How the language atlas shifts

By Han Bingbin (China Daily)

10:07, September 17, 2012

One theory about how dialects came into being suggests that it was Northern Chinesewho passed on the language to the South, which blended it with local speech.

There has been general agreement on the categorization of Chinese dialects since theLanguage Atlas of China was jointly compiled by the Chinese Academy of SocialSciences and Australian Academy of the Humanities, in 1987.

In general, Chinese dialects are divided into Mandarin Chinese and non-MandarinChinese. Mandarin has the most speakers as the speaking region spreads fromNortheast China to the Southwest.

But here, Mandarin is not exactly Putonghua, or standard Chinese, which is thecommon language (with standardized pronunciation and grammar based mainly on theBeijing dialect) and is used on official occasions, in the media and during inter-regionalcommunications.

Within Mandarin, there are about eight dialect regions, including Beijing, NortheastChina and Hebei-Shandong. Most of these dialect regions are in the North. That's whyMandarin is often referred to as Northern dialect.

But exceptions include Jianghuai Mandarin and Southwest Mandarin. The formercovers most of the regions on the north bank of the Yangtze River in Jiangsu and Anhuiprovinces. The latter regions refer to Sichuan, Yunnan and Guizhou provinces.

One of the reasons these dialects are categorized as Mandarin, though they vary a lotin intonation, is that they share similar pronunciation and grammatical rules, and thusare generally mutually intelligible.

By contrast, there's a lot more complications in the non-Mandarin section, which ismore widely known as the Southern dialects spoken across mainly in the South andEast China.

Senior dialect researcher Li Lan at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences says afterthe 1980s scholars generally agreed that non-Mandarin has nine different dialects thatvary from each other in pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary and are thus basicallymutually unintelligible.

Among them, the most prominent are the Wu, Yue (Cantonese) and Min dialects, whichare, respectively, spoken by people in Shanghai-Jiangsu-Zhejiang, Guangdong-HongKong and Fujian-Taiwan.

Wu, with around 70 million speakers, is China's most widely spoken non-Mandarindialect. Cantonese ranks second with some 60 million speakers in the country. But Lisays, worldwide, it tops the ranking with more than 10 million additional speakersoverseas.

These dialects have commonalities in a linguistic sense, but it doesn't necessarily meanpeople within the same dialect region can smoothly talk to each other.

Quite often in Zhejiang and Fujian provinces, residents in neighboring villages haveproblems understanding each other and sometimes even within a village.

Geographical division, like rivers and mountains, are part of the reason, Li says. But,more importantly, frequent immigration provides the means for people who tend tospeak dialect to be influenced by their native dialects. From this point of view, Li says,China could have at least 200 dialects.

The differences between these dialects are no less obvious than that between someEuropean languages, such as German and Dutch, Li says. That's why he says thedistinction between the definitions of language and dialect is often vague.

The one key factor making Chinese dialects remain variants of a unified language isthat they basically use the same characters.

More importantly, due to frequent inter-regional interactions, dialects are mutuallyinfluential and hard to recognize.

"These dialects are bound to be subject to continuous change in the future," Li says.

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（Editor：雪萌、叶欣）