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"Chinese" is a blanket term covering many different varieties spoken across China. Mandarin Chinese is the most popular dialect, and is used as a lingua franca across China. Linguists classify these varieties as the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Within this broad classification, there are between seven and fourteen dialect ...
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).
Map of the variation in the placement of animal gender markers in local Chinese dialects in the core Chinese-speaking area [140] The usual unmarked word order in Chinese varieties is subject–verb–object, with other orders used for emphasis or contrast. [141] Modifiers usually precede the word they modify, so that adjectives precede nouns. [142]
Cantonese, historically the language of most Chinese immigrants, was the third most widely spoken non-English language in the United States in 2004. [6] [page needed] Many Chinese schools have been established to accomplish these goals. Most of them have classes only once a week on the weekends, however especially in the past there have been ...
Most varieties of Chinese use post-verbal particles to indicate aspect, but the particles used vary. Most Mandarin dialects use the particle le (了) to indicate the perfective aspect and zhe (着; 著) for the progressive aspect. Other Chinese varieties tend to use different particles, e.g. Cantonese zo 2 (咗) and gan 2 (紧; 緊) respectively.
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 ...
The remaining 894 sites were generally chosen to be representative of rural dialects of their county, so dialect islands were omitted. [7] A questionnaire was compiled, to elicit the pronunciation of 425 characters representing common Chinese morphemes, the local term for 470 items and the local form of 110 grammatical forms. [8]
The initial release (under Creative Commons v3.0 – Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike) contains only a draft of the first layer, representing maps A1–4 and marking language families and major Chinese dialect groups, but not individual non-Chinese languages or subgroups of Chinese dialects.