How Many Languages Are There in China?

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⏱ TIMESTAMPS:

0:00 - Is “Chinese” a Language?
0:20 - One Country, Many Languages
1:35 - History, In a Nutshell
3:11 - #1: Min
4:41 - #2: Gan
5:30 - #3: Hakka
6:58 - #4: Mandarin
8:24 - #5: Cantonese
10:18 - #6: Wu
11:10 - #7: Xiang
11:48 - Endangered Languages

📜 SOURCES & ATTRIBUTIONS:

BBC: Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

🎬 Video Clips:

Words in Four Different Chinese Dialects

Listen To These 25 Different Chinese Dialects

12 Words in Different Chinese Dialects & Languages

Mandarin VS Cantonese VS Hakka

My Mother-In-Law from China Teaches Me Putian, Fujian Dialect

The Hokkien language, casually spoken | Selly speaking Median Hokkien | Wikitongues

Classic Cantonese Opera hits the stage again in China

🖼 Images:

[sl]

I'm Chinese and this is how I view Chinese as a language. Chinese is a written language, not a spoken language, as each region, even village, in China, has its own dialect. The reason for that is Chinese is not a alphabetical or phonetical language. Take English as an example. Many people argue that English is not a phonetical language, because its spelling doesn't necessarily reflect its pronunciation. However, because English uses Latin alphabet, each alphabet still provide guidance to the pronunciation to some degree. The problem with Chinese characters is that there's not so much connection between each character and its pronunciation, hence, thereotically speaking, each region can pronounce the characters however way they want.

[wuhuhu]

China was unified in 221 BC under Qin dynasty (famous for Terracotta army). That was when Chinese script was standardized. But because Chinese script is non-phonetic, doesn't guide pronunciation, spoken form vary regionally despite all sharing the same script.

[dtan-]

Love this!!!! I speak Hokkien as I was born and raised in the Philippines. I’m so glad you really broke down the different languages. Great work!

[Bob_just_Bob]

As a foreigner who’s been living in China for almost 25 years now I wouldn’t want to even guess at how many dialects there are. I myself am accustomed to using two of them Mandarin mostly as spoken in Beijing but also as used in the Northeast as well as Cantonese but I travel in country a lot and am quite used to hearing a number of the others. Great video thanks

[EddyWoon]

Thanks for this great episode.
My mum is from the Putian region of Fuzhou and speaks the Xinghua language. I had only heard this language when my mum was speaking with my late grandparents.
About 20+ years ago I had stepped into a sushi restaurant and heard the staff there speaking this language. I immediately spoke an expression similar to "wow" in that language and they surprised to have a random customer being able to understand and speak that language. They were the only people outside of my family that I had spoken this language with.
I am Hakka and there is no one that I know of in my region that speaks it. The last time that I had spoken this was about 40 years ago. I am now looking this up in YouTube to relearn this language from again.

[Cheryl.C]

I speak Hakka, Cantonese, Mandarin and understand a little Hokkien... greetings from Malaysia 🇲🇾

[maxyi]

One should think of China as the Roman Empire. The Chinese written language is like written Latin but pronounced the French way, the Italian way, the Spanish way etc. Imaging Latin being the only official language, while French, Italian, Spanish and etc are considered dialects. That is the Chinese language.

[陳小明-xh]

As a Chinese, i am here listening to a foreign guy explaining Chinese to me, nice.

[zealandia]

China is basically a combined Europe. Some Chinese dialects are close to each other and people who speak them can pretty much understand each other (similar like people speaking Danish and Norwegian), some are more different (similar like Danish vs Dutch), some are even more different, which people cannot understand each other (similar like Danish vs Bulgarian).

[tweetalig]

As a person who has spoken Mandarin and Cantonese for nearly 40 years, this was highly educational!

[HongdongTheNoob]

In Chinese there is a distinction between oral form (语) and written form (文) for the language. The national language subject being taught in schools is exactly named 语文 (in the mainland). The 语 part is basically Mandarin while the 文 part includes both classical literacy and modern writings.

[thenaturalyogi]

Yaaay finally tackling 2 other languages that I speak. Mandarin and Hokkien. It's actually hard to learn Hokkien if your family doesn't speak it. I learned Hokkien purely from speaking with my parents and elders, I hope this ancient language doesn't die.

Edit: so many comments on whether Mandarin or Hokkien or Cantonese are languages. However you want to call it, (language/dialect/pattern of speech people in Fujian speak etc) what it means to me is simply if two people are placed in the same room one person who only speaks and understands Mandarin, the other person who only speaks and understands Hokkien, they would both just stare at each other and not understand each other because they are not mutually intelligible. Unlike Russian and Ukrainian, or Spanish and Portuguese where you have similar words and sounds and these 4 are even considered 4 separate languages.

[ChasMusic]

I studied Cantonese because I'm in San Francisco and that's the main Chinese language, although Mandarin has established a much stronger presence in recent years. Even though Cantonese has 9 tones, I consider it easier than Mandarin. This is because it has consonant stop endings, which reduce the meaning pile-up of homonyms.

[adrianso]

The Chinese languages or dialects (the Sinitic languages) are comparable to the modern Germanic languages (Danish, Dutch, German, English) or the contemporary Romance languages (French, Spanish, Romanian, Italian). The Chinese languages share the same origin & are members of the same language family.

[vivredanslaverite]

In canton ( Guangdong ) province alone, there are at least 3 languages are spoken: Cantonese, Hakka and Teochew .

[axgalicyoungdude]

I work as a geological investigator for the National Geological Service, and my team regularly goes on field trips to remote areas. We always have one or two local government translators on our team, because we as outsiders simply can't understand some of the local languages.

[Pointillax]

Dialects are really something to be protected, they contribute so much to a rich cultural history. We had many in France, but in order to standardize french, the government actively repressed the transmission of regional languages. My great grandmother talked about being beaten and punished if the teacher heard her speak her regional language. Nowadays only the most culturaly proud regions have managed to keep they language afloat, even though almost no one speaks them. But you'll find roadsigns in both french and regional language if you go to Brittany, or Pays Basque, and some in Alsace.
You'll still find some very old farmers far back in the country speaking only in their native regional dialect, and that's quite cool (+ they understand standard french no problem)

[IKNFLY]

Imagine Europe as a single country, and I ask you, do you speak European? Disregard French, Spanish, Italian, German as merely some form of European dialect. That's basically China.

[arthaschen]

Mandarin was actually chosen as the official language way before 1955. That is why Taiwanese official language is also basically mandarin, or “National Tone”.

[martinji]

Luanping was only one of the many cities chosen to collect audio samples for this newly constructed language called "Putong hua, " but most people in that town don't speak perfect mandarin. The city nowadays say they are the place where mandarin was created for tourism and city images reasons, but what they claimed isn't true. All Chinese languages inherit old expressions from middle Chinese and old Chinese, so there is no Chinese language that is "older."