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Distribution of Chinese dialect groups within the Greater China Region This video explains the differences in pronunciation and vocabulary among Mandarin Dialects (Std. Mandarin, Sichuan Mandarin and NE Mandarin) and Cantonese. The following is a list of Sinitic languages and their dialects.
In Jin, Lower Yangtze Mandarin and Wu dialects, the stops have merged as a final glottal stop, while in most northern varieties they have disappeared. [113] In Mandarin dialects final /m/ has merged with /n/, while some central dialects have a single nasal coda, in some cases realized as a nasalization of the vowel. [114]
Most Yue varieties have merged the Middle Chinese retroflex sibilants with the alveolar sibilants, in contrast with Mandarin dialects, which have generally maintained the distinction. [39] For example, the words 將; jiāng and 張; zhāng are distinguished in Mandarin, but in modern Cantonese they are both pronounced as jēung.
Cantonese was the dominant Chinese language of the Chinese Australian community from the time the first ethnic Chinese settlers arrived in the 1850s until the mid-2000s, when a heavy increase in immigration from Mandarin-speakers largely from mainland China led to Mandarin surpassing Cantonese as the dominant Chinese dialect spoken. Cantonese ...
Chinese, including Mandarin and Cantonese among other varieties, is the third most-spoken language in the United States, and is mostly spoken within Chinese-American populations and by immigrants or the descendants of immigrants, especially in California and New York. [6]
It is being swamped by Mandarin, the official language of more than 1 billion people in China and Taiwan — as different from Cantonese as Spanish is from French.
However, Cantonese is unique amongst the non-Mandarin varieties in having a widely used written form. Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong used to be a British colony isolated from mainland China before 1997, so most HK citizens do not speak Mandarin. Written Cantonese has developed as a means of informal communication.
Standard Chinese, known in China as Putonghua, based on the Mandarin dialect of Beijing, [5] is the official national spoken language for the mainland and serves as a lingua franca within the Mandarin-speaking regions (and, to a lesser extent, across the other regions of mainland China).