![]() ![]() Despite sharing some vocabulary, Cantonese and Mandarin are mutually unintelligible, owing to their differing systems of grammar, lexicon and pronunciation. With 60 million speakers, Cantonese Chinese is also a main dialect of Chinese, spoken primarily in southeastern China (an area historically known as Canton), as well as by a large number of Chinese expatriates worldwide. Formed of a group of regional dialects spoken in places such as Shanghai, Suzhou, Ningbo and Wuxi, it has roughly 70 million people speakers. Wu, or Shanghainese, is another key dialect of the Chinese language, second only to Mandarin. Through a national education push, it is hoped that the whole of China will achieve a “basic” level of Mandarin by 2020. Accoring to official estimations, roughly 70 percent of Chinese citizens currently speak Mandarin as a first or second language. Mandarin is also referred to as Standard Chinese and is the official state language of China, Taiwan and one of the official languages of Singapore. Mandarin is based on the Beijing dialect and is most typically spoken in northern and southwestern China. With approximately 960 million speakers, Mandarin is the most commonly spoken dialect. Linguists disagree on just how many varieties of Chinese exist, but it is generally accepted that there are between 7 and 13. Mandarin dialects are spoken by 71.5 percent of the population.Īlthough native speakers will often describe Chinese as a single language, it is in fact more accurately thought of as a language family all of its own.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |