Chinese language search marketing

Chinese - mammoth Mandarin leads the way

The Chinese language: an introduction

Chinese is simply the biggest language in the world - providing that you treat each of its mutually unintelligble varieties as dialects and not languages. In total, there are twice as many speakers as English as a mother tongue language - and it has one of the most ancient character sets. These days Mandarin is considered to be the 'standard' although Chinese has many dialects The major Chinese dialects - other than Mandarin are:

Wu - 80 million speakers - Shanghai area
Cantonese - 50 million speakers - extreme southern provinces
Min - 40 million speakers - Fukien province
Hsiang - 40 million speakers - Hunan province
Hakka - 30 million speakers - Szechwan, Kwangtung, Kwangsi, Fukien provinces and Taiwan

How many speakers are there of the Chinese language?

Mandarin is spoken by some 900 million people - mainly in China.

What Chinese language issues do I need to watch out for?

Targeting Chinese is very demanding. The character set of the language was developed over 4000 years ago and was one of the world's first written scripts. The simplest way to think of Chinese characters is to see them representing syllables - although the reality is a little more complex - but the language is NOT pictographic as some people perceive.

Two main Chinese character sets are in use today:

Simplified - introduced brought in 1955 to improve Chinese language literacy by reducing the number of characters.

Traditional - still used by rejectors of traditional in areas such as Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong. Chinese dialects are tonal in nature - which means the similar sounding words (homophones) - are distinguished only by the rising or falling tone of the speaker.

Particular issues for search marketers include dealing with the wide variety of input methods which Chinese speakers use to interact with computers and the web which includes:

Pinyin
Double pinyin
wubi (various varieties)
Contextual character suggestion and selection methods
Handwritten characters with electronic recognition

The above methods have a direct impact on search marketing - and there are over 15 different methods of input.

Which major search engines are important to Chinese speakers?

Which paid search engines target the Chinese - speaking world?

Baidu
Google Adwords
Yahoo Search Marketing

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