC defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. School-children typically learn around 2,000 characters whereas scholars may memorize up to 10,000. A large unabridged dictionary like the Kangxi dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; fewer than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.

Romanization is the process of transcribing a language into the Latin script. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese varieties, due to the lack of a native phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century.

Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the PRC, and later adopted by Singapore and Taiwan. Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across the Americas, Australia, and Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones of new words. In school books that teach Chinese, the pinyin romanization is often shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.

The second-most common romanization system, the Wade–Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels–it is largely an anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade–Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until 2009 was widely used in Taiwan.

When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade–Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade–Giles’s extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng (pinyin), and with Taipei than T’ai2-pei3 (Wade–Giles). This simplification presents syllables as homophones which really are none, and therefore exaggerates the number of homophones almost by a factor of four.

For comparison:

Other systems include Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the French EFEO, the Yale system (invented for use by US troops during World War II), as well as distinct systems for the phonetic requirements of Cantonese, Min Nan, Hakka, and other varieties.

Chinese varieties have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The ‘Phags-pa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of premodern forms of Chinese.

Zhuyin (colloquially bopomofo), a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan’s elementary schools to aid standard pronunciation. Although zhuyin characters are reminiscent of katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system. A comparison table of zhuyin to pinyin exists in the zhuyin article. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles:

There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system.

With the growing importance and influence of China’s economy globally, Standard Chinese instruction has been gaining popularity in schools throughout East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Western world.

Besides Mandarin, Cantonese is the only other Chinese language that is widely taught as a foreign language, largely due to the economic and cultural influence of Hong Kong and its widespread usage among significant Overseas Chinese communities.

In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China’s official Chinese Proficiency Test, called Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK), comparable to the English Cambridge Certificate, but by 2005 the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660 and in 2010 to 750,000.

The current iteration of the HSK exams is termed HSK 2.0, with the release of HSK 3.0 still undefined despite being announced by the Chinese Ministry of Education in March 2021. The new HSK system is thought to be in response to criticism of the current HSK levels not matching with the CEFR levels (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages), contrary to the Chinese Ministry of Education’s claims.

Navi Mumbai (lit. ’New Bombay’, .mw-parser-output .IPA-label-small{font-size:85%}.mw-parser-output .references .IPA-label-small,.mw-parser-output .infobox .IPA-label-small,.mw-parser-output .navbox .IPA-label-small{font-size:100%}Marathi pronunciation: [nəʋiː mumbəi]) is a planned city that is adjacent to Mumbai, located in the Konkan division of Maharashtra state, on the mainland of India. Navi Mumbai is situated across two districts, Thane & Raigad. It is a part of the Mumbai Metropolitan Area.

The city has been ranked 3rd among 73 cities surveyed for cleanliness and hygiene by the Union Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD) and Quality Council of India (QCI) as a part of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan.

Navi Mumbai is home to various educational institutions. Various multinational corporations have their head offices/branches across the city, making it an active business hub. Navi Mumbai also has various recreational facilities such as a Golf Course, Central Park and Pandavkada Water Falls in Kharghar. Thane Belapur Marg and Palm Beach Marg are major business attraction and upmarket residential areas respectively.

The city’s or area history dates back to the late 1500s when Siddis of Janjira built the Belapur Killa located atop a hillock, near the mouth of the Panvel Creek. In 1682, the fort was captured by the Portuguese, who had managed to annex the regions controlled by the Siddis, near Belapur.

In 1733, the Marathas, led by Chimaji Appa, wrested control of the fort from the Portuguese. He had made a vow that if it were to be successfully recaptured from the Portuguese, he would place a garland of beli leaves in a nearby Amruthaishwar temple, and after the victory the fort was christened as Belapur Fort. The Marathas ruled the area until 23 June 1817, when it was captured by Captain Charles Gray of the British East India Company. The British partially destroyed the fort under their policy of razing any Maratha stronghold in the area.

The population of Greater Mumbai rose from 2.966 million in 1951 to 4.152 million in 1961 and to 5.970 million in 1971. The rapid rate of growth of population resulted in a fast deterioration in the quality of life for the majority of people living in the city.

The Government of Maharashtra formed a committee under the Chairmanship of Prof. D. R. Gadgil and asked: “to formulate broad principles of regional planning for the metropolitan regions of Mumbai Panvel and Pune and to make recommendations for the establishment of Metropolitan Authorities for preparation and execution of such plans”.

The Gadgil Committee inter-alia made two important recommendations which have influenced the planning for Navi Mumbai. One, a planned decentralisation of industries with severe restrictions on further industrial growth in the Bombay region. Two, development of the mainland area as a multi-nucleated settlement, each settlement smaller in size than 250,000 population.

The Maharashtra Regional and Town Planning Act was passed in 1966 and brought into force in January 1967. The Bombay Metropolitan Region was notified in June 1967 and a Regional Planning Board constituted under the Chairmanship of Shri L. G. Rajwade, I. C. S. The Draft Regional Plan of the Board was finalised in January 1970. It proposed the development of a twin city across the harbour, on the mainland to the east, as a counter-magnet to the office concentration taking place at the southern tip of Bombay.

The Board recommended that the new metro-centre or Navi Mumbai as it is now called, be developed to accommodate a population of 2.1 million.

The planning of Navi Mumbai began in 1971 and involved leading architects and urban planner like Charles Correa (Chief Architect), Shirish Patel, Pravina Mehta and R. K. Jha (Chief Planner), The City and Industrial Development Corporation (CIDCO) was established on 17 March 1971, under the Indian Companies Act, 1956 for this purpose. The area covered 150 kilometres (93 mi) of the total 720 kilometres (450 mi) of the Konkan coast. Privately owned land consisting of 86 villages covering 15,954 hectares (39,420 acres) within the present limits of Navi Mumbai and further villages measuring an additional 2,870 hectares (7,100 acres) were acquired by the government of Maharashtra. Navi Mumbai covers the southern part of Thane taluka (from Thane District) and part of Panvel and Uran talukas (from Raigad District).

CIDCO carved out 19 small nodes with a view towards facilitating comprehensive development. These nodes were named Airoli, Ghansoli, Kopar Khairane, Juhu Nagar, Vashi, Turbhe, Sanpada, Juinagar, Nerul, Seawoods (Darave), Karave Nagar, CBD Belapur, Kharghar, Kamothe, New Panvel, Kalamboli, Ulwe, Dronagiri and Taloja.

CIDCO planned and constructed all the railway stations, roads and public spaces in Navi Mumbai and developed nearby areas commercially.

In 1973, the Vashi bridge was opened to the public for residents of Vashi, CBD Belapur and Nerul. The Sion-Panvel Highway was built to reduce the time taken to travel from Sion to Panvel. Initially, there was not much response to the new city. Major changes took place only after 1990, with the commissioning of a wholesale agricultural produce market at Turbhe and the construction of a commuter railway line from Mankhurd to Vashi in May 1992. These developments caused a sudden growth in economic activities and population in Navi Mumbai.

The city was originally planned to create affordable housing for people who could not afford living in Mumbai. It was decided not to let any slum pockets pop up across the city. But it failed. as, according to the 2001 census, a fifth to a third of the population of municipalized Navi Mumbai lives in slums
and gaothans (urban villages), with thousands of buildings violating planning norms.

By the end of the 1990s, the planning authority of Navi Mumbai initiated private participation in the developmental activity of Navi Mumbai. A new railway link between Nerul and Uran was inaugurated on 11 November 2018. Southern Navi Mumbai is being developed rapidly with its class infrastructure and modern nodes of Kharghar, Kamothe, Panvel and Kalamboli. These nodes are experiencing major infrastructural developments due to their proximity to the proposed Navi Mumbai International Airport. Also, the latest development known as ‘One Time Planning’ with an estimated budget of ₹12,821 crores is underway to transform the municipalized Navi Mumbai on the lines of the Mega Cities of the world.

A significant part of Flamingos that settle in the Greater Mumbai Region are found in Navi Mumbai.

When Navi Mumbai was created in the 1970s, CIDCO was the only authority that looked after the development and maintenance of the city. CIDCO prepared a developmental plan for Navi Mumbai covering 95 villages all over the city.

For the first ten years of the project CIDCO acted as the planning and administrative body and as the developer and builder for the project. Taxes on property, land, commercial and water were payable to CIDCO.

CIDCO planned 14 nodes divided into the North and the South part. The 7 nodes in the North part are Airoli node, Ghansoli node, Kopar Khairane node, Vashi node, Sanpada node, Nerul node and Belapur node. The 7 nodes in the South part are Kharghar node, Kamothe node, Kalamboli node, Pushpak Nagar node, Panvel node, Ulwe node and Dronagiri node. Also, two municipal bodies have been established, Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation (NMMC) in the North and Panvel Municipal Corporation in the South. Each of the nodes is divided into smaller groups called sectors.

Initially only Juhu Nagar, Vashi, Nerul and CBD Belapur were developed by CIDCO with housing, schools and community centre roads. But after the arrival of the harbour railway line extension in the 1990s, there was an increase in population. CIDCO shifted its development plan to nodes like Kharghar, Kamothe, New Panvel and Kopar Khairane. In its new development plan, CIDCO land was allocated to builders for housing. CIDCO only provided basic infrastructure like roads, water and electricity, these nodes were developed mostly by private builders according to the CIDCO plan.

The newly developed nodes of Navi Mumbai on the south side like Kharghar, Kamothe, New Panvel and Kalamboli are maintained by CIDCO. These nodes, which are all beyond CBD Belapur, come under the Raigad district.

State government has asked CIDCO to develop South Navi Mumbai as a smart city as it will be a role model for other states in the country. Smart City project includes, Navi Mumbai International Airport, Mumbai Trans Harbour Link connecting Ulwe with Sewri, a long coastal link from Dronagiri, extension of the Palm Beach Road from Kopar Khairane to Airoli, extension of national highway, local train railway from Panvel to Ulwe and Uran, new metro projects, including CBD Belapur, Taloja, Khandeshwar and Navi Mumbai airport metro project, development of fourth container terminal in JNPT, new greenfield cities, one near Uran, affordable housing schemes for low income groups and Project Affected Peoples (PAPs), new parks, playgrounds, auditoriums, bhavans, noise and air quality index checkers using advanced technologies, modern sewage treatment plants. CIDCO has its own plan of developing the area under its jurisdiction (informally called as Navi Mumbai South) as a smart city. Everything will be completed by 2022, except the airport.

On 17 December 1991, Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation (NMMC) was constituted by the state government for maintaining some of the developed nodes of Navi Mumbai.

Local self-government started on 1 January 1992. NMMC was handed seven of the 14 nodes of the Navi Mumbai project area for its jurisdiction. However, CIDCO, as a planning authority, has rights on the open plots in these seven nodes.

The NMMC jurisdiction starts at Digha in the North and ends at Belapur in the South. The NMMC area is planned into seven nodes (zones) – Belapur, Nerul, Sanpada, Vashi, Kopar Khairane, Ghansoli and Airoli.

Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation is rated amongst the richest corporations in Maharashtra.

The Municipal Corporation is headed by a Municipal Commissioner and an elected Mayor.

Panvel Municipal Council (PMC), which previously administered the city of Old Panvel, was upgraded from Municipal Council to a Municipal Corporation after incorporating the adjacent nodes of Navi Mumbai under CIDCO’s jurisdiction and surrounding villages in the proposed Panvel Municipal Corporation.

As per provisional reports of Census India, population of Navi Mumbai in 2011 is 1,120,547; out of which males and females are 610,060 and 510,487 respectively. Although Navi Mumbai has population of 1,120,547, its urban / metropolitan population is 18,414,288 of which 9,894,088 are males and 8,520,200 are females. At least 65.5% of population speaks Marathi language in Navi Mumbai.

Total number of literate individuals in Navi Mumbai is 911,542. Out of this number, 519,257 are males while 392,285 are females. Average literacy rate of Navi Mumbai is 91.57 percent of which male and female literacy was 95.05 and 87.33 percent. The sex ratio of Navi Mumbai is 831 females per 1000 males. Child sex ratio of girls is 901 per 1000 boys.

Navi Mumbai has a robust infrastructure, is well connected to other parts of the state and country and is relatively less polluted compared to Mumbai. The city has a good public transportation system with NMMT, the transport wing of NMMC, serving the bus commuters, the Mumbai suburban railway serving the train commuters and a large fleet of auto rickshaws for intra-nodal commute. The Mumbai-Pune Expressway starts at Kalamboli in Navi Mumbai. The Mumbai Trans Harbour Link (MTHL), also known as the Sewri-Nhava Sheva Trans Harbour Link, is a 22-kilometre (14 mi) long freeway grade road bridge connecting South Mumbai with Navi Mumbai.

The Mumbai suburban railway network covers most of the populated regions of the city. The most important suburban stations are Vashi, Nerul, Belapur and Panvel. The stations are planned as major railway junctions. Panvel is the only mainline station and also the busiest railway station of Navi Mumbai. All outstation trains halt here for time periods varying from 5 to 20 minutes. It is an important junction, railway lines come and meet here and it is connected to almost all parts of India. A new broad gauge line is functional between Karjat & Panvel.

Brihanmumbai Electric Supply and Transport (BEST) buses run from various area of Mumbai to Navi Mumbai & Navi Mumbai Municipal Transport (NMMT) buses run all over Navi Mumbai and various area in Mumbai, Thane, Bhiwandi, Kalyan-Dombivli-Badlapur, Panvel-Khopoli-Taloja, Uran-Ulwe etc. The Palm Beach Marg, a 10-kilometre (6.2 mi) long six lane road connects Vashi to CBD Belapur running parallel to the Thane Creek.

Auto rickshaws provide inter as well as intra nodal public transport across the city. Taxis operating from designated taxi stands provide the means to travel to further destinations. Taxis charge a fixed rate approved by the R. T. O. details of which can be found on popular local transit apps of the city.

Navi Mumbai has the largest container terminal in India, Jawaharlal Nehru Port at Nhava Sheva near Uran. It is well connected by road and rail, and handles approximately 56.13% of India’s container traffic. The Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport, 30 km away, is the nearest airport to the city.

The Navi Mumbai International Airport is being constructed in southern Panvel near Ulwe. It is being built through Public Private Partnership (PPP), with private sector partners having 74% equity and the Airports Authority of India (AAI) and Government of Maharashtra (through CIDCO) each holding 13%.

The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has already given techno-feasibility clearance to the airport. The central government provided cabinet approval for the construction on 31 May 2007. The airport’s construction was started in August 2021, and is expected to be fully operational by December 2024.

The Navi Mumbai Metro is an under construction rapid transit system in Navi Mumbai. A network of as many as six lines have been planned of which four lines will be constructed by CIDCO in the Navi Mumbai south region, the second and third line of the metro system will be constructed by NMMC and MMRDA respectively. The first line of the metro system is being constructed by CIDCO. This line includes three phases. In the first phase, the line will join the CBD Belapur station on the Mumbai suburban railway and Pendhar village. In the second phase, the line will join Taloja MIDC and Khandeshwar node (which will be extended to the[Navi Mumbai International Airport in Ulwe node of the city), and in the third phase, the line will link the Pendhar and Taloja MIDC metro stations. The first phase of the line 1 is slated to become operational by 2020 and CIDCO has claimed to make the network of its four lines fully operational by 2022–2023 along with operationalisation of the city’s International Airport in Ulwe node. The cost of the metro project has risen from 4,163 crore for 21.45 km in 2011 to 8,904 crore for 26.26 km in 2018.

The city boasts a reliable supply of electricity from various sources, and excellent motoring conditions, with numerous flyovers, broad roads, and parking lots. A hovercraft service from Vashi to Colaba and the CBD to Colaba did not succeed due to the high cost of tickets and maintenance. CIDCO is planning to relaunch its hovercraft service from Vashi, Belapur, Nerul and Airoli to Gateway of India.

There are adequate utility services, banks, restaurants, malls, multiplexes and other shops in Navi Mumbai. The City boasts several shopping malls such as Little World Mall, Glomax Mall, Prime mall and Pacific Mall in the most developed node of Navi Mumbai, Kharghar; K-Mall and the Orion Mall in Panvel node of the city; Center One, Palm Beach Galleria, Citi Center, Raghuleela Mall and Inorbit Mall in Vashi, along with the Seawoods Nexus Mall in Seawoods. Throughout Navi Mumbai, supermarkets and hypermarkets like Big Bazaar, Reliance Smart, Reliance Smart points, Apna Bazaar, More, Spencer’s, Reliance Fresh, Spinach, Daily Bazar and Fairprice cater to the shopping needs of the residents. DMart has launched eight hypermarkets in Navi Mumbai.

Leading banks such as Bank of India, Punjab National Bank, South Indian Bank, State Bank of India, Union Bank, Saraswat Bank, Bank of Baroda, AXIS Bank, Canara Bank, Oriental Bank of Commerce, Central Bank of India, Bank of Maharashtra, State Bank of Hyderabad, Citibank India, ICICI Bank, Jammu & Kashmir Bank, Citi Bank, HSBC Bank and HDFC Bank have their branches and ATMs around Navi Mumbai. The Reserve Bank of India has served the people of Navi Mumbai since 2001.

Navi Mumbai has some three-star and five-star hotels; namely Royal Tulip (five-star hotel in Kharghar), The Hotel Three Star (In Kharghar), The Park (Belapur CBD), Fortune Select Exotica-Member ITC Hotel Group (Vashi), The Regenza by Tunga (Vashi), Four Points by Sheraton (Vashi) & Hotel Yogi Executive (Vashi) to name a few.

The Navi Mumbai Special Economic Zone (SEZ) located in the nodes of Dronagiri and Kalamboli are planned to provide commercial growth and employment to the city. Positioned en route to the proposed Navi Mumbai Airport, this megaproject has attracted investments of close to 40,000 crores.[citation needed] Navi Mumbai is a new hub for newly incorporated companies & start ups to establish their base in Mumbai. As per the list of newly incorporated companies in Navi Mumbai around 500 new & startup companies were registered in and around the region every month.[citation needed]

Cricket is the most popular sport in the city. Navi Mumbai has its own International Cricket Stadium in Shiravne (Nerul) called the DY Patil Stadium which hosts IPL T-20 matches, including hosting the 2008 and 2010 IPL finals. It was one of the two venues for the inaugural edition of the Women’s Premier League (WPL) in 2023. It is also the home ground for the Indian Super League football club Mumbai City FC. The Fr. Agnel Stadium in Vashi is the training ground of the team.[citation needed]

Navi Mumbai was one of the host cities of the 2017 FIFA U-17 Men’s World Cup and the 2022 FIFA U-17 Women’s World Cup with the DY Patil Stadium hosting the final of the event in 2022.

Navi Mumbai Sports Association is the oldest sports complex in Navi Mumbai, NMSA has contributed significantly to the sports world by creating international level athletes from Navi Mumbai. Navi Mumbai has an Olympic-size swimming pool at Nerul. CIDCO has proposed two 18-hole golf course academies at Nerul and Kharghar. There are plans to have sports facilities in the proposed 80 hectare Central Park being developed in Kharghar. The CIDCO has also constructed an 11-hole golf course in Kharghar near Central Park.[citation needed]

Provision of schools and colleges was priority in the planning of Navi Mumbai. The nodes (townships) were designed to provide one primary school per 5,000 populations, one high school for 12,500 populations and one college for 50,000 population.

Each of the nodes is self-sufficient in terms of providing quality education. Students are given access to various syllabi, including the State Education Board, CBSE, IGCSE, IB and ICSE patterns. Other than this, CIDCO encouraged private institutions as well.

About 22.5% of the total population is considered to be school-going children. Most students attend school and college within their node (township). 76% of the students walk to their school or college, 12% use public transport, 10% use bicycles and only 2% travel by school bus.

A number of premier schools and colleges have been set up in Navi Mumbai. And not just local students, but students from Mumbai and even outside come to Navi Mumbai in their quest for quality education. As such, Navi Mumbai is quickly acquiring the title of educational hub.