Chinese Language --- I, II, III

Dialects

Because there has long been a single method for writing Chinese and a common literary and cultural history, a tradition has grown up of referring to the eight main varieties of speech in China as dialects'.  But in fact, they are as different from each other (mainly in pronunciation and vocabulary) as French or Spanish is from Italian, the dialects of the southeast being linguistically the furthest apart. The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.  However, it must also be recognized that each variety consists of a large number of dialects, many of which may themselves be referred to as languages.  The boundaries between  one so-called language and the next are not always easy to define.

The Chinese refer to themselves and their language, in any of the forms below, as Han - a name which derives from the Han dynasty (202 BC-AD 220). Han Chinese is thus to be distinguished from the non-Han minority languages used in China.  There are over 50 of these languages (such as Tibetan, Russian, Uighur, Kazakh, Mongolian, and Korean), spoken by around 6% of the population.

100% Han Chinese and some non-Han minority Chinese write and read the same Chinese, unlike the situation with dialects in China.