Spoken Chinese comprises many regional variants, the largest of which are Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, and Min. These sub-groups of the Chinese spoken language are, for the most part, not mutually intelligible.
Although the English word dialect is often used to translate the Chinese term fangyan the differences between the major variants Chinese are great enough that they are mutually unintelligible, a criterion used by many linguists to distinguish different languages from dialects of a single language. However, most Chinese view them as variants of a single Chinese language, which is often a prime consideration of a dialect. (See Identification of the varieties of Chinese for more details)
Within China, it is common perception that these varieties are distinct in their spoken forms only, and that the language, when written, is common across the country. Therefore even though China is home to hundreds of relatively unique spoken languages, literate people are usually able to communicate through written language effectively.
Spoken Chinese is a dialect continuum. Differences between the spoken language generally become more pronounced as distances increase. However, the degree of intelligibility varies immensely depending on region. For example, the Mandarin spoken in all three northeastern Chinese provinces is mutually intelligible, but in the small province of Zhejiang a person from one valley may be completely unable to comprehend the language from the next valley, even though both are considered dialects of Wu Chinese. This unevenness of mutual intelligibility makes classification difficult.
There is little formal study of any dialect but Standard Mandarin. Outside of China, the only two spoken languages generally presented in formal courses are Standard Mandarin and Standard Cantonese. Inside China, second language acquisition can only be achieved through immersing in the local language.
The Chinese spoken languages are generally classified into the following groups:
There is some dispute as to whether the following languages should be classified separately:
Some varieties remain unclassified. These include:
In addition, the Dungan language (东干语/東干語) is a dialect of Mandarin spoken in Kyrgyzstan. However, it is written in the Cyrillic alphabet as a result of Soviet rule.
Knowing the local dialect is of considerable social benefit and most Chinese who permanently move to a new area will attempt to pick up the local dialect. Learning a new dialect is usually done informally through a process of immersion and recognizing sound shifts. Generally the differences are more pronounced lexically than grammatically. Typically, a speaker of one dialect of Chinese will need about a year of immersion to understand the local dialect and about three to five years to become fluent in speaking it. Because of the variety of dialects spoken, there are usually few formal methods for learning a local dialect.
Due to the variety in Chinese speech, Mandarin speakers from each area of China are very often prone to fuse or "translate" words from their local tongue into their Mandarin conversations. In addition, each area of China has its recognizable accents while speaking Mandarin. Generally, the nationalized standard form of Mandarin pronunciation is only heard on news and radio broadcasts. Even in the streets of Beijing, the flavour of Mandarin varies in pronunciation from the Mandarin heard on the media.
Another factor that limits the political implications of dialect is that it is very common within an extended family for different people to know and use different dialects. In addition, while speaking similar dialect provides very strong group identity at the level of a city or county, the high degree of linguistic diversity limits the amount of group solidarity at larger levels. Finally, the linguistic diversity of southern China makes it likely that in any large group of Chinese, Standard Mandarin will be the only form of speech that everyone understands.
On the other hand, in the Republic of China on Taiwan, the government had a policy until the mid-1980s of promoting Standard Mandarin as high-status and the local languages—Taiwanese and Hakka—as low-status, a situation which caused much resentment and resulted in considerable backlash in the 1990s, manifested in the Taiwanese localization movement.
which, when translated cognate-by-cognate into Mandarin would be spoken as an awkward or semantically unrecognizable sentence:
Where as when spoken colloquially in Mandarin, one would either say:
or:
the latter omitting the reflexive pronoun (zìjǐ), not usually needed in Mandarin.
Some people, particularly in northern China, would say:
The phonological structure of each syllable consists of a nucleus consisting of a vowel (which can be a monophthong, diphthong, or even a triphthong in certain varieties) with an optional onset or coda consonant as well as a tone. There are some instances where a non-vowel is used as a nucleus. An example of this is in Cantonese, where the nasal sonorant consonants /m/ and /ŋ/ can stand alone as their own syllable.
Across all the spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda, but syllables that do have codas are restricted to /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, /p/, /t/, /k/, or /ʔ/. Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Mandarin, are limited to only two, namely /n/ and /ŋ/. Consonant clusters do not generally occur in either the onset or coda. The onset may be an affricate or a consonant followed by a semivowel, but these are not generally considered consonant clusters.
The number of sounds in the different spoken dialects varies, but in general there has been a tendency to a reduction in sounds from Middle Chinese. The Mandarin dialects in particular have experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds and so have far more multisyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. The total number of syllables in some varieties is therefore only about a thousand, including tonal variation.
All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones. A few dialects of north China may have as few as three tones, while some dialects in south China have up to 6 or 10 tones, depending on how one counts. One exception from this is Shanghainese which has reduced the set of tones to a two-toned pitch accent system much like modern Japanese.
A very common example used to illustrate the use of tones in Chinese are the four main tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable ma. The tones correspond to these five characters:
The confusion arises in how one thinks about the language. In the Chinese writing system, each individual single-syllable morpheme corresponds to a single character, referred to as a zì (字). Most Chinese speakers think of words as being zì, but this view is not entirely accurate. Many words are multisyllabic, and are composed of more than one zì. This composition is what is known as a cí (词/詞), and more closely resembles the traditional Western definition of a word. However, the concept of cí was historically a technical linguistic term that, until only the past century, the average Chinese speaker was not aware of. Even today, most Chinese speakers think of words as being zì. This can be illustrated in the following Mandarin Chinese sentence (romanized using pinyin):
Jīguāng, zhè liǎng ge zì shì shénme yìsi? 激光, 這兩個字是什麼意思? 激光, 这两个字是什么意思?
The sentence literally translates to, “Jī 激 and guāng 光, these two zì 字, what do they mean?” However, the more natural English translation would probably be, “Laser, this word, what does it mean?” Even though jīguāng 激光 is a single word, speakers tend to think of its constituents as being separate (Ramsey, 1987).
Old Chinese and Middle Chinese had many more monosyllabic words due to greater variability in possible sounds. The modern Chinese varieties lost many of these sound distinctions, leading to homonyms in words that were once distinct. Multisyllabic words arose in order to compensate for this loss. Most natively derived multisyllabic words still feature these original monosyllabic morpheme roots. Many Chinese morphemes still have associated meaning, even though many of them no longer can stand alone as individual words - they are bound morphemes. This situation is analogous to the use of the English prefix pre-. Even though pre- can never stand alone by itself as an individual word, it is commonly understood by English speakers to mean “before”, such as in the words predawn, previous, and premonition.
Taking the previous example, jīguāng, jī and guāng literally mean “stimulated light”, resulting in the meaning, “laser”. However, jī is never found as a single word by itself, because there are too many other morphemes that are also pronounced in the same way. For instance, the morphemes that correspond to the meanings “chicken” 雞/鸡, “machine” 機/机, “basic” 基, “hit” 擊/击, “hunger” 饑/饥, and “sum” 積/积 are also pronounced jī in Mandarin. It is only in the context of other morphemes that an exact meaning of a zì can be known. In certain ways, the logographic writing system helps to reinforce meaning in zì that are homophonous, since even though several morphemes may be pronounced the same way, they are written using different characters. Continuing with the example, we have:
| Pinyin | Traditional Characters | Simplified Characters | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| jīguāng | 激光 | 激光 | laser (“stimulated light”) |
| jīqǐ | 激起 | 激起 | to arouse (“stimulated rise”) |
| jīdàn | 雞蛋 | 鸡蛋 | chicken egg |
| gōngjī | 公雞 | 公鸡 | rooster (“male chicken”) |
| fēijī | 飛機 | 飞机 | aeroplane (“flying machine”) |
| jīqiāng | 機槍 | 机枪 | machine gun |
For this reason, it is very common for Mandarin speakers to put characters in context as a natural part of conversation. For example, when telling each other their names (which are often rare, or at least non-colloquial, combinations of zì), Mandarin speakers often state which words their names are found in. As an example, a speaker might say 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyīng, Jiālíngjiāng de jiā, Yīngguó de yīng “My name is Jiāyīng, the Jia of Jialing River and the Ying in England (Yingguo in Chinese)”.
The problem of homonyms also exists but is less severe in southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Taiwanese, which preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese. For instance, the previous examples of jī for “stimulated”, “chicken”, and “machine” have distinct pronunciations in Cantonese (romanized using jyutping): gik1, gai1, and gei1, respectively. For this reason, southern varieties tend to employ fewer multisyllabic words.
There are a few morphemes in Chinese, many of them loanwords, that consist of more than one syllable. These words cannot be further divided into single-syllable meaningful units, however in writing each syllable is still written as separate zì. One example is the word for “spider”, zhīzhū, which is written as 蜘蛛. Even in this case, Chinese tend to try to make some kind of meaning out of the constituent syllables. For this reason, the two characters 蜘 and 蛛 each have an associated meaning of “spider” when seen alone as individual characters. When spoken though, they can never occur apart.
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