漢字 or in simplified shape 汉字 (hanzi in modern standard Mandarin Chinese, one of the several Han languages among Chinese languages), meaning Han (ethnie) script is the script of the main Chinese population, in China for several milleniums. There are not hyeroglyphs (Egyptian script), even if they have in common, as most of all of the planet scripts, pictographic origin.

Beside China, the Han charactees was also the main script used in Koreas (漢字 hanja), Japan (漢字 kanji) and Vietnam (漢字 Hán tự) until the middle of 20th Century. They are often called CJK instead of CJKV, don't know why, Korea as Vietnam don't use them anymore in their everyday script, Vietnam still used it officialy until 1954, the time of French decolonization, where Korea, if I'm not wrong stopped to use it with japanese decolonization in 1945.

Inside 18th and 19th Century China, Mongolians and Tibetan used, probably due to Manchu influence all over China, decoration with rounded shape longevity han character (寿 shou, some thinking that's the near rounded character happiness), also used as first character to describe sushi (寿司) in Japan. They are still used today in independant Mongolian Republic, or by Mongolians of China and Russia too, and by Tibetans, or several mixed culture of Tibetan, Mongolians, Turkic or other minorities cultures.

Chinese Han script (漢字/汉字 hànzì)

As the most spoken language, the number of branchs and administrative divisions, around the world, this is probably the most complex case. I try here to resume the facts.

The commonly called chinese languages, should be called han languages, due to the huge number of cultures (there is a dedicate minstry for schools, dictionnaries, culture protecting of minorities), languages and scripts in China. Han script in han languages are used in China (so called mainland and special administratiion areas, Hong-Kong (from cantonese, xianggang in mandarin), Macao (from portuguese, aomen in mandarin)) han languages speaking/writing countries. Its even one of the recognized languages in U.S.A.. Han languages are classed in what is called in English in Sinetic languages group among sino-tibetan languages family. The Burmese spoke in Myanmar or Lolo, among some other languages, are in this family for good reasons, but nor sinetic nor tibetan, so the name should probably be extended.

I call it dialect something that could be controversials, languists even didn't agree with what is a dialects and if they exists.

Han languages are :

• Mandarin (with five main dialects: standard (official in Mainland, Taiwan, Singapur, semi-official in Malaysia and USA), North (sometimes North-East and North-West are divided), East, South-West (the most spoken dialect on earth)). Sometimes mandarin is divided in 8 regional dialects (archive.is) (Beijing Mandarin (that is standard mandarin for mainland since 1949, replaced the one from Nanjing, that was used during Republic of China on mainland (1912-1949), North-East Mandarin, Jil Mandarin, Zhongyuan Mandarin, Lanyin Mandarin, Jiaoliao Mandarin, Jianghua Mandarin, South-West Mandarin). Beside Mandarin, here are other han languages: Gan
• Gan
• Jin
• Hakka: Mainly spoken in West of Fujian province, there are also speakers, in Taiwan or Indian Ocean's French Island "La Réunion", and franco-British island "Île Maurice"/"Mauricius".
• Min languages (Minbei, Mindong, Minnan (include Hokkien))
• Wu (around Shanghai, including Suzhou, Hanzhou, to Wenzhou (a famous, difficult and world spoken language) in South, also known as Go in Japanese, that was one of the Chinese reading/pronunciation (on'yomi) of Kanji in Japanese)
• Xiang (spoken in Hunan province, was the native language of chairman Mao Zhedong)
• Yue. The most famous is Cantonese as said in NATO country,, as Canton (Guangzhou), in Guangdong province, is the most populated place where it is spoken. It is instead called Guangdong hua in Mandarin and Cantonese that means (Guangdong province language). It is also spoken, all around, including as official language in Hong Kong and Macao, there is a special dialect at Zhuhai (珠海, border of Macao), influenced by the myriade of languages of economic migrants from whole China).

Han characters was also used in non-Han languages in China, including a Mongolian language translittération, or Tangut (Western Xia dynasty) that used a script looking like chinese, but with totaly different vocabulary, pronunciation and elements. Natually, Chinese languages are transcri bed in other scripts too, including a lot of romanisation methods adapted to every language, with often several methods for each language. There is also the special case of Nüshu, that was an hidden script wrote by women during imperial era, to communicate by script, as they was forbiden of.

Etymology

• Chinese Etymology 字源 etymological dictionnary of han script shapes. from turtles and bones oracle scripts to modern standardized shape.
• Zhongwen.com a very good etymological (only modern script, in its traditional form) dictionary. But with only graphic (not utf-8) representaiton of characters.
• Writing styles of Chinese characters on « ''ChinaKnowledge.de - An Encyclopaedia on Chinese History, Literature and Art'' », contain different steps of hanzi evolution from oracle script to medieval standardisation, and main calligraphic styles.

Dictionnaries

• Stardict GIthub sources from Hu Zheng, is a reference free/libre open source tool, available for Linux to read a lot of international mono to multi languages dictionaries, with a specific chinese tree hanzi root/key dictionary tree. The stardict format is a widely used format of multilanguages dictionnaries.
• dict.cn

Japanese Han script (漢字 kanji)

Japanese uses several Han languages pronunciation for it's Han script (on'yomi) and several specifically japanese pronunciation (kun'yomi). Chinese pronunciation don't come from modern standard Mandarin, but from 3 distinct periods, including Tang dynasty, when monks bring chinese culture (including script, agriculture, painting, music, etc) to Japan, and the Mongolian (from futur Yuan dynasty) invasion toward the Song dynasty, when people flyied from around Hangzhou (Wu languages, called Go in Japanese) to Japan (as example, isha 医生is similar to some parts of today Wenzhou languages).

Sadly pronunciation of japanese in european languages cultures dictionaries often miss pitch accent, here are some online resources to have them:

• Prosody Tutor - Suzuki-kun from the Online Japanese Accent Dictionary (OJAD) of Tokyo University, that give pitch accent for whole sentences. (Technical paper about its development)
• Takoboto also have pitch accent database, from japanese scripts.
• Jiten dictionary, both an online dictionary and a free/libre open source software for Android F-Droid version with pitch accent from Wadoku database, stroke order and meaning, but also sadly, no API (that would not help internationalists polyglot that don't have some good base of japanese pronunciation, nor japanese language beginners), and meaning translations are sometime sparse.
• CJKI Japanese Phonetic Database, where pitch accent are given by number, but API is not perfect.
• Jisho has good definition but no pitch accent.

Korean Han script (漢字 hanja)

Still studied at school, still displayed on monuments and during festival, Korean people (from both Jilin and Liaoning province in China, North Korea and South Korea), all use hangeul or hangul now to write Korean everyday.

The last system was created during middle-age, probably derivated from Phagpa scrpt, used by Mongolian during their rule on China, Yuan dynasty, it was quickly blocked by kings, after too much people learned to read ansd write. It come back at the end of the 19th century, and become the main used script during Japanese colonisation of Korean peninsula.

Korean han script wasn't really different than Chinese or Japanese variants. Only few characters have some minimal differences.

Vietnamese in Han script (漢字 Hán tự)

This script also have several other names in Viêt Nam: (𡨸儒, Chữ Nho, meaning scholars script), (chữ Hán (𡨸漢, han script with proper Vietnamese grammar), (chữ Nôm, 𡨸喃, South Script, that diverged the most from han script, since 11th century, with far more differences than Korean or Japanese han scripts). They build a bunch of new characters, by still following Han rules of characters construction.

Han script was offcially used in Viêt Nam until 1954, they made the biggest changes in Chinese script from 11th century, date of their independency from China, until colonization by France. France, then teached latin script to children at schools, but kept Han script at the same time as official script. Every official document during this period, had both French, Han vietnamese and latin vietnamese. After the independency, The communist governement only kept latin script. Han script is still used by scholars, and probably some confucean followers.

• Viện Nghiện cứu Hán Nôm (Institute of Hán-Nôm Studies, in Viêt Nam) in assiociation with Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation created Hán-Nôm fonts (AUR package: nomnatong-fonts). nom foundation also have a Hán-Nôm (chữ Nôm) - Quốc Ngữ dictionary Bảng tra chữ Nôm
• Chunom.org have easy search of 3 dictionnaries with han script, two Han/latin vietnamese to French dictionaries made by french scholar at the end of the 19th century (Génibrel, 1998 and Bonet, 1999), with only raw picture scanned pages, and one more modern, han-latin vietnamese dictionary by Institute of Vietnamese Studies, 2009 Từ Điển Chữ Nôm Trích Dẫn, Dictionary of Nôm characters with excerpts, with digital text.
• Từ điển Hán Nôm (辭典漢喃) Hán Nôm dictionnary with 393.607 entries.
• Collection VIET - Manuscrits et imprimés en Hán-Nôm at library of École française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO).

Some digital tools related to CJKV, fonts history, meaning, pronunciation, etc

• Unihan database at Unicode Foundation, in charge of standardisation of world scripts for computers. code source on Github
• Gucharmap, nice GTK tool with lot of functionalities for surfing among Unicode characters and use them. Classified by script categories, with details from UniHan database of each character.