Chinese spoken languages

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• 汉语方言

Chinese
Geographic distribution:	mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Singapore and other areas with historic immigration from China.
Genetic classification:	Sino-Tibetan  ? Sinitic (or perhaps Tibeto-Burman[1])   Chinese
Subdivisions:	Min Chinese descendants of Middle Chinese (see map)
Primary branches of Chinese spoken in areas claimed by the People's Republic of China.

Spoken Chinese (hànyǔ 汉语/漢語 or zhōngguóhuà 中国话/中國話) comprises many regional varieties, the primary ones being Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, and Min. These are not mutually intelligible, but for sociological and political reasons are considered a single Chinese language.^[2]

Although the English word dialect is often used to translate the Chinese terms huà 话, yǔ 語, or fāngyán 方言, the lack of mutual intelligibility between the major (and many minor) varieties is at odds with the normal English use of the word dialect. The nonce term topolect has been coined as a more literal translation of fangyan, but "variety" will be used here.

Classification

Chinese people make a strong distinction between written language (文, Pinyin: wén) and spoken language (语/語 yǔ). English does not necessarily have this distinction. As a result the terms Zhongwen (中文) and Hanyu (漢語) in Chinese are both translated in English as "Chinese".

Within China, it is common perception that these varieties are distinct in their spoken forms only, and that the language, when written, is common across the country. Therefore even though China is home to hundreds of relatively unique spoken languages, literate people are usually able to communicate through written language effectively.

Diversity

Chinese consists of several dialect continuums. Differences in speech generally become more pronounced as distances increase, with few radical breaks. However, the degree of change in intelligibility varies immensely depending on region. For example, the varieties of Mandarin spoken in all three northeastern Chinese provinces are mutually intelligible, but in the small province of Zhejiang a person from one valley may be completely unable to comprehend the language from the next, though both are considered dialects of Wu Chinese.

There is little formal study of any variety but Standard Mandarin. Outside of China, the only two varieties commonly presented in formal courses are Standard Mandarin and Standard Cantonese. Inside China, second-language acquisition can only be achieved through immersion in the local language.

The varieties of Chinese are classified into the following groups:

• Mandarin 官话/官話 (also Northern 北方話/北方话): (c. 836 million speakers) This is the group of dialects spoken in northern and southwestern China, and makes up the largest spoken language in China. Standard Mandarin, called Putonghua or Guoyu in Chinese, which is often also translated as "Mandarin" or simply "Chinese", belongs to this group. It is the official spoken language of the People's Republic of China, and Singapore. Mandarin Chinese is also the official language of the Republic of China governing Taiwan, although there are minor differences in this standard from the form standardized in the PRC.^[3]

Mandarin is characterized by four tones, compared to eight in Cantonese, and the loss of final consonants, so that while Middle Chinese had an inventory of -p, -t, -k, -m, -n, ng, Standard Mandarin only has -n, -ng. Mandarin has adjusted to the high number of homonyms created by these losses through word compounding. The use of compounds is generally less frequent in other dialects.

• Wu 吴语/吳語: (c. 77 million) spoken in the provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and the municipality of Shanghai. Wu includes Shanghai dialect, sometimes taken as the representative of all Wu dialects. Wu's subgroups are extremely diverse, especially in the mountainous regions of Zhejiang and eastern Anhui. The group possibly comprises hundreds of distinct spoken forms which are not mutually intelligible amongst each other. The Wu dialect is notable among Chinese dialects in having kept "voiced" (actually slack voiced) initials, such as /b̥/, /d̥/, /ɡ̊/, /z̥/, /v̥/, /d̥ʑ̊/, /ʑ̊/ etc.
• Yue (Cantonese) 粤语/粵語: (c. 71 million) spoken in Guangdong, Guangxi, Hong Kong, Macau, parts of Southeast Asia and by Overseas Chinese with an ancestry tracing back to the Guangdong region. The term "Cantonese" may cover all the Yue dialects, including Taishanese, or specifically the Canton dialect of Guangzhou and Hong Kong. Not all varieties of Yue are mutually intelligible. Yue retains the full complement of Middle Chinese word-final consonants (p, t, k, m, n, ng), and has a well developed inventory of tones.
• The Min languages 闽语/閩語: (c. 60 million) spoken in Fujian, Taiwan, parts of Southeast Asia particularly in Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore, and amongst Overseas Chinese who trace their roots to Fujian and Taiwan. The largest Min language is Hokkien, which is spoken in Southern Fujian, Taiwan, and by many Chinese in Southeast Asia and includes the Taiwanese, and Amoy dialects amongst others. Min is the only branch of Chinese that cannot be directly derived from Middle Chinese. It is also the most diverse, divided into seven subgroups defined on the basis of relative mutual intelligibility: Min Nan (which includes Hokkien and Teochew), Min Dong (which includes the Fuzhou dialect), Min Bei, Min Zhong, Pu Xian, Qiong Wen, and Shao Jiang.
• Xiang (Hunanese) 湘语/湘語:(c. 36 million) spoken in Hunan. Xiang is usually divided into the "old" and "new" dialects, with the new dialects being significantly influenced by Mandarin.^{[citation needed]}
• Hakka 客家话/客家話: (c. 34 million) spoken by the Hakka people, a cultural group of the Han Chinese, in several provinces across southern China, in Taiwan, and in parts of Southeast Asia such as Malaysia and Singapore. The term "Hakka" itself translates as "guest families", and many Hakka people consider themselves to be descended from Song-era refugees from North China, although genetic and linguistic evidence suggests that the Hakka originated not far from where they live today. Hakka has kept many features of northern Middle Chinese that have been lost in the North. It also has a full complement of nasal endings, -m -n -ŋ and occlusive endings -p -t -k, maintaining the four categories of tonal types, with splitting in the ping and ru tones, giving six tones. Some dialects of Hakka have seven tones, due to splitting in the qu tone. One of the distinguishing features of Hakka phonology is that Middle Chinese voiced initials are transformed into Hakka voiceless aspirated initials.
• Gan 赣语/贛語: (c. 31 million) spoken in Jiangxi. In the past, it was viewed as closely related to Hakka dialects, because of the way Middle Chinese voiced initials have become voiceless aspirated initials, as in Hakka, and were hence called by the umbrella term "Hakka-Gan dialects". This term, however, has now become obsolete.

There is some dispute as to whether the following varieties should be classified separately:

• Huizhou 徽语/徽語: (c. 3.2 million) spoken in the southern parts of Anhui—usually classified as a dialect of Gan.
• Jin 晋语/晉語: spoken in Shanxi, as well as parts of Shaanxi, Hebei, Henan, and Inner Mongolia. It is often classed as a dialect of Mandarin.
• Pinghua 平话/平話: (c. 2 million) spoken in parts of the Guangxi. It is sometimes classed as a dialect of Cantonese.

Some varieties remain unclassified. These include:

• Danzhou dialect 儋州话/儋州話: spoken in Danzhou, Hainan.
• Xianghua 乡话/鄉話: spoken in a small strip of land in western Hunan, this group of dialects has not been conclusively classified.
• Shaozhou Tuhua 韶州土话/韶州土話: spoken at the border regions of Guangdong, Hunan, and Guangxi. This is an area of great linguistic diversity, and has not yet been conclusively described or classified.

In addition, the Dungan language (东干语/東干語) is a dialect of Mandarin spoken in Kyrgyzstan. However, it is written in the Cyrillic alphabet as a result of Soviet rule.

Quantitative similarity

A 2007 study ^[4] compared 15 major urban dialects on two objective and two subjective criteria:

1. Lexical similarity
2. Phonological regularity (regularity of sound correspondences, not direct phonological similarity)
3. Subjective intelligibility
4. Subjective similarity

• Generally the top-level split put Northern, New Xiang, and Gan in one group and Min (samples at Fuzhou, Xiamen, Chaozhou), Hakka, and Yue in the other group, except for phonological regularity, where the one Gan dialect (Nanchang) was in the Southern group and very close to Hakka, and the top-level phonological split was between Wenzhounese (the southernmost Wu dialect) and all other dialects.
• The two Wu dialects were closer to the Northern/New Xiang/Gan group in lexical similarity and strongly closer in subjective intelligibility, but closer to Min/Hakka/Yue in phonological regularity and subjective similarity, except that Wenzhou was farthest from all other dialects in phonological regularity. The two Wu dialects were close to each other in lexical similarity and subjective similarity, but not in subjective intelligibility, where Suzhou was actually closer to Northern/Xiang/Gan than to Wenzhou.
• Hakka and Yue grouped closely together on the three lexical and subjective measures, but not in phonological regularity.
• Fuzhou (Eastern Min) grouped weakly with the Southern Min dialects Xiamen and Chaozhou on the two objective criteria, but was slightly closer to Hakka and Yue on the subjective criteria.
• Changsha (New Xiang) was always within the Mandarin group. No Old Xiang dialect was in the sample.
• Taiyuan (Jin or Shanxi) and Hankou (Wuhan, Hubei) were subjectively perceived as relatively different from other Northern dialects, but were very close in subjective intelligibility. Objectively, Taiyuan had substantial phonological divergence but little lexical divergence.
• Chengdu (Sichuan) was somewhat divergent lexically, but very little on the other measures.

Local classifications

Generally, when referring to a local dialect in everyday speech, the speaker will refer to the dominant city in the region as a marker of the dialect as a whole. For example, a Wu speaker would not ask a fellow Wu speaker if they speak "Wu", but would rather ask whether or not they speak the dialect from Suzhou or Hangzhou, known as Suzhouhua and Hangzhouhua, respectively, in Chinese. Generally dialects are branded according to cities, geographical regions, or provinces. This method of informal classification is commonly used in spoken language. Provinces whose dialects are more homogeneous within its boundaries, such as Shaanxi, Shanxi, Shandong, Hebei, Hunan, Jiangxi, Sichuan, etc. tend to refer to their own dialects by the name of the province (although sub-dialects exist and can be referred to locally by the name of a city). In more diverse provinces such as Fujian, dialects are informally classified by mutual intelligibility into Min Nan (闽南话), Min Dong (闽东话), and Min Bei (闽北话); in Zhejiang, where there is vast variance in spoken language, dialects are generally classified by cities or counties — as such, no singular "Zhejiang dialect" exists. An area with widespread homogeneity in spoken language is the three provinces of Northeastern China, whose spoken language is collectively known as Northeastern Mandarin, or Dongbei Hua (东北话) in Chinese.

Sociolinguistics

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Bilingualism with Mandarin

In southern China (not including Hong Kong and Macau), where the difference between Standard Mandarin and local dialects are particularly pronounced, well-educated Chinese are generally fluent in Standard Mandarin, and most people have at least a good passive knowledge of it, in addition to being native speakers of the local dialect. The choice of dialect varies based on the social situation. Standard Mandarin is usually considered more formal and is required when speaking to a person who does not understand the local dialect. The local dialect (be it nonstandard Mandarin or non-Mandarin altogether) is generally considered more intimate and is used among close family members and friends and in everyday conversation within the local area. Chinese speakers will frequently code switch between Standard Mandarin and the local dialect. Parents will generally speak to their children in dialect, and the relationship between dialect and Mandarin appears to be mostly stable. Local languages give a sense of identity to local cultures.

Knowing the local dialect is of considerable social benefit and most Chinese who permanently move to a new area will attempt to pick up the local dialect. Learning a new dialect is usually done informally through a process of immersion and recognizing sound shifts. Generally the differences are more pronounced lexically than grammatically. Typically, a speaker of one dialect of Chinese will need about a year of immersion to understand the local dialect and about three to five years to become fluent in speaking it. Because of the variety of dialects spoken, there are usually few formal methods for learning a local dialect.

Due to the variety in Chinese speech, Mandarin speakers from each area of China are very often prone to fuse or "translate" words from their local tongue into their Mandarin conversations. In addition, each area of China has its recognizable accents while speaking Mandarin. Generally, the nationalized standard form of Mandarin pronunciation is only heard on news and radio broadcasts. Even in the streets of Beijing, the flavour of Mandarin varies in pronunciation from the Mandarin heard on the media.

Political issues

Within mainland China, there has been a consistent drive towards promoting the standard language （大力推广普通话 dàlì tuīguǎng Pǔtōnghuà）; for instance, the education system is entirely Mandarin-medium from the second year onwards. However, usage of local dialect is tolerated, and in many informal situations socially preferred. Unlike in Hong Kong, where colloquial Cantonese characters are often used for formal occasions, within the PRC a character set closer to Mandarin tends to be used. At the national level, differences in dialect generally do not correspond to political divisions or categories, and this has for the most part prevented dialect from becoming the basis of identity politics. Historically, many of the people who promoted Chinese nationalism were from southern China and did not natively speak the national standard language, and even leaders from northern China rarely spoke with the standard accent. For example, Mao Zedong often emphasized his Hunan origins in speaking, rendering much of what he said incomprehensible to many Chinese. One consequence of this is that China does not have a well developed tradition of spoken political rhetoric, and most Chinese political works are intended primarily as written works rather than spoken works.

Another factor that limits the political implications of dialect is that it is very common within an extended family for different people to know and use different dialects. In addition, while speaking similar dialect provides very strong group identity at the level of a city or county, the high degree of linguistic diversity limits the amount of group solidarity at larger levels. Finally, the linguistic diversity of southern China makes it likely that in any large group of Chinese, Standard Mandarin will be the only form of speech that everyone understands.

On the other hand in Taiwan, the government had a policy of promoting Standard Mandarin over the local languages, such as Taiwanese and Hakka. This policy was implemented rigidly when Standard Mandarin was the only language of instruction in schools, while English was offered as the compulsory second language. Since late 1990s, other languages have also been offered as a second language.

Examples of variations

The Min languages are often regarded as furthest removed linguistically from Standard Mandarin, in phonology, grammar, and vocabulary. To illustrate: in Taiwanese, a variety of Hokkien, a Min language, to express the idea that one is feeling a little ill ("I am not feeling well."), one might say (in Pe̍h-oē-jī):

Goá kā-kī lâng ū tām-po̍h-á bô sóng-khoài.

我家己人有淡薄無爽快。

which, when translated cognate-by-cognate into Mandarin would be spoken as an awkward or semantically unrecognizable sentence:

Wǒ jiājǐ rén yǒu dànbó wú shuǎngkuài.

Could roughly be interpreted as:
My family's own person is weakly not feeling refreshed.

Where as when spoken colloquially in Mandarin, one would either say:

Wǒ zìjǐ yǒu yīdiǎn bù shūfu.

我自己有一點不舒服。

I myself feel a bit uncomfortable.

or:

Wǒ yǒu yīdiǎn bù shūfu.

我有一點不舒服。

I feel a bit uncomfortable.

the latter omitting the reflexive pronoun (zìjǐ), not usually needed in Mandarin.

Some people, particularly in northern China, would say:

Wǒ yǒu diǎnr bù shūfu.

我有點兒不舒服。

Literally: I am [a] bit[DIM.] uncomfortable.

Comparison of vocabularies

^{[Wu, Xiang, Gan, Hakka, Min Nan missing tone]}

The number of tones in a particular variety often differs between traditional Chinese grammar and modern linguistic theory. This is because modern linguistic theory only counts tones that are phonemically distinct (i.e. can be used to convey meaning differences in words that are otherwise identical), whereas traditional Chinese grammar also counts the major allophonic distinctions within phonemic tones. For most dialects, the specific difference boils down to whether tones in syllables closed by a stop consonant (i.e. "entering tones") are counted separately. However, Mandarin dialects have no syllables with an "entering tone". In Wu dialects the situation is more complicated.

Phonology

This section called "Phonology" is missing citations or needs footnotes. Please help add inline citations to guard against copyright violations and factual inaccuracies. (November 2008)

The phonological structure of each syllable consists of a nucleus consisting of a vowel (which can be a monophthong, diphthong, or even a triphthong in certain varieties) with an optional onset or coda consonant as well as a tone. There are some instances where a non-vowel is used as a nucleus. An example of this is in Cantonese, where the nasal sonorant consonants /m/ and /ŋ/ can stand alone as their own syllable.

Across all the spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda, but syllables that do have codas are restricted to /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, /p/, /t/, /k/, or /ʔ/. Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Mandarin, are limited to only two, namely /n/ and /ŋ/. Consonant clusters do not generally occur in either the onset or coda. The onset may be an affricate or a consonant followed by a semivowel, but these are not generally considered consonant clusters.

The number of sounds in 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 multisyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. The total number of syllables in some varieties is therefore only about a thousand, including tonal variation.

All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones. A few dialects of north China may have as few as three tones, while some dialects in south China have up to 6 or 10 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 the use of tones in Chinese are the four main tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable ma. The tones correspond to these five characters:

	Listen to the tones This is a recording of the four main tones. Fifth, or neutral, tone is not included.
Problems listening to this file? See media help.

Historically, Middle Chinese had three tonal distinctions on most syllables. Checked syllables (those ending in a stop consonant /p/, /t/ or /k/) were toneless; however, traditional Chinese grammar counted these as a fourth tone (the so-called "entering tone"). During the Middle Chinese period, a tone split happened in most varieties as a result of two successive sound changes:

1. Tones in syllables beginning with a voiced consonant were phonetically lowered in pitch.
2. Except in Wu, voiced obstruents merged with voiceless ones but the lowered tones remained, doubling the number of phonemic tones.

This produced 6 phonemic tones, or 8 according to traditional Chinese classification. Standard Cantonese maintains these tones, and has developed an additional distinction in checked syllables. However, most varieties have reduced the number of tonal distinctions. For example, in Standard Mandarin, the tones resulting from the split of Middle Chinese tones 2 and 3 merged, leaving 4 tones. Furthermore, Mandarin final stop consonants disappeared, and such syllables were reassigned to one of the other 4 tones.

In Wu, voiced obstruents were retained, and the tone split never became phonemic: the higher-pitched allophones occur with initial voiceless consonants, and the lower-pitched allophones occur with initial voiced consonants. (Traditional Chinese classification nonetheless counts these as different tones.) Most Wu dialects retain the three tones of Middle Chinese, and some have developed additional distinctions. However, in Shanghainese one of these merged with the other two, and these two merged in syllables with initial voiced consonants. In addition, in polysyllabic words, the tone of all other syllables is determined by the tone of the first: Shanghainese has word rather than syllable tone. The result is that there are only two phonemic tones in Shanghainese, and those only in words beginning with a voiceless stop and whose first syllables do not end in a stop. Other words have no phonemic tonal distinctions.

See also

China portal

• Identification of the varieties of Chinese
• Languages of China
• List of Chinese dialects
• Sinitic linguistic family
• varieties of Chinese

References

Footnotes

Notations

• Branner, David Prager. (2000). Problems in Comparative Chinese Dialectology — the Classification of Miin and Hakka. Trends in Linguistics series, no. 123. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
• DeFrancis, John. 1990. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0-8248-1068-6
• Hannas, William. C. 1997. Asia's Orthographic Dilemma. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0-8248-1892-X (paperback); ISBN 0-8248-1842-3 (hardcover)

External links

• Popup Chinese podcasts and lessons in the standard mandarin dialect, with others dialogues covering a wide range of alternate regional dialects including Hangzhouhua, Shanghaihua, Beijinghua and Guangdonghua.
• Open Source Chinese-English Dictionary including a user-editable online interface, downloadable software and dictionary package, and online community of translators and students.
• Details on many Chinese Dialects(e.g. Classification)
• Technical Notes on the Chinese Language Dialects, by Dylan W.H. Sung(Phonology & Official Romanization Schemes)
• Discovering dialects
• Hello Mandarin: Introduction of Mandarin / Putonghua
• CEDICT Chinese English Dictionary
• Editorial on use of dialects from China Daily. Raymond Zhou. 19 November 2005
• Chinese Example Sentences
• Mandarin Chinese
• 中国語方言リンク集 Link to Web pages on Chinese dialects

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