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Languages of China. Distribution of language families in China. Official. Standard Mandarin. Cantonese (Hong Kong and Macau) Portuguese (Macau) English (Hong Kong) Mongolian (Inner Mongolia, Haixi in Qinghai, Bayingolin and Bortala in Xinjiang) Korean (Yanbian in Jilin)
Some linguists and most ordinary Chinese people consider all the spoken varieties as one single language, as speakers share a common national identity and a common written form. [54] Others instead argue that it is inappropriate to refer to major branches of Chinese such as Mandarin, Wu, and so on as "dialects" because the mutual ...
This is a list of languages by total number of speakers. It is difficult to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect . For example, Chinese and Arabic are sometimes considered single languages, but each includes several mutually unintelligible varieties , and so they are sometimes considered language families instead.
Yue (including the Cantonese and Taishanese variants) Min (including the Hokkien and Fuzhounese variants) Hakka (Kejia) Xiang (Hunanese) Gan (Jiangxinese) The revised classification of Li Rong, used in the Language Atlas of China (1987) added three further groups split from these: Mandarin → Jin. Wu → Huizhou. Yue → Pinghua.
Mandarin (/ ˈmændərɪn / ⓘ MAN-dər-in; simplified Chinese : 官话; traditional Chinese : 官話; pinyin : Guānhuà; lit. 'officials' speech') is a group of Chinese language dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard ...
Similarly, Chinese is sometimes viewed as a single language because of a shared culture and common literary language. [4] It is also common to describe various Chinese dialect groups, such as Mandarin, Wu and Yue, as languages, even though each of these groups contains many mutually unintelligible varieties. [5] There are also difficulties in ...
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 Guānhuà (官話 / 官话 'officer speech'). While never formally defined, knowledge of this ...
The oldest attested written Chinese—comprising the oracle bone inscriptions made during the 13th century BCE by the Shang dynasty royal house in modern Anyang, Henan—is also the earliest direct evidence of the Sinitic languages. Most experts agree that Sinitic languages share a common ancestor with the Tibeto-Burman languages, forming the ...