The Chinese language has an attested history spanning more than three millennia, and linguists have reconstructed forms spoken millennia prior to the earliest known examples of written Chinese . Chinese may be viewed either as a holistic unit with great internal topological variation, or as an entire language family comprising many groupings of varieties. Written Chinese makes use of Chinese characters, one of the four independent inventions of writing agreed by scholars, and the only one of these remaining in use. Speakers and readers exhibit a high degree of diglossia between both local varieties and Standard Chinese, and between written and spoken language. The historically predominant written form of the language is known as Literary Chinese.
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