One word, many kinds of speech
“Chinese” is not a single way of speaking. It is a family of related spoken varieties, used across a very large area, that share a common written tradition and a long common history. Standard Mandarin is the best known and the most widely used, but it sits alongside many others, some of which a Mandarin speaker cannot follow without study.
This article gives a broad map. Specific varieties and the writing system are taken up in more detail elsewhere on the site.
What people mean by Mandarin
The English word “Mandarin” is usually traced to the officials of imperial times. In Chinese there are several terms. Putonghua (“common speech”) is the usual name for the standard in mainland China, and Guoyu (“national language”) is a term long used in Taiwan. Both refer to a standard based mainly on the pronunciation of the Beijing area, with vocabulary and grammar drawn from northern speech and from modern written Chinese.
It helps to separate two things that share a name:
- Standard Mandarin, the taught and broadcast form used in schools, media and official settings.
- The wider Mandarin group, a large set of regional varieties spoken across much of northern, central and southwestern China. A speaker from the northeast, one from Sichuan and one from the northwest may all be called Mandarin speakers, yet their everyday speech can differ noticeably in sounds and words.
Because the standard was promoted widely during the twentieth century through schooling and broadcasting, many people across China today are comfortable in it, often alongside their home speech. Levels of fluency vary from person to person and place to place.
The other major groups
Linguists commonly sort the varieties of Chinese into several major groups. The exact count and boundaries are debated, but the following are usually named:
- Wu, associated with Shanghai and the surrounding region.
- Yue, which includes Cantonese, centered on Guangzhou and also strong in Hong Kong and Macau.
- Min, a diverse group centered on Fujian and found in Taiwan and overseas, including Hokkien.
- Hakka, spoken in scattered communities across southern China and abroad.
- Xiang and Gan, spoken in Hunan and Jiangxi respectively.
Some classifications add further groups. Within each group there is more local variation, and speech may change noticeably from one town or valley to the next.
Why “dialect” is both right and misleading
In English, the word dialect usually means a variety that speakers of the same language can mostly understand. By that test, many Chinese varieties would count as separate languages. A Cantonese speaker and a Mandarin speaker who have never studied each other’s speech typically cannot hold a conversation. The same goes for many pairs among Wu, Min and the rest.
Yet the Chinese term often translated as dialect, fangyan (“regional speech”), reflects a different way of thinking. Several things pull the varieties together under one heading:
- A shared written language. Readers across regions can usually read the same standard text, even when they would pronounce it very differently.
- A shared history and literature. The classical tradition, discussed in more detail in the article on Classical Chinese, was common to educated people everywhere.
- A shared sense of identity. Many speakers see their local speech as one thread of a single cultural world, much as people elsewhere may feel their regional speech belongs to a larger nation.
Neither answer is simply correct. Scholars often note that where the line between a language and a dialect falls is partly a social and political decision, not only a linguistic one. It is reasonable to say that these varieties are related like the Romance languages in some respects, while recognizing that the comparison is imperfect, since the written standard and the political history are different.
How the differences show up
The varieties differ in several ways that a learner would notice.
Sounds. Different groups have different numbers of tones, and some keep final consonants that Mandarin has lost. The article on Chinese tones looks at how pitch works in Mandarin, and the article on Cantonese shows a contrasting system.
Vocabulary. The same everyday object can have different words in different places, and some varieties preserve older words that Mandarin dropped.
Grammar. There are differences in word order for some constructions and in small grammar words, though the basic structure is broadly similar.
Writing. Standard written Chinese follows Mandarin-based grammar and vocabulary. Speakers of other varieties usually learn to write in this standard, so a person might read a sentence aloud in Cantonese or Hokkien, using a quite different pronunciation. Some varieties also have informal written forms, particularly for colloquial speech.
Beyond the Chinese group
China is also home to many people whose first languages are not Chinese at all, such as Tibetan, Uyghur or Mongolian, and others from different language families. These belong to a different part of the picture, and the discussion of ethnic minorities covers the people behind them.
Why the map matters
Regional speech is closely tied to place and memory. Movement of people over centuries, including long-distance migration within China and emigration abroad, spread several varieties to new regions, which is why Hokkien, Cantonese and Hakka are heard in many overseas communities. The speech of a city or region can also be a source of pride, and it appears in local songs, storytelling and Chinese opera.
At the same time, the spread of a national standard has changed daily life. Many families now use the standard with children in some places, while elsewhere there are active efforts to keep local speech in use. Opinions differ, and the situation varies widely by region and generation.
For a reader new to the subject, a useful rule of thumb is this: written Chinese ties the world together, while spoken Chinese varies widely. Understanding both halves, and the reasons for the split, makes much of Chinese cultural life easier to follow.