Old Chinese (), or Archaic Chinese as used by linguist Bernhard Karlgren, refers to the Chinese spoken from the Shang Dynasty (Chinese Bronze Age, ended in the 11th century BC), well into the Former Han Dynasty (206 BC to 9 AD). There are several distinct sub-periods within that long period of time. The term, in contrast to Middle Chinese and Modern Chinese, is usually used in historical Chinese phonology, which tries to reconstruct the way in which Old Chinese was pronounced.

Since Old Chinese was the language spoken by the Chinese when classical works such as the Analects of Confucius, the Mencius, and the Tao Te Ching were written, and was the official language of the unified empire of the Qin Dynasty and long-lasting Han Dynasty, Old Chinese was preserved for the following two millennia in the form of Classical Chinese, a style of written Chinese that emulates the grammar and vocabulary of Old Chinese as presented in those works.

Periodisation

The earliest known evidence of the Chinese language are the so-called oracle bone inscriptions from the late Shang state, about 1200 BC. Despite the difficulties in deciphering these inscriptions, there is no question that the language written is an early form of Chinese. The language has been called "archaic" and its use extends to the very early Zhou, being found exclusively on oracle bone inscriptions and bronze vessels. The archaic vocabulary consists of between 3,000 and 4,000 words, most of which are proper nouns. Grammatically the language is far less characterised by overtly analysable syntactic constructions than standard Classical Chinese, and has far fewer grammatical particles.

In the following Western Zhou period, there began to be a profusion of written texts. The language, sometimes called "Pre-Classical", retained a succinctness of style and grammar, but there were noticeable expansions in specialised vocabulary and occasional use of overt syntactic constructions.

The four centuries from 600 to 200 BC have been called the "golden age of Classical Chinese literature and philosophy". From this period "Classical Chinese", which was the written standard until the twentieth century, was passed down. Works from the period, such as the Analects and the Mencius have been viewed from the Han period to the present day as models of Classical Chinese prose style. Bronze inscriptions from this period are numerous but are outnumbered by the transmitted texts. The texts of the period were written in ink on bamboo, wood strips, and toward the end of the period, on silk.

Phonology

Since Chinese is written with logographic characters, not letters, it is not easy to trace changes to the sound of Chinese over time. Attempts to reconstruct Old Chinese have nearly always proceeded from first reconstructing Middle Chinese with the use of riming dictionaries and rime tables from the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties.

No rime tables for Old Chinese exist, so scholars have had to rely on indirect evidence to reconstruct Old Chinese. They heavily rely on those rhymed pre-Qin texts, chiefly Shi Jing, and the fact that characters sharing the same phonetic component were homophones or near-homophones when the characters were first created. The reconstruction of Old Chinese began when Gu Yanwu of the Qing Dynasty divided the sounds of Old Chinese into ten rime groups (韵部 yunbu). Other Qing scholars followed Gu's steps, refining the division. The Swedish sinologist Bernhard Karlgren was the first person to reconstruct Old Chinese with Latin alphabet (not IPA).
E. G. Pulleyblank has constructed a reasonably complete picture of the phonological and morphological structures of Old Chinese. The phonetic values reconstructed for the Old Chinese finals are based on the set of distinctions by the Shi Jing rime groups, and therefore reflect a date of about the sixth century BC. The reconstruction of the initials, by contrast, is based on extrapolating from the consonants reconstructed for the finals coupled with Pulleybank's hypothesis that the set of twenty-two signs known as the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches (ganzhi) represents an exhaustive and non-repeating inventory of the consonants in the language. The phonetic values of the ganzhi set can be traced to Shang inscriptions at least, ca. 1200 BC.

There is much dispute over the phonology of Old Chinese. Today it is agreed that Old Chinese had consonant clusters such as *kl- and gl-, which do not occur in any modern Chinese dialect. However, the following issues are still open to debate:

• that Old Chinese had pharyngealized consonants or other rare features.

• that Old Chinese was not monosyllabic.

• that Early Old Chinese was not a tonal language. The tones of Middle Chinese evolved from consonants in Old Chinese that had since changed or disappeared.

Script

Chinese writing is first known from Shang oracle bone and bronze inscriptions found at Anyang, although there is also evidence that writing may have been done in bamboo or wooden strips. Chinese writing was probably invented much earlier than 1200 BC, developing according to the same pattern that characterised Egyptian hieroglyphic and Mesopotamian cuneiform writing. (For example, many characters had already undergone extensive simplification and linearization; the processes of semantic extension and phonetic loan had also clearly been at work for some time, at least hundreds of years and perhaps longer.) That is, early writing progressed through three developmental stages: (1) the zodiographic, (2) the multivalent, (3) the determinative.

At the zodiographic stage, writing first arose through a process of depicting realistically actual objects or easily portrayable actions or relations.

Lexicon

The traditional view is that Chinese is an analytic language without inflection. However, since Henri Maspero's pioneering work, there have been scholars seriously studying the morphology of Old Chinese. Sagart (1999) provides a summary of these efforts, and a word-list based on his work is available at the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database .

Grammar

The grammar of Old Chinese is not identical to that of Classical Chinese. Many usages found in Classical Chinese are absent in Old Chinese.
For example, the word 其 (qí) can be used as a third-person pronoun (he/she/it/they) in Classical Chinese, but not in Old Chinese, where it serves as a third-person possessive adjective (his/her/its/their).

There is no copula in Old Chinese, the copula 是 (shì) in Middle and modern Chinese being a near demonstrative ("this", which equals 這 (zhè) traditional or 这 simplified in modern Chinese) in Old Chinese.

Non-Chinese loanwords and influences

Old Chinese has been classified as a part of a large Sino-Tibetan language family. The hypothesis is based almost entirely on phonetic comparison between Middle Chinese or Old Chinese words, and words from one or more Tibeto-Burmese languages, usually classical Written Tibetan and Written Burmese. An example is the Old Chinese word for "I", pronounced ngag, compared with the Tibetan nga and Burmese ŋa''. The Sino-Tibetan hypothesis postulates not only that Chinese and Tibeto-Burmese speakers were once geographically proximate, but also of a common ultimate source at a much earlier time. Disavowal of the Sino-Tibetan hypothesis, on the other hand, means that all of the seeming cognates must be explained as language borrowings, some perhaps as late as the period of Old Chinese.

Jerry Norman and Mei Tsu-lin have identified a stratum of early Austroasiatic loanwords in Old Chinese, probably a result of contact between languages in south China. Possible sources of Austroasiatic loanwords were the people known to ancient Chinese as the Yue, and perhaps even the Yi.