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 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 are identified by common correspondences with selected features of Middle Chinese.
Chinese varieties differ in their phonology, 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 the coastal area from Zhejiang to eastern Guangdong. There are major lexical and grammatical differences between northern and southern varieties, but often some northern areas have features found in the south, and vice versa.
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, the de facto official language of Taiwan and one of the four official languages of Singapore. It has become a pluricentric language, with differences in pronunciation and vocabulary between them. Standard Chinese is also one of the six official languages of the United Nations.
History
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 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 the texts of the Spring and Autumn period. Although the Zhou royal domain was no longer politically powerful, its speech still represented a model for communication across China. The Fangyan is devoted to differences in vocabulary between regions. Commentaries from the Eastern Han provide significant evidence of local differences in pronunciation. The Qieyun, 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 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.
Standard Chinese
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 a common language based on Mandarin varieties, known as . 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 varieties. In the 1930s, a standard national language was adopted that had pronunciation based on the Beijing dialect, but 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 four official languages of Singapore. It has become a pluricentric language, with differences in pronunciation and vocabulary between them.
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.
Comparison with Romance languages
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 a whole. As with the Romance languages descended from Latin, the ancestral language was spread by imperial expansion over substrate languages around 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 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, developing into numerous independent states. Vernacular writing using 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, is similarly used as a literary form by speakers of all varieties.
Classification
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, 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.
Dialect groups
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 the main routes of migration and communication in southern China. The first scientific classifications, based primarily on correspondences with 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 of Yuan Jiahua's dialectology handbook:;Mandarin
;Wu
;Gan
;Xiang
;Min
;Hakka
;Yue
The Language Atlas of China follows a classification of Li Rong, distinguishing three further groups:
;Jin
;Huizhou
;Pinghua
Some varieties remain unclassified, including the Danzhou dialect, Mai, Waxiang, Xiangnan Tuhua, Shaozhou Tuhua, and the forms of Chinese spoken by the She people and the Miao people.
She Chinese, Xiangnan Tuhua, Shaozhou Tuhua and unclassified varieties of southwest Jiangxi appear to be related to Hakka.
Most of 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.
Dialect geography
classified the traditional seven dialect groups into three zones: Northern, Central and Southern.He argued that the varieties of the Southern zone are derived from a standard used in the Yangtze valley during the Han dynasty, which he called Old Southern Chinese, while the Central zone was a transitional area of varieties 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 and Far Southern areas, with Pinghua transitional between Southwestern and Far Southern areas.
The long history of migration of peoples and interaction between speakers of different varieties makes it difficult to apply 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 the Huai and Yangtze Rivers.
A north-south barrier is formed by the Tianmu and Wuyi Mountains.