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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 groups, depending on the classification.
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).
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 ...
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 Mandarin-speaking areas distinguish between the retroflex initials /ʈʂ ʈʂʰ ʂ/ from the apical sibilants /ts tsʰ s/, though they often have a different distribution than in the standard language. In most dialects of the southeast and southwest the retroflex initials have merged with the alveolar sibilants, so that zhi becomes zi, chi ...
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. [55] 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 ...
Among Chinese-speaking Thai households, Cantonese is the fourth most-spoken Chinese variety after Teochew, Hakka and Hainanese. [49] Nevertheless, within the Thai Chinese commercial sector, it serves as a common language alongside Teochew or Thai. Chinese-language schools in Thailand have also traditionally been conducted in Cantonese.
The Linguistic Atlas of Chinese Dialects (Chinese: 汉语方言地图集; pinyin: Hànyǔ Fāngyán Dìtú Jí), edited by Cao Zhiyun and published in 2008 in three volumes, is a dialect atlas documenting the geography of varieties of Chinese. Unlike the Language Atlas of China (1987), which aims to map the boundaries of both minority languages ...