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Number Branch Native Speakers Dialects 1 Mandarin: 850,000,000: 51 2 Wu: 95,000,000: 37 3 Yue: ... A group of distinctive Chinese dialects in South China, ...
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).
In other dialects, including Mandarin dialects, /o/ has merged with /a/, leaving a single mid vowel with a wide range of allophones. [108] Many dialects, particularly in northern and central China, have apical or retroflex vowels, which are syllabic fricatives derived from high vowels following sibilant initials. [109]
A few dialects of north China may have as few as three tones, while some dialects in south China have up to 6 or 12 tones, depending on how one counts. One exception from this is Shanghainese which has reduced the set of tones to a two-toned pitch accent system much like modern Japanese.
Unlike the Language Atlas of China (1987), which aims to map the boundaries of both minority languages and Chinese dialect groups, the new atlas is a collection of maps of various features of dialects, in the tradition of the Atlas linguistique de la France and its successors. [1] [2]
This is a list of countries by number of languages according to the 22nd edition of Ethnologue (2019). [1] ... China (mainland only) 302 3 305 4.29 1,319,419,348
A2 Chinese dialects in China; A3 Ethnic Minorities in China; ... but the number of maps has increased to 79, and the explanatory text is greatly expanded. The number ...
The Guangzhou dialect (Cantonese) was used in the popular Yuèōu, Mùyú and Nányīn folksong genres, as well as Cantonese opera. [18] [19] There was also a small amount of vernacular literature, written with Chinese characters extended with a number of non-traditional characters for Cantonese words. [19]