About Chinese Languages
We find it perfectly natural to talk about a language called "Chinese." We say, for example, that the people of' China speak different dialects of Chinese, and that Confucius wrote in an ancient form of Chinese. On the other hand, we would never think of saying that the people of Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal speak dialects of one language, and that Caesar wrote in an ancient form of that language. But the facts are Julius almost exactly parallel.
Therefore, in terms of what we think of as a language when closer to home, "Chinese" is not one language, but a family of languages. The language of Confucius is partway up the trunk of the family tree. Like Latin, it lived on as a literary language long after its death as a spoken language in popular use. The seven modern languages of China, traditionally the "dialects," are the branches of the tree. They share as strong a family resemblance as do Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, and are about as different from one another.
The predominant language of China is now known as or "Standard Chinese" (literally "the common speech'.'). The more traditional term, still used in Taiwan, is Guoyu or "Mandarin" (literally "the national 1anguage"). Standard Chinese is spoken natively by almost two-thirds of the population of China. and throughout the greater part of the country.
The term "Standard Chinese" is often used more narrowly to refer to the true national language which is emerging. This language, which is already the language of all national broadcasting, is based primarily on the Peking dialect, but takes in elements from other dialects of Standard Chinese and even from other Chinese languages. Like many national languages it is more widely understood than spoken, and is often spoken with some concessions to local speech, particularly in pronunciation.
The Chinese languages and their dialects differ far more in pronunciation than in grammar and vocabulary.
What distinguishes Standard Chinese most from the other Chinese languages, for example, is that it has the fewest tones and the fewest final consonants.
The remaining six Chinese languages, spoken by approximately a quarter of the population of China, are tightly grouped in the southeast, below the Yangtze River. the Wu group (Wú), which includes the "Shanghai dialect"; Hunanese (Xiāng); the "Kiangsi dialect" Cantonese (Yuè), the language of Guǎngdōng, widely spoken in Chinese communities in the United States; Fukienese (Mǐn), a variant of which is spoken by a majority on Taiwan and hence called Taiwanese; and Hakka spoken in a belt above the Cantonese area, as well as by a minority on Taiwan. Cantonese, Fukienese, and Hakka are also widely spoken throughout Southeast Asia.
There are minority ethnic groups in China who speak non-Chinese languages. Some of these, such as Tibetan, are distantly related to the Chinese languages. Others, such as Mongolian, are entirely unrelated.
Vocabulary