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The Many Varieties and Dialects of Chinese


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Most of us are aware of the many varieties of Chinese spoken within the country. Inhabitants of a region can talk with each other in a dialect which is unintelligible to someone who is not from that area.

 

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Even within the language families indicated on the map, there are smaller groups of mutually unintelligible languages.

 

The language spoken in Yulin is 玉林话 Yùlín huà

 

Some Chinese linguists have suggested that the Yue dialect of Yulin is the best surviving example of what ancient spoken Chinese would have sounded like based on rhyme patterns in Tang dynasty poetry.

 

 

This article in the Sixth Tone talks about the decline of the Shanghainese dialect, due to factors including an influx of 40% migrants.

 

Local language in steady decline as city becomes more diverse and cosmopolitan.
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One article I read a while ago that I quoted in CFV said that there 19 different actual languages in China and 52 different dialects. But another said among the smaller language divisions Hakka, Wu, and Min there are over 200 different dialects spoken there. When they settle that argument I hope they will let us know.

 

No wonder when my wife went to Guangzhou she had a tough time understanding everyone. She's Mandarin.speaking.

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  • 3 years later...

Training Our Tongues to Forget
Chinese families are losing their linguistic diversity, and with it, the threads linking them to the past.

from the Sixth Tone 
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Quote

 

I am a person deprived of a dialect. I speak no dialect fluently other than Mandarin, the official language of today’s China. Possibly because of this, I have been fascinated by the linguistic diversity in my family since a young age. Not only do my parents speak different dialects — my father the Wu tongue common in East China and my mother Xiang, a language native to Hunan province — but the four generations of Hunanese in my mother’s family also don’t speak the same versions of Xiang.

As a child, I had fun imitating my maternal grandparents’ speech. During the few years I lived with them, my cousin and I would secretly mimic our grandparents and laugh at the way the words rolled out of their mouths. “I’ll throw you little devils out of the window,” my grandfather would thunder in his peculiar accent, only making us laugh harder.

The adults referred to my grandparents’ dialect as tuhua — “language of the soil.” As kids we didn’t necessarily know what that meant, only that it must be something related to tu, soil. And there was indeed an earthy quality to it that reminded us of vegetables just picked from our rural relatives’ field — unwashed, unpolished, and low-status.

 

 

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