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56-507: The principal varieties of Chinese spoken are Hakka (64%), Cantonese (29%) and others (7%). Mandarin is rarely spoken except in teaching. It is famous for its Yingde Stone and Yingdehong tea . In 1963 the British royal family popularized Yingde's black tea worldwide after offering the tea to guests at the Queen's Banquet. Yingde's tea history dates back to over 1,200 years ago. It

112-461: A common language based on Mandarin varieties , known as Guānhuà ( 官話 / 官话 'officer speech'). While never formally defined, knowledge of this language was essential for a career in the imperial bureaucracy. In the early years of the Republic of China , Literary Chinese was replaced as the written standard by written vernacular Chinese , which was based on northern dialects. In the 1930s,

168-488: A rime dictionary published in 601, noted wide variations in pronunciation between regions, and was created with the goal of defining a standard system of pronunciation for reading the classics. This standard is known as Middle Chinese , and is believed to be a diasystem , based on a compromise between the reading traditions of the northern and southern capitals. The North China Plain provided few barriers to migration, which resulted in relative linguistic homogeneity over

224-500: A tone split conditioned by syllabic onsets. Syllables with voiced initials tended to be pronounced with a lower pitch, and by the late Tang dynasty , each of the tones had split into two registers conditioned by the initials, known as "upper" ( 阴 / 陰 yīn ) and "lower" ( 阳 / 陽 yáng ). When voicing was lost in all dialects except in the Wu and Old Xiang groups, this distinction became phonemic, yielding eight tonal categories, with

280-678: A classification of Li Rong , distinguishing three further groups: Some varieties remain unclassified, including the Danzhou dialect (northwestern Hainan ), Mai (southern Hainan), Waxiang (northwestern Hunan ), Xiangnan Tuhua (southern Hunan), Shaozhou Tuhua (northern Guangdong), and the forms of Chinese spoken by the She people ( She Chinese ) and the Miao people . She Chinese, Xiangnan Tuhua, Shaozhou Tuhua and unclassified varieties of southwest Jiangxi appear to be related to Hakka. Most of

336-457: A combination of innovations and retention of distinctions from Middle Chinese: Chinese finals may be analysed as an optional medial glide , a main vowel and an optional coda. Conservative vowel systems, such as those of Gan dialects , have high vowels /i/ , /u/ and /y/ , which also function as medials, mid vowels /e/ and /o/ , and a low /a/ -like vowel. In other dialects, including Mandarin dialects, /o/ has merged with /a/ , leaving

392-480: A compound word or phrase. This process is so extensive in Shanghainese that the tone system is reduced to a pitch accent system much like modern Japanese . The tonal categories of modern varieties can be related by considering their derivation from the four tones of Middle Chinese , though cognate tonal categories in different dialects are often realized as quite different pitch contours. Middle Chinese had

448-548: A final and a tone . In general, southern varieties have fewer initial consonants than northern and central varieties, but more often preserve the Middle Chinese final consonants. Some varieties, such as Cantonese, Hokkien and Shanghainese , include syllabic nasals as independent syllables. In the 42 varieties surveyed in the Great Dictionary of Modern Chinese Dialects , the number of initials (including

504-416: A marker, usually the same as the attributive marker, though some varieties use a different marker. All varieties have transitive and intransitive verbs. Instead of adjectives, Chinese varieties use stative verbs , which can function as predicates but differ from intransitive verbs in being modifiable by degree adverbs. Ditransitive sentences vary, with northern varieties placing the indirect object before

560-498: A primary division between northern groups (Mandarin and Jin) and all others, with Min as an identifiable branch. Because speakers share a standard written form , and have a common cultural heritage with long periods of political unity, the varieties are popularly perceived among native speakers as variants of a single Chinese language, and this is also the official position. Conventional English-language usage in Chinese linguistics

616-665: A reduced pitch range that is determined by the preceding syllable. Most morphemes in Chinese varieties are monosyllables descended from Old Chinese words, and have cognates in all varieties: Southern varieties also include distinctive substrata of vocabulary of non-Chinese origin. Some of these words may have come from Tai–Kadai and Austroasiatic languages. Chinese varieties generally lack inflectional morphology and instead express grammatical categories using analytic means such as particles and prepositions . There are major differences between northern and southern varieties, but often some northern areas share features found in

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672-851: A single mid vowel with a wide range of allophones . Many dialects, particularly in northern and central China, have apical or retroflex vowels, which are syllabic fricatives derived from high vowels following sibilant initials. In many Wu dialects , vowels and final glides have monophthongized , producing a rich inventory of vowels in open syllables. Reduction of medials is common in Yue dialects . The Middle Chinese codas, consisting of glides /j/ and /w/ , nasals /m/ , /n/ and /ŋ/ , and stops /p/ , /t/ and /k/ , are best preserved in southern dialects, particularly Yue dialects such as Cantonese. In some Min dialects, nasals and stops following open vowels have shifted to nasalization and glottal stops respectively. In Jin, Lower Yangtze Mandarin and Wu dialects,

728-460: A six-way contrast in unchecked syllables and a two-way contrast in checked syllables. Cantonese maintains these eight tonal categories and has developed an additional distinction in checked syllables. (The latter distinction has disappeared again in many varieties.) However, most Chinese varieties have reduced the number of tonal distinctions. For example, in Mandarin, the tones resulting from

784-575: A standard national language with pronunciation based on the Beijing dialect was adopted, but with vocabulary drawn from a range of Mandarin varieties, and grammar based on literature in the modern written vernacular. Standard Chinese is the official spoken language of the People's Republic of China and Taiwan, and is one of the official languages of Singapore. It has become a pluricentric language , with differences in pronunciation and vocabulary between

840-471: A third tone changes to a second tone when followed by another third tone. Particularly complex sandhi patterns are found in Wu dialects and coastal Min dialects. In Shanghainese, the tone of all syllables in a word is determined by the tone of the first, so that Shanghainese has word rather than syllable tone. In northern varieties, many particles or suffixes are weakly stressed or atonic syllables. These are much rarer in southern varieties. Such syllables have

896-577: A three-way tonal contrast in syllables with vocalic or nasal endings. The traditional names of the tonal categories are 'level'/'even' ( 平 píng ), 'rising' ( 上 shǎng ) and 'departing'/'going' ( 去 qù ). Syllables ending in a stop consonant /p/ , /t/ or /k/ ( checked syllables ) had no tonal contrasts but were traditionally treated as a fourth tone category, 'entering' ( 入 rù ), corresponding to syllables ending in nasals /m/ , /n/ , or /ŋ/ . The tones of Middle Chinese, as well as similar systems in neighbouring languages, experienced

952-620: A velar or glottal initial: Plural personal pronouns may be marked with a suffix, noun or phrase in different varieties. The suffix men 们 / 們 is common in the north, but several different suffixes are use elsewhere. In some varieties, especially in the Wu area, different suffixes are used for first, second and third person pronouns. Case is not marked, except in varieties in the Qinghai–Gansu sprachbund . The forms of demonstratives vary greatly, with few cognates between different areas. A two-way distinction between proximal and distal

1008-422: A verb cognate with yǒu 有 , which can also be used as a transitive verb indicating possession. Most varieties use a locative verb cognate to zài 在 , but Min, Wu and Yue varieties use several different forms. Fangyan (book) The Fangyan is a Chinese dictionary compiled in the early 1st century CE by the poet and philosopher Yang Xiong (53 BCE – 18 CE). It

1064-810: A whole. As with the Romance languages descended from Latin , the ancestral language was spread by imperial expansion over substrate languages 2000 years ago, by the Qin and Han empires in China, and the Roman Empire in Europe. Medieval Latin remained the standard for scholarly and administrative writing in Western Europe for centuries, influencing local varieties much like Literary Chinese did in China. In both cases, local forms of speech diverged from both

1120-516: A wide area. Contrastingly, the mountains and rivers of southern China contain all six of the other major Chinese dialect groups, with each in turn featuring great internal diversity, particularly in Fujian . 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

1176-662: A zero initial) ranges from 15 in some southern dialects to a high of 35 in Chongming dialect , spoken in Chongming Island , Shanghai . The initial system of the Fuzhou dialect of northern Fujian is a minimal example. With the exception of /ŋ/ , which is often merged with the zero initial, the initials of this dialect are present in all Chinese varieties, although several varieties do not distinguish /n/ from /l/ . However, most varieties have additional initials, due to

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1232-469: Is considered to be one of the top three places in the world to grow black tea. This Guangdong location article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Varieties of Chinese There are hundreds of local Chinese language varieties forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family , many of which are not mutually intelligible . Variation is particularly strong in

1288-462: Is most common, but some varieties have a single neutral demonstrative, while others distinguish three or more on the basis of distance, visibility or other properties. An extreme example is found in a variety spoken in Yongxin County , Jiangxi, where five grades of distance are distinguished. Attributive constructions typically have the form NP/VP + ATTR + NP, where the last noun phrase

1344-470: Is similarly used as a literary form by speakers of all varieties. Dialectologist Jerry Norman estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese. These varieties form a dialect continuum , in which differences in speech generally become more pronounced as distances increase, although there are also some sharp boundaries. However, the rate of change in mutual intelligibility varies immensely depending on region. For example,

1400-456: Is the head and the attributive marker is usually a cognate of de 的 in the north or a classifier in the south. The latter pattern is also common in the languages of Southeast Asia. A few varieties in the Jiang–Huai, Wu, southern Min and Yue areas feature the old southern pattern of a zero attributive marker. Nominalization of verb phrases or predicates is achieved by following them with

1456-566: Is to use dialect for the speech of a particular place (regardless of status), with regional groupings like Mandarin and Wu called dialect groups . Other linguists choose to refer to the major groups as languages. However, each of these groups contains mutually unintelligible varieties. ISO 639-3 and the Ethnologue assign language codes to each of the top-level groups listed above except Min and Pinghua, whose subdivisions are assigned five and two codes respectively. Some linguists refer to

1512-612: The Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area , Chinese varieties require an intervening classifier when a noun is preceded by a demonstrative or numeral. The inventory of classifiers tends to be larger in the south than in the north, where some varieties use only the general classifier cognate with ge 个 / 個 . First- and second-person pronouns are cognate across all varieties. For third-person pronouns, Jin, Mandarin, and Xiang varieties have cognate forms, but other varieties generally use forms that originally had

1568-852: The tree model to Chinese. Scholars account for the transitional nature of the central varieties in terms of wave models . Iwata argues that innovations have been transmitted from the north across the Huai River to the Lower Yangtze Mandarin area and from there southeast to the Wu area and westwards along the Yangtze River valley and thence to southwestern areas, leaving the hills of the southeast largely untouched. Some dialect boundaries , such as between Wu and Min, are particularly abrupt, while others, such as between Mandarin and Xiang or between Min and Hakka, are much less clearly defined. Several east-west isoglosses run along

1624-463: The Beijing dialect distinguishes mā ( 妈 / 媽 'mother'), má ( 麻 'hemp'), mǎ ( 马 / 馬 'horse) and mà ( 骂 / 罵 'to scold'). The number of tonal contrasts varies between dialects, with Northern dialects tending to have fewer distinctions than Southern ones. Many dialects have tone sandhi , in which the pitch contour of a syllable is affected by the tones of adjacent syllables in

1680-768: The Huai and Yangtze Rivers. A north-south barrier is formed by the Tianmu and Wuyi Mountains . Most assessments of mutual intelligibility of varieties of Chinese in the literature are impressionistic. Functional intelligibility testing is time-consuming in any language family, and usually not done when more than 10 varieties are to be compared. However, one 2009 study aimed to measure intelligibility between 15 Chinese provinces. In each province, 15 university students were recruited as speakers and 15 older rural inhabitants recruited as listeners. The listeners were then tested on their comprehension of isolated words and of particular words in

1736-477: The Latin alphabet supplanted Latin itself, and states eventually developed their own standard languages . In China, Literary Chinese was predominantly used in formal writing until the early 20th century. Written Chinese, read with different local pronunciations, continued to serve as a source of vocabulary for the local varieties. The new standard written vernacular Chinese , the counterpart of spoken Standard Chinese,

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1792-558: The above example, Paul Serruys reconstructs 'tiger' as Old Chinese *blxâg . Serruys also applied the techniques of modern dialectology to the distribution of regional words, identifying dialect areas and their relationships. Victor Mair proposed that 方言 be translated as topolect , while dialect should be translated into Chinese as 通言 tōngyán . Based on this, topolect has been used to characterize other speech varieties where an identification as either language or dialect would be controversial. Examples include Scots and

1848-435: The coastal area from Zhejiang to eastern Guangdong . Standard Chinese takes its phonology from the Beijing dialect, with vocabulary from the Mandarin group and grammar based on literature in the modern written vernacular . It is one of the official languages of China and one of the four official languages of Singapore . It has become a pluricentric language , with differences in pronunciation and vocabulary between

1904-517: The context of sentences spoken by speakers from all 15 of the provinces surveyed. The results demonstrated significant levels of unintelligibility between areas, even within the Mandarin group. In a few cases, listeners understood fewer than 70% of words spoken by speakers from the same province, indicating significant differences between urban and rural varieties. As expected from the wide use of Standard Chinese , speakers from Beijing were understood more than speakers from elsewhere. The scores supported

1960-475: The countryside annually to record folk songs and idioms from across China, reaching as far north as Korea. The Fangyan originally contained some 9,000 characters in 15 chapters, but two chapters have since been lost. Definitions typically list regional synonyms. For example, the entry for hu ( 虎 'tiger') is as follows: 虎：陳魏宋楚之間或謂之李父；江淮南楚之間謂之李耳，或謂之於菟．自關東西或謂之伯都． Tiger: in the regions of Chen - Wei Song - Chu [Central China], some call it lifu ; in

2016-933: The dialects of the Southern zone are derived from a standard used in the Yangtze valley during the Han dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD), which he called Old Southern Chinese, while the Central zone was a transitional area of dialects that were originally of southern type, but overlain with centuries of Northern influence. Hilary Chappell proposed a refined model, dividing Norman's Northern zone into Northern and Southwestern areas, and his Southern zone into Southeastern (Min) and Far Southern (Yue and Hakka) areas, with Pinghua transitional between Southwestern and Far Southern areas. The long history of migration of peoples and interaction between speakers of different dialects makes it difficult to apply

2072-581: The direct object and southern varieties using the reverse order. All varieties have copular sentences of the form NP1 + COP + NP2, though the copula varies. Most Yue and Hakka varieties use a form cognate with xì 係 'to connect'. All other varieties use a form cognate with shì 是 , which was a demonstrative in Classical Chinese but began to be used as a copula from the Han period. All varieties form existential sentences with

2128-419: The greatest differences in their phonology , and to a lesser extent in vocabulary and syntax . Southern varieties tend to have fewer initial consonants than northern and central varieties, but more often preserve the Middle Chinese final consonants. All have phonemic tones , with northern varieties tending to have fewer distinctions than southern ones. Many have tone sandhi , with the most complex patterns in

2184-403: The languages previously dominant in these areas, and forms of the language spoken in different regions began to diverge. During periods of political unity there was a tendency for states to promote the use of a standard language across the territory they controlled, in order to facilitate communication between people from different regions. The first evidence of dialectal variation is found in

2240-548: The literary standard and each other, producing dialect continua with mutually unintelligible varieties separated by long distances. However, a major difference between China and Western Europe is the historical reestablishment of political unity in 6th century China by the Sui dynasty , a unity that has persisted with relatively brief interludes until the present day. Meanwhile, Europe remained politically decentralized, and developed numerous independent states. Vernacular writing using

2296-432: The local varieties as languages, numbering in the hundreds. The Chinese term fāngyán 方言 , literally 'place speech', was the title of the first work of Chinese dialectology in the Han dynasty , and has had a range of meanings in the millennia since. It is used for any regional subdivision of Chinese, from the speech of a village to major branches such as Mandarin and Wu. Linguists writing in Chinese often qualify

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2352-494: The lower-pitched allophones occur with initial voiced consonants. (Traditional Chinese classification nonetheless counts these as different tones.) Most Wu dialects retain the tone categories of Middle Chinese, but in Shanghainese several of these have merged. Many Chinese varieties exhibit tone sandhi , in which the realization of a tone varies depending on the context of the syllable. For example, in Standard Chinese

2408-480: The main routes of migration and communication in southern China. The first scientific classifications, based primarily on the evolution of Middle Chinese voiced initials, were produced by Wang Li in 1936 and Li Fang-Kuei in 1937, with minor modifications by other linguists since. The conventionally accepted set of seven dialect groups first appeared in the second edition (1980) of Yuan Jiahua 's dialectology handbook: The Language Atlas of China (1987) follows

2464-411: The more mountainous southeast part of mainland China. The varieties are typically classified into several groups: Mandarin , Wu , Min , Xiang , Gan , Jin , Hakka and Yue , though some varieties remain unclassified. These groups are neither clades nor individual languages defined by mutual intelligibility, but reflect common phonological developments from Middle Chinese . Chinese varieties have

2520-529: The regions of Jiang - Huai Nan-Chu [Southern China], they call it li'er , and some call it wutu . From the Pass, east- and west-ward [Eastern and Western China], some call it also bodu . Comparative linguists have used dialect data from the Fangyan in reconstructing the pronunciation of Eastern Han Chinese (1st century CE), which is an important diachronic stage between Old Chinese and Middle Chinese . In

2576-527: The south, and vice versa. The usual unmarked word order in Chinese varieties is subject–verb–object , with other orders used for emphasis or contrast. Modifiers usually precede the word they modify, so that adjectives precede nouns. Instances in which the modifier follows the head are mainly found in the south, and are attributed to substrate influences from languages formerly dominant in the area, especially Kra–Dai languages . Nouns in Chinese varieties are generally not marked for number. As in languages of

2632-433: The split of Middle Chinese rising and departing tones merged, leaving four tones. Furthermore, final stop consonants disappeared in most Mandarin dialects, and such syllables were distributed amongst the four remaining tones in a manner that is only partially predictable. In Wu, voiced obstruents were retained, and the tone split never became phonemic: the higher-pitched allophones occur with initial voiceless consonants, and

2688-535: The stops have merged as a final glottal stop , while in most northern varieties they have disappeared. 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. All varieties of Chinese, like neighbouring languages in the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area , have phonemic tones . Each syllable may be pronounced with between three and seven distinct pitch contours, denoting different morphemes. For example,

2744-405: The term to distinguish different levels of classification. All these terms have customarily been translated into English as dialect , a practice that has been criticized as confusing. The neologisms regionalect and topolect have been proposed as alternative renderings of fāngyán . The usual unit of analysis is the syllable, traditionally analysed as consisting of an initial consonant ,

2800-591: The texts of the Spring and Autumn period (771–476 BC). Although the Zhou royal domain was no longer politically powerful, its speech still represented a model for communication across China. The Fangyan (early 1st century AD) is devoted to differences in vocabulary between regions. Commentaries from the Eastern Han (25–220 AD) provide significant evidence of local differences in pronunciation. The Qieyun ,

2856-497: The three forms. Standard Chinese is much more widely studied than any other variety of Chinese, and its use is now dominant in public life on the mainland. Outside of China and Taiwan, the only varieties of Chinese commonly taught in university courses are Standard Chinese and Cantonese . Local varieties from different areas of China are often mutually unintelligible, differing at least as much as different Romance languages and perhaps even as much as Indo-European languages as

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2912-570: The three forms. It is also one of the six official languages of the United Nations . At the end of the 2nd millennium BC, a form of Chinese was spoken in a compact area along the lower Wei River and middle Yellow River . Use of this language expanded eastwards across the North China Plain into Shandong , and then southwards into the Yangtze River valley and the hills of south China. Chinese eventually replaced many of

2968-481: The varieties of Mandarin spoken in all three northeastern Chinese provinces are mutually intelligible, but in the province of Fujian, where Min varieties predominate, the speech of neighbouring counties or even villages may be mutually unintelligible. Proportions of first-language speakers Classifications of Chinese varieties in the late 19th century and early 20th century were based on impressionistic criteria. They often followed river systems, which were historically

3024-413: The various regional varieties of Arabic and Romani . In all of these situations, an identification of distinct languages by the straightforward criterion of mutual intelligibility may not be politically or socially acceptable to a significant number of scholars. For example, several varieties of Southwestern Mandarin are not mutually intelligible, and they would be classified as distinct languages within

3080-585: The vocabulary of the Bai language of Yunnan appears to be related to Chinese words, though many are clearly loans from the last few centuries. Some scholars have suggested that it represents a very early branching from Chinese, while others argue that it is a more distantly related Sino-Tibetan language overlaid with two millennia of loans. Jerry Norman classified the traditional seven dialect groups into three zones: Northern (Mandarin), Central (Wu, Gan, and Xiang) and Southern (Hakka, Yue, and Min). He argued that

3136-441: Was the first Chinese dictionary to include significant regional vocabulary, and is considered the "most significant lexicographic work" of its era. His dictionary's preface explains how he spent 27 years amassing and collating the dictionary. Yang collected regionalisms from many sources, particularly the 'light carriage' ( 輶軒 yóuxuān ) surveys made during the Zhou and Qin dynasties, where imperial emissaries were sent into

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