The number of frequently used Chinese characters is decreasing, a new survey of the Ministry of Education and the State Language Commission shows.

To understand 90 percent of the content in Chinese publications, people have to learn only about 900 Chinese characters and 11,000 phrases, according to the survey on the current situation of Chinese language.

The survey is based on 900 million characters in more than 8.9 million text files chosen from newspapers, magazines, TV stations and the Internet.

The report, the first of its kind issued in China, also shows that a large number of characters, which were rarely used in the past, now appear more often in publications.

Among the first 7,000 characters ranked according to frequency of usage in the research, about 615 are not in the existing 7,000-character table of the standard Chinese that was made nearly20 years ago.

Among the words used on the Internet, more than 55 percent are symbols or letters, exceeding Chinese characters, according to the survey.

The survey also shows that many of the 100 languages used by various ethnic minorities of China are at the brink of extinction.

(Xinhua News Agency May 23, 2006)