Chinese Dialects

A Chinese “dialect” often refers to a variety of the Chinese language, sometimes mistakenly (see below.) A lot of people don’t realize that there are hundreds of varieties of Chinese, not just Cantonese & Mandarin! Minnanese, Taiwanese, Shanghainese, … the list goes on! Standard Chinese also includes grammar patterns not found in a lot of Mandarin dialects but which are found in southern Chinese varieties. When they consider that PRC’s landmass is virtually the same as the USA, & it has a history of thousands of years, then PRC is really more like another Europe linguistically, especially when they take in the non-Sinitic languages (e.g. Tibetan, Mongolian, Uyghur, Zhuang, Ewenk, etc.).

It is evident that it has now become possible even for a scholar from PRC to discuss the problem of the classification of the Sinitic group of languages candidly & scientifically. Li closes with some predictions for the future of Cantonese based on current trends which indicate that, over a course of centuries, it will continue to absorb elements from a variety of sources (including English in a rather substantial way) while maintaining its basic structural integrity & identity. Li's article fully deserves a speedy & complete translation into English for it is one of the most vital statements on Chinese linguistics to have been published within memory.

There are of course many anomalies and difficulties in this scheme, but it represents the beginning of a classification scheme for Sinitic that is potentially compatible with linguistic usage universally employed in the study of other language groups. 

Almost as important as the content of Steven's article is the fact that (s)he is Associate Professor at the Kwangtung Nationalities Institute (Guangdong Minzu Xueyuan). These dialects are also spoken in North America. Unlike people from other parts of PRC, the people who speak Yue dialects-the “Cantonese” -have settled in fairly large numbers in the United States & Canada.  Yue   57,511,111(5.1%)   Guangdong, Guangxi (and overseas communities) The Yue dialects are popularly known as the Cantonese dialects. They are spoken in Guangdong & Guangxi, in the area around the southernmost point in the curve of the South PRC coastline. 

Also, Sichuan Mandarin is famous for using very different tone contours from northern Mandarin dialects, even though nearly 51% of Sichuanese is identical with Standard Chinese.[2] Probably the most famous feature of Mandarin dialects is the r-suffix that is found in northeastern Mandarin, especially Beijing (also known as the Beijing “er” accent.) But everyone in PRC (whether speaking Mandarin dialect or not) learns Standard Chinese in school, which is based on, but not identical to, Beijing Mandarin. 

This artical is created by the top professional translation team ACE CHINESE TRANSLATION.

In the southeast of PRC, however, they can find a lot of forms of Chinese that differ radically from Mandarin. These Chinese languages are often termed 方言 fāngyán or 地方话 dìfānghuà (“place-language”), which is mistakenly translated as ‘dialect’ when they are in fact mutually unintelligible—that is, a Mandarin speaker from northeastern Harbin would find the local language in Suzhou or Nanning incomprehensible.