There are hundreds of local Chinese language varieties forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family, many of which are not mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast part of mainland China. The varieties are typically classified into ten primary groups: Mandarin, Jin, Wu, Hui, Min, Xiang, Gan, Hakka, Yue, and Pinghua though some varieties remain unclassified. These groups are neither clades nor individual languages defined by mutual intelligibility, but are identified by common correspondences with selected features of Middle Chinese.
Chinese varieties differ in their phonology, vocabulary and syntax. Southern varieties tend to have fewer initial consonants than northern and central varieties, but more often preserve the Middle Chinese final consonants. All have phonemic tones, with northern varieties tending to have fewer distinctions than southern ones. Many have tone sandhi, with the most complex patterns in the coastal area from Zhejiang to eastern Guangdong. There are major lexical and grammatical differences between northern and southern varieties, but often some northern areas have features found in the south, and vice versa.
Standard Chinese takes its phonology from the Beijing dialect, with vocabulary from the Mandarin group and grammar based on literature in the modern written vernacular. It is the official language of China, Taiwan and one of the four official languages of Singapore. It has become a pluricentric language, with differences in pronunciation and vocabulary between them. Standard Chinese is also one of the six official languages of the United Nations.
History At the end of the 2nd millennium BC, a form of Chinese was spoken in a compact area along the lower Wei River and middle Yellow River. Use of this language expanded eastwards across the North China Plain into Shandong, and then southwards into the Yangtze River valley and the hills of south China. Chinese eventually replaced many of the languages previously dominant in these areas, and forms of the language spoken in different regions began to diverge. During periods of political unity there was a tendency for states to promote the use of a standard language across the territory they controlled, in order to facilitate communication between people from different regions.
The first evidence of dialectal variation is found in the texts of the Spring and Autumn period (771–476 BC). Although the Zhou royal domain was no longer politically powerful, its speech still represented a model for communication across China. The Fangyan (early 1st century AD) is devoted to differences in vocabulary between regions. Commentaries from the Eastern Han (25–220 AD) provide significant evidence of local differences in pronunciation. The Qieyun, a rime dictionary published in 601, noted wide variations in pronunciation between regions, and was created with the goal of defining a standard system of pronunciation for reading the classics. This standard is known as Middle Chinese, and is believed to be a diasystem, based on a compromise between the reading traditions of the northern and southern capitals.
The North China Plain provided few barriers to migration, which resulted in relative linguistic homogeneity over a wide area. Contrastingly, the mountains and rivers of southern China contain all six of the other major Chinese dialect groups, with each in turn featuring great internal diversity, particularly in Fujian.
Standard Chinese
Until the mid-20th century, most Chinese people spoke only their local language. 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 (/ 'officer speech'). While never formally defined, knowledge of this language was essential for a career in the imperial bureaucracy.
In the early years of the Republic of China, Literary Chinese was replaced as the written standard by written vernacular Chinese, which was based on northern varieties. In the 1930s, a standard national language was adopted that had pronunciation based on the Beijing dialect, but vocabulary drawn from a range of Mandarin varieties, and grammar based on literature in the modern written vernacular. Standard Chinese is the official spoken language of the People's Republic of China and Taiwan, and is one of the four official languages of Singapore. It has become a pluricentric language, with differences in pronunciation and vocabulary between them.
Standard Chinese is much more widely studied than any other variety of Chinese, and its use is now dominant in public life on the mainland. Outside of China and Taiwan, the only varieties of Chinese commonly taught in university courses are Standard Chinese and Cantonese.
Comparison with Romance languages Local varieties from different areas of China are often mutually unintelligible, differing at least as much as different Romance languages and perhaps even as much as Indo-European languages as a whole. As with the Romance languages descended from Latin, the ancestral language was spread by imperial expansion over substrate languages around 2000 years ago, by the Qin and Han empires in China and the Roman Empire in Europe. Medieval Latin remained the standard for scholarly and administrative writing in Western Europe for centuries, influencing local varieties much like Literary Chinese did in China. In both cases, local forms of speech diverged from both the literary standard and each other, producing dialect continua with mutually unintelligible varieties separated by long distances.
However, a major difference between China and Western Europe is the historical reestablishment of political unity in 6th century China by the Sui dynasty, a unity that has persisted with relatively brief interludes until the present day. Meanwhile, Europe remained politically decentralized, developing into numerous independent states. Vernacular writing using the Latin alphabet supplanted Latin itself, and states eventually developed their own standard languages. In China, Literary Chinese was the dominant style of formal writing until the early 20th century. Written Chinese, read with different local pronunciations, continued to serve as a source of vocabulary for the local varieties. The new standard written vernacular Chinese, the counterpart of spoken Standard Chinese, is similarly used as a literary form by speakers of all varieties.
Classification
Dialectologist Jerry Norman 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, although there are also some sharp boundaries.
However, the rate of change in mutual 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 province of Fujian, where Min varieties predominate, the speech of neighbouring counties or even villages may be mutually unintelligible.
Dialect groups
Classifications of Chinese varieties in the late 19th century and early 20th century were based on impressionistic criteria. They often followed river systems, which were historically the main routes of migration and communication in southern China. The first scientific classifications, based primarily on correspondences with Middle Chinese voiced initials, were produced by Wang Li in 1936 and Li Fang-Kuei in 1937, with minor modifications by other linguists since. The conventionally accepted set of seven dialect groups first appeared in the second edition (1980) of Yuan Jiahua's dialectology handbook:
Mandarin This is the group spoken in northern and southwestern China and has by far the most speakers. This group includes the Beijing dialect, which forms the basis for Standard Mandarin Chinese, colloquially called "Chinese" (outside Hong Kong and Macau) or "Mandarin" (everywhere) in English. In addition, the Dungan language of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan is a Mandarin variety written in the Cyrillic script. Wu These varieties are spoken in Shanghai, most of Zhejiang and the southern parts of Jiangsu and Anhui. The group comprises hundreds of distinct spoken forms, many of which are not mutually intelligible. The Suzhou dialect is usually taken as representative, because Shanghainese features several atypical innovations. Wu varieties are distinguished by their retention of voiced or murmured obstruent initials (stops, affricates and fricatives). Gan These varieties are spoken in Jiangxi and neighbouring areas. The Nanchang dialect is taken as representative. In the past, Gan was viewed as closely related to Hakka because of the way Middle Chinese voiced initials became voiceless aspirated initials as in Hakka, and were hence called by the umbrella term "Hakka–Gan dialects". Xiang The Xiang varieties are spoken in Hunan and southern Hubei. The New Xiang varieties, represented by the Changsha dialect, have been significantly influenced by Southwest Mandarin, whereas Old Xiang varieties, represented by the Shuangfeng dialect, retain features such as voiced initials. Min These varieties originated in the mountainous terrain of Fujian and eastern Guangdong, and form the only branch of Chinese that cannot be directly derived from Middle Chinese. It is also the most diverse, with many of the varieties used in neighbouring counties—and, in the mountains of western Fujian, even in adjacent villages—being mutually unintelligible. Early classifications divided Min into Northern and Southern subgroups, but a survey in the early 1960s found that the primary split was between inland and coastal groups. Varieties from the coastal region around Xiamen have spread to Southeast Asia, where they are known as Hokkien (named from a dialectical pronunciation of "Fujian"), and Taiwan, where they are known as Taiwanese. Other offshoots of Min are found in Hainan and the Leizhou Peninsula, with smaller communities throughout southern China. Hakka The Hakka (literally "guest families") are a group of Han Chinese living in the hills of northeastern Guangdong, southwestern Fujian and many other parts of southern China, as well as Taiwan and parts of Southeast Asia such as Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. The Meixian dialect is the prestige form. Most Hakka varieties retain the full complement of nasal endings, and stop endings , though there is a tendency for Middle Chinese velar codas -ŋ and -k to yield dental codas -n and -t after front vowels. Yue These varieties are spoken in Guangdong, Guangxi, Hong Kong and Macau, and have been carried by immigrants to Southeast Asia and many other parts of the world. The prestige variety and by far most commonly spoken variety is Cantonese, from the city of Guangzhou (historically called "Canton"), which is also the native language of the majority in Hong Kong and Macau. Taishanese, from the coastal area of Jiangmen southwest of Guangzhou, was historically the most common Yue variety among overseas communities in the West until the late 20th century. Not all Yue varieties are mutually intelligible. Most Yue varieties retain the full complement of Middle Chinese word-final consonants () and have rich inventories of tones.
The Language Atlas of China (1987) follows a classification of Li Rong, distinguishing three further groups: Jin These varieties, spoken in Shanxi and adjacent areas, were formerly included in Mandarin. They are distinguished by their retention of the Middle Chinese entering tone category. Huizhou The Hui varieties, spoken in southern Anhui, share different features with Wu, Gan and Mandarin, making them difficult to classify. Earlier scholars had assigned them to one or other of these groups, or to a group of their own. Pinghua