153-480: WeChat or Weixin in Chinese ( Chinese : 微信 ; pinyin : Wēixìn ( listen ) ; lit. 'micro-message') is a Chinese instant messaging , social media , and mobile payment app developed by Tencent . First released in 2011, it became the world's largest standalone mobile app in 2018 with over 1 billion monthly active users . WeChat has been described as China 's "app for everything" and
306-736: A border dispute between India and China, WeChat was banned in India in June 2020 along with several other Chinese apps, including TikTok . U.S. president Donald Trump sought to ban U.S. "transactions" with WeChat through an executive order but was blocked by a preliminary injunction issued in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California in September 2020. Joe Biden officially dropped Trump's efforts to ban WeChat in
459-525: A customer relationship . Comparing with the traditional E-business like JD.com and Alibaba , WeChat Business has a large range of influence and profits with less input and lower threshold, which attracts lots of people to join in WeChat business. This is the main profit mode of WeChat Business. The first one is to launch advertisements and provide services through the WeChat Official Account, which
612-464: 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
765-457: 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
918-724: A super-app because of its wide range of functions. WeChat provides text messaging, hold-to-talk voice messaging, broadcast (one-to-many) messaging, video conferencing, video games, mobile payment, sharing of photographs and videos and location sharing. Accounts registered using Chinese phone numbers are managed under the Weixin brand, and their data is stored in mainland China and subject to Weixin's terms of service and privacy policy, which forbids content which "endanger[s] national security , divulge[s] state secrets , subvert[s] state power and undermine[s] national unity ". Non-Chinese numbers are registered under WeChat, and WeChat users are subject to
1071-455: 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
1224-595: A Shanghai resident may speak both Standard Chinese and Shanghainese ; if they grew up elsewhere, they are also likely fluent in the dialect of their home region. In addition to Standard Chinese, a majority of Taiwanese people also speak Taiwanese Hokkien (also called 台語 ; 'Taiwanese' ), Hakka , or an Austronesian language . A speaker in Taiwan may mix pronunciations and vocabulary from Standard Chinese and other languages of Taiwan in everyday speech. In part due to traditional cultural ties with Guangdong , Cantonese
1377-509: A WeChat ID could not be changed more than once. On 17 June 2020, WeChat released a new add-on called "WeChat Nudge". The feature was first introduced in MSN Messenger 7.0, in 2005. The feature was called Buzz in Yahoo! Messenger and the feature had interoperability with MSN Messenger's Nudge. Similar to Messenger and Yahoo, users can access WeChat Nudge by double-clicking on other users' profiles in
1530-848: A backing track to the song. In response, began creating a "crowdsourced" project called Ratatouille the Musical . Since Mertzlufft's video, many new elements including costume design, additional songs, and a playbill have been created. On 1 January 2021, a full one-hour virtual presentation of Ratatouille the Musical premiered on TodayTix . It starred Titus Burgess as Remy, Wayne Brady as Django, Adam Lambert as Emile, Kevin Chamberlin as Gusteau, Andrew Barth Feldman as Linguini, Ashley Park as Colette, Priscilla Lopez as Mabel, Mary Testa as Skinner, and André De Shields as Ego. A viral TikTok trend known as " devious licks " involves students vandalizing or stealing school property and posting videos of
1683-498: A backlash from users of Instagram, Spotify, and Twitter. In March 2022, The Washington Post reported that Facebook's owner Meta Platforms paid Targeted Victory—a consulting firm backed by supporters of the U.S. Republican Party —to coordinate lobbying and media campaigns against TikTok and portray it as "a danger to American children and society". Its efforts included asking local reporters to serve as "back channels" of anti-TikTok messages, writing opinion articles and letters to
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#17328526517151836-691: A balance by linking their Weixin account to their debit cards, or by receiving money from other users. For non-Chinese users of Weixin Pay, an additional identity verification process of providing a photo of a valid ID is required before certain functions of Weixin Pay become available. Users who link their credit card can only make payments to vendors, and cannot use this to top up WeChat balances. Weixin Pay can be used for digital payments, as well as payments from participating vendors. As of March 2016, Weixin Pay had over 300 million users. Weixin Pay's main competitor in China and
1989-462: 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
2142-597: 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 (Taiwan), one of the four official languages of Singapore , and one of
2295-700: 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
2448-400: A deal was confirmed between ByteDance and Oracle in which the latter will serve as a partner to provide cloud hosting. In November 2020, TikTok signed a licensing deal with Sony Music . In December 2020, Warner Music Group signed a licensing deal with TikTok. The advertising revenue of short video clips is lower than other social media: while users spend more time, American audience
2601-664: A different, less strict terms of service and stricter privacy policy, and their data is stored in the Netherlands for users in the European Union, and in Singapore for other users. User activity on Weixin, the Chinese version of the app, is analyzed, tracked and shared with Chinese authorities upon request as part of the mass surveillance network in China . Chinese-registered Weixin accounts censor politically sensitive topics . Any interactions between Weixin and WeChat users are subject to
2754-459: A feature that allows users to add their own video to an existing video with the original content's audio, have sparked many of these trends. Many stars got their start on musical.ly , which merged with TikTok on 2 August 2018. These include Loren Gray , Baby Ariel , Zach King , Lisa and Lena , Jacob Sartorius , and many others. Loren Gray remained the most-followed individual on TikTok until Charli D'Amelio surpassed her on 25 March 2020. Gray's
2907-515: A limit on direct messages. The app expanded its parental controls feature called "Family Pairing" in September 2020 to provide parents and guardians with educational resources to understand what children on TikTok are exposed to. Content for the feature was created in partnership with online safety nonprofit, Internet Matters . In October 2021, TikTok launched a test feature that allows users to directly tip certain creators. Accounts of users that are of age, have at least 100,000 followers and agree to
3060-622: A major part in making " Old Town Road " by Lil Nas X one of the biggest songs of 2019 and the longest-running number-one song in the history of the US Billboard Hot 100 . TikTok has allowed many music artists to gain a wider audience, often including foreign fans. For example, despite never having toured in Asia, the band Fitz and the Tantrums developed a large following in South Korea following
3213-401: A major platform, in contrast to Warner Music, which had recently renewed its own licensing deal with TikTok. In March 2024, Universal Music Publishing Group removed its catalogue of 4 million compositions from TikTok. In April 2024, Taylor Swift 's music returned to the platform. The app has spawned numerous viral trends , internet celebrities , and music trends around the world. Duets,
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#17328526517153366-422: A message recall feature to allow users to recall and withdraw information (e.g. Images, documents) that are sent within 2 minutes in a conversation. To use this feature, users can select the message or file to be recalled by long pressing. In the menu that appears select 'recall' and 'ok' to complete the withdrawal process. Eventually, the selected messages or files will be removed from the WeChat chatting box on both
3519-564: A millennium. The Four Commanderies of Han were established in northern Korea in the 1st 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
3672-504: A model compared to how they fit on a typical consumer resonated with many who had believed that they were alone in their struggle. Content promoting cosmetic surgery is popular on TikTok and has spawned several viral trends on the platform. In December 2021, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery , the journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons , published an article about the popularity of some plastic surgeons on TikTok. In
3825-430: A mutual friend group. For example, friends from high school are not able to see the comments and likes from friends from a university. When users post their moments, they can separate their friends into a few groups, and they can decide whether this Moment can be seen by particular groups of people. Contents posted can be set to "Private", and then only the user can view it. Unlike Weibo or Instagram, these are only shared to
3978-670: A new app called TikTok Notes. The app is not released yet; however, TikTok confirmed it is being working on. TikTok Notes will be a direct competitor to Instagram for photo sharing. Jasmine Enberg, a principal social media analyst at eMarketer , observes that launching Notes as a separate app, instead of as a new feature in TikTok, may be done in response to regulatory and consumer scrutiny. On 18 April, Notes first released to users in Canada and Australia for limited testing. The mobile app allows users to create short videos, which often feature music in
4131-438: A new version of WeChat has added seven major functions for the iOS 8.0.17, Android 8.0.18 or newer version users. In the function of Personal Information Authority, users can check the number of times personal information has been edited in the past year through the personal information collection list, including head portrait, name, mobile number, gender, region, personalized signature, and address. On March 30, 2022, according to
4284-784: A paid photo on "Moments" and other users could pay to see the photo and comment on it. The photos were taken down each night. In 2014, Burberry partnered with WeChat to create its own WeChat apps around its fall 2014 runway show, giving users live streams from the shows. Another brand, Michael Kors used WeChat to give live updates from their runway show, and later to run a photo contest "Chic Together WeChat campaign". In 2016, L'Oréal China cooperated with Papi Jiang to promote their products. Over one million people watched her first video promoting L'Oreal's beauty brand MG. In 2016, WeChat partnered with 60 Italian companies (WeChat had an office in Milan) who were able to sell their products and services on
4437-538: 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
4590-480: A series of order fulfillment centers in the US and is reportedly planning to start the new live shopping business before the end of the year. The Financial Times reported that TikTok will launch a video gaming channel, but the report was denied in a statement to Digiday , with TikTok instead aiming to be a social hub for the gaming community. According to data from app analytics group Sensor Tower, advertising on TikTok in
4743-503: 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
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4896-678: 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
5049-406: A specific video, over which it is placed in a small window that is movable around the screen. Its "duet" feature allows users to film a video aside from another video. The "duet" feature was another trademark of musical.ly . The duet feature is also only able to be used if both parties adjust the privacy settings. Videos that users do not want to post yet can be stored in their "drafts". The user
5202-447: A trend known as the #NoseJobCheck trend was going viral on TikTok. TikTok content creators used a specific audio on their videos while showing how their noses looked before and after having their rhinoplasty surgeries. By January 2021, the hashtag #nosejob had accumulated 1.6 billion views, #nosejobcheck had accumulated 1 billion views, and the audio used in the #NoseJobCheck trend had been used in 120,000 videos. In 2020, Charli D'Amelio,
5355-533: A type of account, they cannot change it to another type. By the end of 2014, the number of WeChat official accounts had reached 8 million. Official accounts of organizations can apply to be verified (cost 300 RMB or about US$ 45). Official accounts can be used as a platform for services such as hospital pre-registrations, or credit card service. To create an official account, the applicant must register with Chinese authorities, which discourages "foreign companies". In April 2022, WeChat announced that it will start displaying
5508-610: 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 dating to 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
5661-563: A variety of Yue from a small coastal area around Taishan, Guangdong . In parts of South China, the dialect of a major city may be only marginally intelligible to its neighbors. For example, Wuzhou and Taishan are located approximately 260 km (160 mi) and 190 km (120 mi) away from Guangzhou respectively, but the Yue variety spoken in Wuzhou is more similar to the Guangzhou dialect than
5814-914: A week after creating a Douyin account. TikTok food trends are specific food recipes and food-related fads on the social media platform TikTok. This content amassed popularity in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic , given that many were inclined to eat at home while simultaneously turning to social media as a form of entertainment. While some TikTok users share their diets and recipes, others expand their brand or image on TikTok through step-by-step videos of easy and popular recipes. Users often refer to food-related content as "FoodTok." "Midsize" fashion gained greater exposure on TikTok after many creators opened up about not able to find clothing sizes that fit them well. Women's apparel can roughly be divided into petite, straight, and plus sizes, leaving gaps in between. Realistic videos about how differently pieces of garment fit on
5967-533: Is Douyin , is a short-form video hosting service owned by Chinese internet company ByteDance . It hosts user-submitted videos, which can range in duration from three seconds to 60 minutes. It can be accessed with a smart phone app or the web. Since its launch, TikTok has become one of the world's most popular social media platforms, using recommendation algorithms to connect content creators with new audiences. In April 2020, TikTok surpassed two billion mobile downloads worldwide. Cloudflare ranked TikTok
6120-596: Is Taishanese. Wuzhou is located directly upstream from Guangzhou on the Pearl River , whereas Taishan is to Guangzhou's southwest, with the two cities separated by several river valleys. In parts of Fujian , the speech of some neighbouring counties or villages is mutually unintelligible. Local varieties of Chinese are conventionally classified into seven dialect groups, largely based on the different evolution of Middle Chinese voiced initials: Proportions of first-language speakers The classification of Li Rong , which
6273-532: Is a digital wallet service incorporated into Weixin, which allows users to perform mobile payments and send money between contacts. Although users receive immediate notification of the transaction, the Weixin Pay system is not an instant payment instrument, because the funds transfer between counterparts is not immediate. The settlement time depends on the payment method chosen by the customer. All Weixin users have their own Weixin Pay accounts. Users can acquire
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6426-492: Is a B2C mode. This mode has been used by many hospitals, banks, fashion brands, internet companies and personal blogs because the Official Account can access online payment, location sharing, voice messages, and mini-games. It is like a 'mini app', so the company has to hire specific staff to manage the account. By 2015, there were more than 100 million WeChat Official Accounts on this platform. WeChat salesperson in this mode
6579-474: Is a feed of videos that are recommended to users based on their activity on the app. Content is curated by TikTok's artificial intelligence depending on the content a user liked, interacted with, or searched. This helps users find new content and creators reach new audiences, in contrast to other social networks that base recommendations on the interactions and relationships between users. TikTok's algorithm, recognized by The New York Times in 2020 as one of
6732-480: Is a function in WeChat for protecting users under 14 years old. It was introduced to promote safety and provide security environment for WeChat users. After operating the Guardian Mode, the functions of "people nearby", "games", "search" will not be accessible in the interface. The channels function in WeChat, a video mini program, would only show contents suitable for adolescents. Additionally, WeChat users who turn on
6885-689: Is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China , as well as by various communities of the Chinese diaspora . Approximately 1.35 billion people, or 17% 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
7038-487: Is allowed to see their "drafts" and post when they find it fitting. The app allows users to set their accounts as "private". When first downloading the app, the user's account is public by default. The user can change to private in their settings. Private content remains visible to TikTok but is blocked from TikTok users who the account holder has not authorized to view their content. Users can choose whether any other user, or only their "friends", may interact with them through
7191-415: Is available and could also translate the conversation during messaging. WeChat supports different instant messaging methods, including text messages, voice messages, walkie talkie, and stickers. Users can send previously saved or live pictures and videos, profiles of other users, coupons, lucky money packages, or current GPS locations with friends either individually or in a group chat. WeChat also provides
7344-485: Is called either 华语 ; 華語 ; Huáyǔ 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. Diglossia is common among Chinese speakers. For example,
7497-506: Is for promoting products by individuals, which belongs to C2C mode. In this mode, individual sellers post relevant photos and messages of their agent products on the WeChat Moments or WeChat groups and sell products to their WeChat friends. Besides, they develop friendships with their customers by sending messages in festivals or write comments under their updates on WeChat moments to increase their trust. Also, continuing to communicate with
7650-593: Is home to only one-fifth of Internet users globally. If we don't expand on a global scale, we are bound to lose to peers eyeing the four-fifths. So, going global is a must." ByteDance created TikTok as a global version of Douyin. TikTok was launched in the international market in September 2017. On 9 November 2017, ByteDance spent nearly $ 1 billion to purchase Musical.ly , a startup headquartered in Shanghai with an overseas office in Santa Monica , California . Musical.ly
7803-499: Is monetized at a rate of $ 0.31 per hour, a third the rate of Facebook and a fifth the rate of Instagram, $ 67 per year while Instagram will make more than $ 200. In July 2023, Iranian Mehr News Agency reported "experts from Douyin" will meet Iranian business in Tehran to enable Iranian exports to China. In 2023, several high-level executives transferred from ByteDance to TikTok to focus on moneymaking operations. Some moved from Beijing to
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#17328526517157956-595: 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 morphemes are monosyllabic—in contrast, English has many multi-syllable morphemes, both bound and free , such as 'seven', 'elephant', 'para-' and '-able'. Some of
8109-445: 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
8262-450: Is only available for those who have at least 1,000 followers and are over 16 years old. If over 18, the user's followers can send virtual "gifts" that can be later exchanged for money. TikTok announced a "family safety mode" in February 2020 for parents to be able to control their children's presence on the app. There is a screen time management option, restricted mode, and the option to put
8415-494: Is owned by founders and Chinese investors, other global investors, and employees. One of ByteDance's main domestic subsidiaries is owned by Chinese state funds and entities through a 1% golden share . Employees have reported that multiple overlaps exist between TikTok and ByteDance in terms of personnel management and product development. TikTok says that since 2020, its US-based CEO is responsible for making important decisions, and has downplayed its China connection. Douyin
8568-462: Is set to diversify further and place more emphasis on new products and services like WeChat Channels, amid new regulatory restrictions imposed in China. By June 2021, WeChat Channels had accumulated over 200 million users, and WeChat Channels have 500 million DAU (Daily Active Users), growing at 79% year-on -year. More than 27 million people had used the platform to watch Irish boy band Westlife 's online concert in 2021, and 15 million users also viewed
8721-668: 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
8874-484: 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,
9027-496: Is used as an everyday 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
9180-497: Is used in education, media, formal speech, and everyday life—though Mandarin is increasingly taught in schools due to the mainland's growing influence. Historically, the Chinese language has spread to its neighbors through a variety of means. Northern Vietnam was incorporated into the Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE) in 111 BCE, marking the beginning of a period of Chinese control that ran almost continuously for
9333-540: 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 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
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#17328526517159486-428: 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
9639-735: The Qieyun rime dictionary (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
9792-551: The COVID-19 pandemic . However, it has received criticism for not paying royalties to artists whose music is used on the platform. Classic stars are able to connect with younger audiences born decades after a musician's first debut and across traditional genres. In 2020 Fleetwood Mac 's "Dreams" was used in a skating video and a recreation by Mick Fleetwood . The song re-entered Billboard Hot 100 after 43 years and topped Apple Music. In 2022, Kate Bush 's " Running Up That Hill " went viral among fans of Stranger Things , topping
9945-736: The Chinese government through ByteDance. TikTok Ltd was incorporated in the Cayman Islands and is based in both Singapore and Los Angeles . It owns four entities that are based respectively in the United States, Australia (which also runs the New Zealand business), United Kingdom (also owns subsidiaries in the European Union ), and Singapore (owns operations in Southeast Asia and India). Its parent company, Beijing -based ByteDance ,
10098-504: The Hong Kong dollar . In 2019 it was reported that Chinese users can use WeChat Pay in 25 countries outside China , including, Italy , South Africa and the UK . For work purposes, companies and business communication, a special version of WeChat called WeCom (formally known as Enterprise WeChat (or Qiye Weixin) and WeChat Work before Nov 2020) was launched in 2016. The app was meant to help employees separate work from private life. In addition to
10251-525: 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
10404-680: 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
10557-579: 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. In Hong Kong and Macau , Cantonese is the dominant spoken language due to cultural influence from Guangdong immigrants and colonial-era policies, and
10710-505: The Shenzhou 12 spaceflight launch using the app service. In September 2021, WeChat introduced a brand-new feature on its platform called Easy Mode. It was mainly designed for elderly people with higher readability by providing a larger font size, sharper colours, and bigger buttons. Another feature provided in this update was the ability to listen to text messages. Easy Mode was released in version 8.0.14 for both iOS and Android. Guardian Mode
10863-586: The most popular website of 2021, surpassing Google . The popularity of TikTok has allowed viral trends in food and music to take off and increase the platform's cultural impact worldwide. TikTok has come under scrutiny due to data privacy violations, mental health concerns, misinformation , offensive content, and its role during the Israel–Hamas war . Countries have fined, banned, or attempted to restrict TikTok to protect children or out of national security concerns over possible user data collection by
11016-473: The oracle bone inscriptions created during 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
11169-591: 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
11322-680: 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. TikTok TikTok , whose mainland Chinese and Hong Kong counterpart
11475-646: The Chinese market without having to get a license to operate a business in China. In 2017, Andrea Ghizzoni, European director of Tencent, said that 95 percent of global luxury brands used WeChat. In 2020 Burberry and WeChat collaborated to design a shop in Shenzhen where Burberry has a flagship store, as well as an app allowing shoppers to interact with the shop digitally. Chinese language Chinese ( simplified Chinese : 汉语 ; traditional Chinese : 漢語 ; pinyin : Hànyǔ ; lit. ' Han language' or 中文 ; Zhōngwén ; 'Chinese writing')
11628-465: The Chinese version of TikTok, some celebrities who had garnered large followings as of August 2019 include Dilraba Dilmurat , Angelababy , Luo Zhixiang , Ouyang Nana , and Pan Changjiang . In the 2022 FIFA World Cup , a Qatari teenage royal became an Internet celebrity after his angry expressions were recorded in Qatar's opening match loss to Ecuador; he amassed more than 15 million followers in less than
11781-399: The Guardian Mode are only able to add friends through QR codes and group chats. Moreover, WeChat users would only be able to view 10 latest Moments posts and would not be able to view the 10 latest Moments posts of non-friend users under the privacy setting of Guardian Mode. In January 2016, Tencent launched WeChat Out, a VOIP service allowing users to call mobile phones and landlines around
11934-555: The Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet . English words of Chinese origin include tea from Hokkien 茶 ( tê ), dim sum from Cantonese 點心 ( dim2 sam1 ), and kumquat from Cantonese 金橘 ( gam1 gwat1 ). The sinologist Jerry Norman has 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
12087-675: The U.S. National Football League (NFL) announced a multi-year partnership. The agreement occurred just two days before the NFL's 100th season kick-off at Soldier Field , where TikTok hosted activities for fans in honor of the deal. The partnership entails the launch of an official NFL TikTok account, which is to bring about new marketing opportunities such as sponsored videos and hashtag challenges . In July 2020, TikTok, excluding Douyin, reported close to 800 million monthly active users worldwide after less than four years of existence. In May 2021, TikTok appointed Shou Zi Chew as their new CEO who assumed
12240-648: The U.S. in June 2021. WeChat provides a variety of features including text messaging, hold-to-talk voice messaging, broadcast (one-to-many) messaging, video calls and conferencing, video games, photograph and video sharing, as well as location sharing. WeChat also allows users to exchange contacts with people nearby via Bluetooth , as well as providing various features for contacting people at random if desired (if people are open to it). It can also integrate with other social networking services such as Facebook and Tencent QQ . Photographs may also be embellished with filters and captions, and automatic translation service
12393-700: The UK singles chart 37 years after its original release. In 2023 Kylie Minogue 's " Padam Padam " entered the Radio 1 playlist after being shared by Gen Z , even though many youth radio stations had refused to play it. Other older artists with strong engagement on TikTok include Elton John and Rod Stewart . In June 2020, TikTok users and K-pop fans "claimed to have registered potentially hundreds of thousands of tickets" for President Trump's campaign rally in Tulsa through communication on TikTok, contributing to "rows of empty seats" at
12546-497: The US grew by 11% in March 2023, with companies including Pepsi , DoorDash , Amazon and Apple among the top spenders. According to estimates from research group Insider Intelligence, TikTok is projected to generate $ 14.15 billion in revenue in 2023, up from $ 9.89 billion in 2022. In March 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported that TikTok's growth in the U.S. had stagnated. Since at least 2020, following calls to ban TikTok in
12699-505: The US. According to sources for The Wall Street Journal , the personnel move led to concerns from some TikTok employees and was reported to the office of US Senator Ted Cruz for further investigation. In December 2023, TikTok invested $ 1.5 billion in GoTo's Indonesian e-commerce business, Tokopedia . In March 2024, The Information reported that it is an open secret among investors that TikTok loses billions of dollar annually. Although
12852-648: The United States and has reached 2 billion downloads worldwide, according to data from mobile research firm Sensor Tower (those numbers exclude Android users in China). In the United States, celebrities, including Jimmy Fallon and Tony Hawk , began using the app in 2018. Other celebrities, including Jennifer Lopez , Jessica Alba , Will Smith , and Justin Bieber joined TikTok as well as many others. In January 2019, TikTok allowed creators to embed merchandise sale links into their videos. On 3 September 2019, TikTok and
13005-580: The WeChat app. In January 2018, WeChat announced a record of 580,000 mini programs. With one Mini Program, consumers could scan the Quick Response code using their mobile phone at a supermarket counter and pay the bill through the user's WeChat mobile wallet. WeChat Games have received huge popularity, with its "Jump Jump" game attracting 400 million players in less than 3 days and attaining 100 million daily active users in just two weeks after its launch, as of January 2018. Ever since WeChat Mini Program's Launch,
13158-512: The action on the platform. The trend has led to increasing school vandalism and subsequent measures taken by some schools to prevent damage. Some students have been arrested for participating in the trend. TikTok has taken measures to remove and prevent access to content displaying the trend. Another TikTok trend known as the Kia Challenge involves users stealing certain models of Kia and Hyundai cars manufactured without immobilizers , which
13311-420: The app to pay bills, order goods and services, transfer money to other users, and pay in stores if the stores have a Weixin payment option. Vetted third parties, known as "official accounts", offer these services by developing lightweight "apps within the app". Users can link their Chinese bank accounts, as well as Visa , MasterCard and JCB . WeChat Pay, officially referred to as Weixin Pay ( 微信支付 ) in China,
13464-419: The app via comments, messages, or "react" or "duet" videos. Users also can set specific videos to either "public", "friends only", or "private" regardless if the account is private or not. Users can also send their friends videos, emojis , and messages with direct messaging. TikTok has also included a feature to create a video based on the user's comments. Influencers often use the "live" feature. This feature
13617-575: The app was created by Allen Zhang , named "Weixin" ( 微信 ) by Pony Ma, and launched in 2011. The user adoption of WeChat was initially very slow, with users wondering why key features were missing; however, after the release of the Walkie-talkie -like voice messaging feature in May of that year, growth surged. By 2012, when the number of users reached 100 million, Weixin was re-branded "WeChat" by President Martin Lau for
13770-412: The article, it was noted that plastic surgeons were some of the earliest adopters of social media in the medical field and many had been recognized as influencers on the platform. The article published stats about the most popular plastic surgeons on TikTok up to February 2021 and at the time, five different plastic surgeons had surpassed 1 million followers on the platform. In 2021, it was reported that
13923-431: The background and can be sped up, slowed down, or edited with a filter. They can also add their own sound on top of the background music. To create a music video with the app, users can choose background music from a wide variety of music genres , edit with a filter and record a 15-second video with speed adjustments before uploading it to share with others on TikTok or other social platforms. The "For You" page on TikTok
14076-416: The chat. This virtually shakes user's profile photo and sends a vibration notification. Both users must have the latest Wechat update. If a user does not have the latest update they will be unable to nudge another user, but can still receive nudges. A user can only nudge another user if they have previous conversations. Newly added friends without previous messages cannot nudge each other. On January 16, 2022,
14229-453: The contact list can like the content and leave comments, functioning similarly to a private social network. In 2017 WeChat had a policy of a maximum of two advertisements per day per Moments user. Privacy in WeChat works by groups of friends: only the friends from the user's contact are able to view their Moments' contents and comments. The friends of the user will only be able to see the likes and comments from other users only if they are in
14382-678: The country, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) has been investigating the company's 2017 merger with Musical.ly but has not finalized any of its negotiations with TikTok, such as the Project Texas proposal, waiting instead for Congress to act. TikTok was downloaded over 104 million times on Apple's App Store during the first half of 2018, according to data provided to CNBC by Sensor Tower. After merging with musical.ly in August, downloads increased and TikTok became
14535-453: The daily active user count of WeChat Mini Programs are increasing dramatically. In 2017, there were only 160 million daily active users, however, the number reached 450 million in 2021. In 2020, WeChat Channels were launched. They are a short video platform within WeChat that allows users to create and share short video clips and photos to their own WeChat Channel. Users of Channels can also discover content posted to other Channels by others via
14688-399: 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
14841-484: 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
14994-749: The editor , including one in the name of a concerned parent, amplifying stories about TikTok trends, such as "devious licks" and "Slap a Teacher", that actually originated on Facebook, and promoting Facebook's own corporate initiatives. Ties to Meta were not disclosed to the other parties involved. Targeted Victory said that it is "proud of the work". A Meta spokesperson said that all platforms, including TikTok, should face scrutiny. The Wall Street Journal reported that Silicon Valley executives met with US lawmakers to build an "anti-China alliance" before TikTok CEO's congressional hearing in March 2023. In April 2024, TikTok users started receiving notifications that their current and future picture posts would be shown on
15147-566: 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
15300-499: The event. Later, in October 2020, an organization called TikTok for Biden was created to support then-presidential candidate Joe Biden . After the election, the organization was renamed to Gen-Z for Change . On 10 August 2020, Emily Jacobssen wrote and sang "Ode to Remy", a song praising the protagonist from Pixar's 2007 computer-animated film Ratatouille . The song rose to popularity when musician Daniel Mertzlufft composed
15453-413: 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 the 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
15606-491: 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
15759-599: 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 . 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
15912-482: The in-built feed. Each post can include hashtags, a location tag, a short description, and a link to an WeChat official account article. In September 2021, it was reported that WeChat Channels began allowing users to upload hour-long videos, twice of the duration limit previously imposed on all WeChat Channels videos. Comparisons are often drawn between WeChat Channels and TikTok (or Douyin) for their similarity in features. In January 2022, there were reports that WeChat
16065-485: The international market. During a period of government support of e-commerce development—for example in the 12th five-year plan (2011–2015)—WeChat also saw new features enabling payments and commerce in 2013, which saw massive adoption after their virtual Red envelope promotion for Chinese New Year 2014. WeChat had over 889 million monthly active users by 2016, and as of 2019 WeChat's monthly active users had risen to an estimate of one billion. As of January 2022, it
16218-424: The lack of any supervision mechanism in WeChat business also provides opportunities for criminals to continue this illegal behavior. In early 2022, WeChat suspended more than a dozen NFT (non-fungible token) public accounts to clean up crypto speculation and scalping. The crackdown on NFT-related content comes from domestic digital collectibles, which cannot be resold for profit. In a 2016 campaign, users could upload
16371-581: 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 using what are known as Sino-Xenic pronunciations . Chinese words with these pronunciations were also extensively imported into
16524-462: 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 its historical colonization by France, Vietnamese now uses
16677-492: The location of users in China everytime they post on a public account. Meanwhile, overseas users on public accounts will also display the country based on their IP address. "Moments" ( 朋友圈 ) is WeChat's brand name for its social feed of friends' updates. "Moments" is an interactive platform that allows users to post images, text, and short videos taken by users. It also allows users to share articles and music (associated with QQ Music or other web-based music services). Friends in
16830-522: The market leader in online payments is Alibaba Group's Alipay . Alibaba company founder Jack Ma considered Weixin's red envelope feature to be a " Pearl Harbor moment", as it began to erode Alipay's historic dominance in the online payments industry in China, especially in peer-to-peer money transfer. The success prompted Alibaba to launch its own version of virtual red envelopes in its competing Laiwang service. Other competitors, Baidu Wallet and Sina Weibo , also launched similar features. In 2019 it
16983-455: 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 phonetic erosion : 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
17136-733: The most advanced for shaping user experiences and social interactions, stands out from traditional social media. While typical platforms focus on active user actions like likes, clicks, or follows, TikTok monitors a wider array of behaviors during video viewing. This comprehensive observation is then used to refine its algorithms, as noted by Wired in 2020. Furthermore, The Wall Street Journal in 2021 highlighted its superiority over other social media platforms in understanding users' preferences and emotions. TikTok's algorithm leverages this insight to present similar content, creating an environment that users often find hard to disengage from. The app's "react" feature allows users to film their reaction to
17289-469: The most downloaded app in the U.S. in October 2018, which musical.ly had done once before. In February 2019, TikTok, together with Douyin, hit one billion downloads globally, excluding Android installs in China. In 2019, media outlets cited TikTok as the 7th-most-downloaded mobile app of the decade, from 2010 to 2019. It was also the most-downloaded app on Apple's App Store in 2018 and 2019, surpassing Facebook , YouTube and Instagram . In September 2020,
17442-425: 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
17595-583: 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
17748-538: 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 . All varieties of Chinese are tonal at least to some degree, and are largely analytic . The earliest attested written Chinese consists of
17901-406: The parties to communicate with the courts via WeChat, through which parties can file lawsuits, participate in proceedings, present evidence, and listen to verdicts. As of December 2019, more than 3 million parties had used WeChat for litigation. In spring 2020, WeChat users are now able to change their WeChat ID more than once, being allowed to change their username only once per year. Prior to this,
18054-636: The phone was brought in close proximity to the ear. After the receiver was held at a certain distance from the ear, the sensor would then proceed to automatically disable the phone speakers. This feature eliminates the risk of the user's voice messages being inadvertently broadcast to the general public. WeChat users can register as a public account ( 公众号 ), which enables them to push feeds to subscribers, interact with subscribers, and provide subscribers with services. Users can also create an official account, which fall under service, subscription, or enterprise accounts. Once users as individuals or organizations set up
18207-516: The position from interim CEO Vanessa Pappas , following the resignation of Kevin A. Mayer on 27 August 2020. In September 2021, TikTok reported that it had reached 1 billion users. In 2021, TikTok earned $ 4 billion in advertising revenue. In October 2022, TikTok was reported to be planning an expansion into the e-commerce market in the US, following the launch of TikTok Shop in the United Kingdom. The company posted job listings for staff for
18360-404: The rate of change varies immensely. Generally, mountainous South China exhibits more linguistic diversity than the North China Plain . Until the late 20th century, Chinese emigrants to Southeast Asia and North America came from southeast coastal areas, where Min, Hakka, and Yue dialects were spoken. Specifically, most Chinese immigrants to North America until the mid-20th century spoke Taishanese ,
18513-702: The regular customers raises the 'WOF' (word-of-mouth) communications, which influences decision-making. Some WeChat businessmen already have an online shop in Taobao , but use WeChat to maintain existing customers. As more and more people have joined WeChat Business, it has brought many problems. For example, some sellers have begun to sell counterfeit luxury goods such as bags, clothes and watches. Some sellers have disguised themselves as international flight attendants or overseas students to post fake stylish photos on WeChat Moments. They then claim that they can provide overseas purchasing services but sell counterfeit luxury goods at
18666-552: 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
18819-509: 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
18972-468: The relevant laws and regulations of China, in order to prevent the risk of publicity stunts in virtual currency transactions, the Wechat public platform standardized the official account and mini program of secondary sales of digital collections. WeChat Business ( 微商 ) is one of the latest mobile social network business model after e-commerce , which utilizes business relationships and friendships to maintain
19125-428: The same price as the authentic ones. Other popular products selling on WeChat are facial masks. The marketing mode is like that of Amway but most goods are unbranded products which come from illegal factories making excess hormones which could have serious effects on customers' health. However, it is difficult for customers to defend their rights because a large number of sellers' identities are uncertified. Additionally,
19278-433: The sender's and recipient's phones. WeChat also provides a voice-to-text feature that brings convenience when it is not convenient to listen to voice messages, as well as the basic ability to recognize emojis based on different tones of voice, but the privacy leaks involved are also thought-provoking. A distance sensing feature is implemented in WeChat. It has the ability to activate the receivers' hold-to-talk function when
19431-505: 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
19584-563: The size of its user base falls short of that of Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube, TikTok reached 1 billion active monthly users faster than any of them. Competition from TikTok prompted Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, to spend $ 120 million as of 2022 to entice more content creators to its Reels service, although engagement level remained low. Snapchat had likewise paid out $ 250 million in 2021 to its creators. Many platforms and services, including YouTube Shorts , began to imitate TikTok's format and recommendation page. Those changes caused
19737-557: 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
19890-503: The software uses code from the open-source OBS Studio . OBS made a statement saying that, under the GNU GPL version 2, TikTok has to make the code of Live Studio publicly available if it wants to use any code from OBS. In May 2022, TikTok announced TikTok Pulse, an ad revenue-sharing program. It covers the "top 4% of all videos on TikTok" and is only available to creators with more than 100,000 followers. If an eligible creator's video reaches
20043-414: The terms can activate a "Tip" button on their profile, which allows followers to tip any amount, starting from $ 1. In December 2021, TikTok started beta-testing Live Studio, a streaming software that would let users broadcast applications open on their computers, including games. The software also launched with support for mobile and PC streaming. However, a few days later, users on Twitter discovered that
20196-431: The terms of service and privacy policies of both services. By 2010, Tencent had already attained a massive user base with their desktop messenger app QQ . Recognizing smart phones were likely to disrupt this status quo, CEO Pony Ma sought to proactively invest in alternatives to their own QQ messenger app. WeChat began as a project at Tencent Guangzhou Research and Project center in October 2010. The original version of
20349-609: The tonal distinctions, compared with about 5,000 in Vietnamese (still a largely monosyllabic language), and over 8,000 in English. Most modern varieties tend 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
20502-508: The top 4%, they will receive a 50% share of the revenue from ads displayed with the video. In July 2023, TikTok launched a new streaming service called TikTok Music, currently available only in Brazil and Indonesia. This service allows users to listen to, download and share songs. It is reported that TikTok Music features songs from major record companies like Universal Music Group , Sony Music and Warner Music Group. On 19 July 2023, TikTok Music
20655-547: 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
20808-512: 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
20961-502: The user's friends. These are unlikely to go viral. Recently, WeChat launched a new foundation that users can choose to top their posts in their own Moments. No matter how long the posts can be viewed set by users, the posts topped by them can be seen all the time. This foundation enable people to mark some important posts that it will be easy to find them. Besides, users can permanently display some posts while ensuring overall privacy. Users who have provided bank account information may use
21114-536: The usual chat features, the program let companies and their employees keep track of annual leave days and expenses that need to be reimbursed, employees could ask for time off or clock in to show they were at work. In 2017, WeChat launched a feature called "Mini Programs" ( 小程序 ). A mini program is an app within an app. Business owners can create mini apps in the WeChat system, implemented using proprietary versions of CSS , JavaScript , and templated XML JavaScript with proprietary APIs . Users may install these inside
21267-411: The widespread popularity of their 2016 song " HandClap " on the platform. "Any Song" by R&B and rap artist Zico became number one on the Korean music charts due to the popularity of the #anysongchallenge, where users dance to the choreography of the song. The platform has also launched many songs that failed to garner initial commercial success into sleeper hits , particularly since the outbreak of
21420-452: 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
21573-480: The world. The feature allowed purchasing credit within the app using a credit card. WeChat Out was originally only available in the United States, India, and Hong Kong, but later coverage was expanded to Thailand, Macau, Laos, and Italy. In March 2017, Tencent released WeChat Index. By inserting a search term in the WeChat Index page, users could check the popularity of this term in the past 7, 30, or 90 days. The data
21726-508: 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
21879-453: 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 ), was adopted. After much dispute between proponents of northern and southern dialects and an abortive attempt at an artificial pronunciation,
22032-515: Was a social media video platform that allowed users to create short lip-sync and comedy videos, initially released in August 2014. TikTok merged with Musical.ly on 2 August 2018 with existing accounts and data consolidated into one app, keeping the title TikTok. On 23 January 2018, the TikTok app ranked first among free application downloads on app stores in Thailand and other countries. TikTok has been downloaded more than 130 million times in
22185-599: Was a standard feature at the time, between 2010 and 2021. As of February 2023, it had resulted in at least 14 crashes and eight deaths according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration . In May, Kia and Hyundai settled a $ 200-million class-action lawsuit by agreeing to provide software updates to affected vehicles and over 26,000 steering wheel locks. In 2023, a trend emerged where streamers acted as if they were video-game characters following prompts from their viewers. On Douyin,
22338-497: Was expanded for select users in Australia, Mexico and Singapore. Following a dispute with TikTok regarding payouts for artists and regulation of AI-generated music content on the platform, Universal Music Group decided not to renew its licensing agreement with TikTok, causing its catalogue of 3 million recordings to become unavailable for usage after 31 January 2024. This marked the company's first instance of withdrawing its music from
22491-481: 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
22644-720: Was launched by ByteDance in September 2016, originally under the name A.me , before rebranding to Douyin ( 抖音 ) in December 2016. Douyin was developed in 200 days and within a year had 100 million users, with more than one billion videos viewed every day. While TikTok and Douyin share a similar user interface , the platforms operate separately. Douyin includes an in-video search feature that can search by people's faces for more videos of them, along with other features such as buying, booking hotels, and making geo-tagged reviews. ByteDance planned on Douyin expanding overseas. The founder of ByteDance, Zhang Yiming , stated that "China
22797-460: Was mined from data in official WeChat accounts and metrics such as social sharing, likes and reads were used in the evaluation. In May 2017, Tencent started news feed and search functions for its WeChat app. The Financial Times reported this was a "direct challenge to Chinese search engine Baidu ". In 2017, WeChat was reported to be developing an augmented reality (AR) platform as part of its service offering. Its artificial intelligence team
22950-769: Was reported that WeChat has more than 1.2 billion users. After the launch of WeChat payment in 2013, its users reached 400 million the next year, 90 percent of whom were in China. By comparison, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp had about one billion monthly active users in 2016 but did not offer most of the other services available on WeChat. For example, in Q2 2017, WeChat's revenues from social media advertising were about US$ 0.9 billion (RMB6 billion) compared with Facebook's total revenues of US$ 9.3 billion, 98% of which were from social media advertising. WeChat's revenues from its value-added services were US$ 5.5 billion. By 2018, WeChat had been used by 93.5% of Chinese internet users. In response to
23103-454: Was reported that Weixin had overtaken Alibaba with 800 million active Weixin mobile payment users versus 520 million for Alibaba's Alipay. However Alibaba had a 54 per cent share of the Chinese mobile online payments market in 2017 compared to Weixin's 37 per cent share. In the same year, Tencent introduced "WeChat Pay HK", a payment service for users in Hong Kong. Transactions are carried out with
23256-440: Was the first TikTok account to reach 40 million followers on the platform. She was surpassed with 41.3 million followers. D'Amelio was the first to ever reach 50, 60, and 70 million followers. Charli D'Amelio remained the most-followed individual on the platform until she was surpassed by Khaby Lame on 23 June 2022. Other creators rose to fame after the platform merged with musical.ly on 2 August 2018. TikTok also played
23409-414: Was working on a 3D rendering engine to create a realistic appearance of detailed objects in smartphone-based AR apps. They were also developing a simultaneous localization and mapping technology, which would help calculate the position of virtual objects relative to their environment, enabling AR interactions without the need for markers, such as Quick Response codes or special images. Chinese courts allow
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