By Anna Xie
This map shows the many language families that make up China. Most people associate Chinese with Mandarin or maybe Cantonese. However, there are several hundred languages in China. A lot of these languages are Sinitic languages which includes Mandarin. Traditionally, seven major groups of dialects have been recognized. Aside from Mandarin, the other six are Wu, Gan, and Xiang in central China and Min, Hakka, and Yue on the southeast coast.
The spoken varieties of Chinese are mutually unintelligible to their respective speakers. They are different from each other similarly to romance languages. Most of these differences emerge with pronunciation and vocabulary. All of these Chinese languages share the same written language called “wenyan,” which are Chinese characters. This written language has no pronunciation, instead the speaker reads it based on the pronunciation of their own language.
In the early 1900s, a program for the unification of a national language was launched and it was based in Mandarin. In 1956, a new romanization system was introduced called “Pinyin” and it’s based on the pronunciation of the Beijing dialect. In 1979, the system was prescribed for use in all diplomatic documents and foreign-language publications in English speaking countries.
Some scholars divide the history of the Chinese languages into Proto-Chinese; (until 500 B.C.), Old Chinese (8th to 3rd century B.C.), Middle Chinese (through A.D. 907), and Modern Chinese (from c. the 10th century to modern day). The Proto-Sinitic is where the most ancient inscriptions and poetry comes from and most Chinese loanwords come from this period. The works of Confucius mark the beginning of Middle Chinese. The knowledge of Ancient Chinese sounds has been derived from a dictionary published in 601 A.D.
Wu Chinese originated from the Yangtze River Delta and developed around major cultural hubs such as Shanghai and Hangzhou and it’s influenced by ancient migration and trade routes. Gan Chinese reflects the regional dialects along with the mixture of indigenous languages in the area. Gan Chinese emerged through historic migrations during the Tang and Song dynasties. It’s mostly clustered in the Jiangxi province and is spoken in Jiangxi’s neighboring provinces. Xiang Chinese is spoken mainly in the Hunan province and it still has features of Old Chinese. The dialects of Xiang are broken up into “Old” and “New” Chinese.
Yue Chinese, which is often used interchangeably with Cantonese, is a branch of Chinese languages that is mostly spoken in the Guangdong and Guangxi provinces. However, linguists classify Cantonese as a dialect in the Yue Chinese branch. Min Chinese originated from the southern Fujian region and was developed by early Han settlers who wanted to preserve ancient linguistic elements. Hakka is associated with the Hakka people who migrated from Northern to Southern China, particularly Guangdong and Fujian.
The Many Dialects of China | Asia Society
Chinese languages | History, Characteristics, Dialects, Types, & Facts | Britannica