What ARE the Different Chinese Languages?

Question

Well, you see, there's more than one Chinese language.

But all I hear out of everyone's mouth is...:

"Mandarin"

I mean, Mandarin isn't the only Chinese language neh?

So just out of thought.....Can you name all the Chinese languages?

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Answer 1

There are definitely many different dialects of Chinese....The most popular is of course Mandarin and Cantonese, but there are other dialects from other parts of China, like Shanghaiese, Fujianese, Tsoi San, Taiwanese, just to name a few...the only one that I don't I think i heard a different dialect is Beijing b/c they mainly speak Mandarin with a Bejing accent to their words...

Answer 2

There are many Chinese dialects, because China is a country that has gone through various kings and emperors for about four thousand years, and some of them are Mandarin (which is spoken by about 850 million and is the standard dialect of China), Wu (87 million), Cantonese (54.8 million), Southern Min (46 million), Jin (45 m), Xiang (36 m), Hakka (30 m), Gan (21 m), Northern Min (10.3 m), Eastern Min (9.1 m) Hui (3.2 m), and Ping. Chinese is not the only language spoken in China, though, because Hong Kong, which was a British colony until 1997, also has English as the official language, and Macau, which was a trading port for Portugese, also has Portugese as the official language. Almost everyone in China learns Mandarin, though, because the Chinese had so many languages, and the government wanted one standard language. Although the languages may be drastically different as English is from French, they all write with either a simplified or traditional writing system (they don't have an alphabet, just thousands of characters). The simplified writing system came about because the leaders in Mainland China wanted a writing system that even the commoners could use, and the traditional writing system was used by the Chinese for centuries after Shi Huangdi, who was also the first emperor of China, standardized it. Today, the simplified system is used more, because the Chinese government uses it, and it is easier to use, but the traditional system is used mostly outside of China, like Taiwan and the USA. Not only that, Chinese has influenced several other languages as well, like Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese, in terms of vocabulary. Also, if you include all of the dialects of China, then the Chinese language is the most spoken in the world, with over a billion out of about 6.5 billion people, followed by Spanish and English. As a result, it is one of the six official languages in the UN. As you can see, the answer to your question depends on what you really mean by the "Chinese language."

Answer 3

Only discusses Han Nationality's Chinese, pronounces is dissimilar, the grammar difference is very small, they develops from the identical language. In close area, the pronunciation is similar. And, the people in the north of china can't understand the people in the south when they are talking, but the people in the south can understand the people in the north, because the mandarin chinese is based on the north chinese language (mainly the peking area). I can't say too much with my broken english, i even don't know if you understand what I've said.

Answer 4

Whenever we say "Language", it encompass both the writing and speaking. In many languages, the writing is usually in just 1-2 forms. In china, the mainland uses the simplified version while Hong Kong and overseas chinese uses the traditional version and Taiwan uses a mix of both.
Now, the spoken "dialects" can vary from 2 to dozens in some countries. China is in the later category. Mandarin is the designated official "common dialect" which the locals called Putonhua and it means exactly just that.
Examples of others major dialects are cantonese, shanghai, minang, etc plus literally dozens of others spoken in Tibet, Xinjian and inner Mongolia.

Answer 5

Mandarin or 普通话 putonghua is the People's republic of China's national language. It is thaught in every school and if you speak it you can normaly be understood all around main land China.

After you have dialects like Cantonese (which is almost a language by itself). It is spoken in the Guangdong province, Hong-Kong and most foreign overseas Chinese people.

Most of the big cities or province have their own language : Shanghai, Nanjing, Suzhou, Sichuan... They are all different and if each people speak in their own dialect then they won't be able to understand each other.

But if they write no problem as in main land China the writting is the same. It is different though with Taiwan, Macau and Hong-Kong which use tradional Chinese which mean that it is a non simplified one and thus more difficult to write because caracters have more strokes.

Answer 6

As a Chinese, I gonna answer this properly...

Chinese (汉语/漢語, Pinyin: Hànyǔ; 华语/華語, Huáyǔ; or 中文, Zhōngwén) is a language (or language family) that forms part of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the people in the world speak some form of Chinese as their native language.

In general, all varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. However, Chinese is also distinguished for a high level of internal diversity. Regional variation between different variants/dialects is comparable to the Romance language family: many variants of spoken Chinese are different enough to be mutually incomprehensible. It could be argued that there are more native "Romance" (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.) speakers than "Chinese" speakers.[citation needed] There are between six and twelve main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most populous by far is Mandarin (c. 800 million), followed by Wu (c. 90 million), and Cantonese (c. 80 million). The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "languages" or "dialects" is a controversial issue. If Chinese is classified as a single language rather than a group of languages, it is the most widely spoken language in the world.

The standardized form of spoken Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect, a member of the Mandarin group; it is described in the article "Standard Mandarin." Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China or Taiwan, as well as one of four official languages of Singapore (together with English, Malay, and Tamil). Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations (alongside English, Arabic, French, Russian, and Spanish). Spoken in the form of Standard Cantonese, Chinese is one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese).

Answer 7

Cantonese is the other common Chinese spoken in America. There are tons of Chinese dialects spoken in specific parts of China (like Fukienese and Shanghainese) and they all sound completely different. The good thing is that they all are all written the same way.

Answer 8

Cantonese

Answer 9

there's mandrin and cantonese, mandrin is used throughout the country, contonese is used in parts near hongkong and there's traditonal chinese(ppl call it cantonese) and simplified chinese(mandrin)

Answer 10

mandarin and cantonese. thats all i know.