Varieties of Chinese

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See also: List of Chinese dialects and Spoken Chinese

Geographic distribution of Sinitic language families

Chinese forms part of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Currently, about

one-fifth of the people in the world speak some variety of Chinese as their
native language. Internal diversity between the Chinese languages (or dialects,
see below), with respect to grammar, vocabulary, and syntax, is comparable to
that of theRomance languages. However, owing to China's sociopolitical and
cultural situation, whether these variants should be known
as languages or dialects is a subject of ongoing debate. Some people call
Chinese a language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese
a language family and its subdivisions languages. If the definition of "dialect"
includes mutual intelligibility, this confusion would resolve into a paradigm of
mutually incomprehensible languages, such as Cantonese andMandarin, broken
down into groups of mutually intelligible dialects, such as Beijing and Sichuan
speech as somewhat mutually intelligible dialects of Mandarin.

From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply
arbitrary groups of similar idiolects. However, the language/dialect distinction
has far-reaching implications in socio-political issues, such as the national
identity of China, regional identities within China, and the very nature of
the Han Chinese "nation". As a result, it has become a subject of contention.
 Contents
[hide]
• 1 Origi
ns
• 2 Termi
nology
in
Chinese
and
English
• 3 Identi
fication
in
China
• 3
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[edit]Origins

The modern spoken varieties of Chinese originated from Old

Chinese and Middle Chinese, and not Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is a
literary language, and not any form of current Spoken Chinese, including in
previous times.
[edit]Terminology in Chinese and English
huà 話/话 (talk, speech) is the most common and colloquial word to denote the
speech of a place, anything from the whole country (Zhongguohua) or one of
the largest cities (Beijinghua, Shanghaihua, Guangzhouhua) to a village dialect,
and can also be used for foreign languages.

yǔ 語/语 is a more formal word also originally referring primarily to spoken

language, used as a suffix in a name for Chinese as a whole (漢語 hanyu) and
often in more formal names for major regional standards (粵語 yueyu, 閩南語
minnanyu) as well as formal Chinese names for foreign languages. The original
meaning of the word was to tell a story, as it still does in Japan's Tale of Genji;
the shift in meaning from "tell a story" to "words, language" parallels the
development of Latin "parabolare" into French "parler", Spanish "palabra", etc.
Its use as a suffix in modern Chinese may be a borrowing from Sino-
Japanese vocabulary.

wen 文 refers to writing; the distinction between speech and writing is made
more sharply than in English terminology. Zhongwen is "Chinese writing" but
sometimes used loosely to include Chinese speech as well. Regional varieties of
Chinese are never referred to as separate "wen". In fact they are rarely written
(most writing is in the standard language) and written versions of local
varieties do not indicate that local pronunciation of a character is different from
the standard pronunciation; local vocabulary is only visible when a local word is
written with completely different characters than the corresponding word in the
standard language. "Wen" is often used for foreign languages, e.g. Yingwen
(English).

fāngyán 方言, literally "place speech" where 言 is an archaic word for speech, is
the technical term for a local variety, used by linguists rather than in ordinary
speech. This is also a modern borrowing from Sino-Japanese technical
terminology.

None of the terms are exactly equivalent to English "language" or "dialect".

Also, none of the terms focus on whether two speech varieties have mutual
intelligibility, which linguists sometimes list as the criterion for being dialects of
the same language rather than each being a language.
The English terms topolect and regiolect have been coined by linguists to avoid
the shortcomings of both "dialect" and "language" to describe varieties of
Chinese, but they are not in widespread use outside of linguistic scholars.
[edit]Identification in China
[edit]Self-descriptions of speakers of regional variants
Although linguists have made great progress in describing and classifying the
regional varieties of Chinese over the course of the last century, their
classification does not necessarily correspond to how these regional variants
have traditionally been viewed and categorized. Thus, although the first-level
divisions of Chinese are often referred to as "languages", they do not always
correspond to linguistic divisions or cultural self-identity.

It is customary in China to refer to people's speech in terms of cities and

provinces, even though these provincial boundaries have little in common with
linguistic ones. For example, the various dialects within Anhui Province are
often referred to as the "Anhui dialect", even though this "Anhui dialect"
comprises four of the "Chinese languages" recognized by linguists
— Mandarin, Wu, Huizhou, and Gan. Likewise, what linguists consider to be
dialects of the Wu are spoken throughout Zhejiang Province, Jiangsu Province,
Anhui Province, and ShanghaiMunicipality, and are therefore often be described
as "Zhejiang dialect", "Jiangsu dialect", "Anhui dialect", and "Shanghainese". By
the same token, although the Sichuan dialect is considered to be distinct from
the Beijing dialect, linguists consider the Sichuan dialect and the Beijing
dialect to be part of the Mandarin group. If the definition of "dialect" includes
mutual intelligibility, then Sichuan and Beijing speech clearly become dialects
of Mandarin. Given the rift that exists between these systems of geographical
and linguistic classification, sociolinguistic self-identity in China is also a
complex phenomenon.

There is a tendency to regard dialects as "variations" of a single written

Chinese language. This is partly because speakers of different varieties of
Chinese have historically had a single written form. Before the 20th
century, Classical Chinese, a logographic language that could be pronounced
according to the phonology of any Chinese language, enjoyed exclusive use for
writing; thus, it was possible to regard the common written language as
detached and "above" all of the spoken languages. However, the 20th century
saw the replacement of Classical Chinese with "Vernacular Chinese", a written
standard based on the modern Mandarin group of dialects and used by all
Chinese-speakers regardless of the group to which their native dialect belongs.
This development has complicated the idea that all Chinese languages,
Mandarin or not, share one single written language, as this unitary written
language is now based on one particular group of spoken dialects. This
"Standard Written Chinese" is essentially consistent in terms of grammar and
vocabulary when written by speakers of different Chinese languages, and
differs only in the pronunciation of characters, which varies regionally.
However, the spoken Chinese languages are generally not mutually intelligible
with Standard Written Chinese even when recited with the local language's
pronunciation, since the written language, being based on Mandarin, may not
use the same morphology, vocabulary and syntax. Proponents of Chinese as a
single language with many dialects describe grammatical/lexical deviations of
the local language from the single written language as "slang" (simplified
Chinese:俚语; traditional Chinese: 俚語; pinyin: lǐyǔ; literally "vulgar language"),
even if these differences persist at the acrolectic (formal) level.

At the same time, regions with a strong sense of regional cohesion have
become more aware of regional groupings of dialects in recent times, and have
formed self-identities connected to these linguistic categories. In some self-
identified linguistic groups, such as Wu orHakka, these groups correspond well
to those devised by linguists. In other self-identified linguistic groups, such
as Teochew and Taiwanese, the correspondencies are not as exact.
[edit]Comparisons

[edit]Comparison with Europe

Differences in the socio-political context of Chinese and European languages
gave rise to the difference in terms of linguistic perception between the two
cultures. In Western Europe, Latin remained the written standard for centuries
after the spoken language diverged and began shifting into distinct Romance
languages, and similarly Classical Chinese remained the written standard while
dialects of Old Chinese andMiddle Chinese diverged. Latin, however, was
eventually revived as a spoken language as well (Medieval Latin), and political
fragmentation gave rise to independent states roughly the size of Chinese
provinces, which eventually generated a political desire to create separate
cultural and literary standards to differentiate nation-states and standardize
the language within a nation-state. But in China, the cultural standard of
Classical Chinese (and later, Vernacular Chinese) remained a purely literary
language, while the spoken language continued to diverge between different
cities and counties, much as European languages diverged, due to the scale of
the country, and the obstruction of communication by geography.

The diverse Chinese spoken forms and common written form comprise a very
different linguistic situation from that in Europe. In Europe, linguistic
differences sharpened as the language of each nation-state was standardized.
The use of local speech became stigmatized. In China, standardization of
spoken languages was weaker, but they continued to be spoken, with written
Classical Chinese read with local pronunciation. Although, as with Europe,
dialects of regional political or cultural capitals were still prestigious and widely
used as the region'slingua franca, their linguistic influence depended more on
the capital's status and wealth than entirely on the political boundaries of the
region.