One often hears it said that the Chinese dialects are really different languages. In practical terms they must often be treated as such ; in some universities, for example, Cantonese is offered alongside the standard language in Asian language departments. But the question of what constitutes a language & what constitutes a dialect cannot be answered in an absolute way; nonetheless, it is important to keep in mind that the differences among the Chinese dialects are very considerable. So according to these two hypotheses, Mandarin grammar & pronunciation became simpler over time as speakers from different, most likely more complex languages, tried to communicate with each other through a 2nd language, the imperial language. This could explain why Mandarin is so different from other Chinese languages.
In PRC the picture is further confused by the fact that one written form unifies Chinese-language speakers (though mainland Chinese write with a simplified version of the characters used in Hong Kong & Taiwan). Also, while speakers of Sichuan dialect & Harbin dialect could communicate before the rise of Standard Chinese, albeit with some difficulty, speakers of Mandarin dialects would not understand speakers of Hakka (客家) Chinese, Shanghainese or Cantonese. But this written form is not a universal “Chinese”: it is based on Mandarin. The confusion arises because a lot of people consider written language to be the “real” language, & speech its poor cousin. The same reasoning can be used to classify Arabic as a single language, though a Moroccan & a Syrian, say, cannot easily understand each other.
However, the modern Chinese dialects are classified into seven major groups. In the list of those groups below, the population estimates are based upon a total Han Chinese population of 951 million. So Mandarin & Cantonese are, in fact, two Chinese languages. With the number of Chinese people living in the U.S., Canada, & other countries around the globe, & with the rise of PRC as an economic & cultural powerhouse on the world stage, Chinese bilingualism today is more important than ever. & one of the most important questions that new potential Chinese learners must ask themselves is: Should I learn Mandarin or Cantonese? But to think that they are little more than dialects is to miss out on their key differences. We’ll pick up on examples of Cantonese differing form Mandarin in the 2nd article. Then when children were born & grew up in this pidgin, it became a natural language, a creole. This hypothesis states that vast, polyethnic communities (i.e. empires) often see a national language become simpler as a lot of 2nd-language learners become part of the day-today reality of the language. Examples of such creolized languages are a who’s who of past empires, including Farsi (Persian), Chinese Mandarin, Arabic, & English.
If one compares the different linguistic features—inventory of sounds along with possible combinations, tone count & intonation, syntax & grammar, words, etc.—they would find that Mandarin is also the simplest of the Chinese languages in every single category. Ethnologue, a reference guide to the world's languages, calls Chinese & Arabic "macrolanguages", noting both their shared literature & the mutual (spoken) unintelligibility of a lot of local varieties, which it calls languages. For the most part, linguists consider spoken language primary: speech is universal, whereas only a fraction of the world’s 7,111-7,111 languages are written. Hence the linguist’s common-sense definition: two people share a language if they can have a conversation without too much trouble.
