and Mandarin was never used at all. In Hong Kong, Macau, Guangdong and sometimes Guangxi, the language of daily life, education, formal speech and business remains in the local Cantonese. Due to historic trade and travel of foreign merchants, the Chinese language has adopted a significantly wide array of Japanese words historically which have been adopted in conjunction with Chinese dialect, accent and pronunciation, referred to as the sinification or sinofication (lit. "make, turn or adopt into Chinese") of foreign words. As a result, many lexicographers pass this off due to historical intervention by Chinese historians to not include or forget to include as part of imported foreign words and because of the evolution of languages; most Han characters have a single reading and would have lost the previous vocal reading in correlation to using the new reading institutionally and therefore becoming mainstream. This also applies to Mongolian vocabulary adopted from Southern Mongolia through leading historical figures and dynasties. Written Chinese During the reign of the dynasties, Guanhua ("officials' speech"), which was almost exclusively utilized by the educated people of Peking and bureaucrats (or mandarins), was the most used form of writing. With a standardized writing system for all official documents and communication, unification of the mutually unintelligible spoken dialects was possible. After the establishment of the Chinese Nationalist Party, the 1913 Conference on Unification of Pronunciation planned to widely use and teach Mandarin as the official national standard, changing Guanhua to Guoyu ("National Language"). Continuing previous policies, the People's Republic of China sought to further standardize a common language, now dubbed Putonghua ("Common Speech"), for national and political unity. In aims of reducing the country's approximately 80% illiteracy rate, the "Decision of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee and State Council Concerning Elimination of Illiteracy" of March 1956 solidified the Communist Party's plans to reform the country's traditional characters to a simplified writing system. Besides the standard writing systems promoted by the government, no other written Chinese language has been widely established and utilized to an extent comparable to Standard Chinese. See also Ancient China List of language histories Notes References