How many dialects are spoken in China?

a.p.a.m.   Fri Mar 23, 2007 2:26 pm GMT
Roughly, how many? I'm curious. Are there any entirely different languages spoken there? I'm sure Tibetan is one of them. Are there any other?
Guest   Fri Mar 23, 2007 2:28 pm GMT
Talking about chinese, we must say that it is not an unique language but it is considered as a language family made of differente members spoken in different regions of China but not only (mandarin, cantoonese, taiwanese etc): they're not dialect, they are different languages and probabily thery aren't mutually intellegible among them even if they use the same writing system (wich uses logogram).
Guest   Fri Mar 23, 2007 2:39 pm GMT
Standard Mandarin

Cantonese

Wu

Xiang

Gan

Hakka

Ping

Jin

Probabily there are many other languagese or variants...Someone call them dialects, but many authors say that they must be considered as separated languages.
Standard Mandarin is used in documents, in school and in official acts, but many people do not speak it, actually.

Tibetan is a separated language, belonging to a different group.
Josh Lalonde   Fri Mar 23, 2007 2:48 pm GMT
Chinese has an interesting situation. There are many different lects (I'm not going to use language or dialect here because there is no consensus) that are all known as "Chinese" and use the same writing system. Their spoken forms, however are not mutually intelligible. Mandarin and Cantonese are the two biggest, but there are many others, as indicated above. The Chinese government says that these are all one language, but most linguists who use the term say that they aren't. There are also other non-Chinese languages in China: Tibetan, Uighur, Mongolian, etc. Many of them have their own writing systems, or use the Cyrillic or Arabic alphabets.
a.p.a.m.   Fri Mar 23, 2007 5:49 pm GMT
China is emerging as the most economically powerful nation on earth. It would make economic sense form them to change their writing sytem from 26,000 or so different characters to a much more sensible Roman alphabet of 26 letters. It would facilitate communication and trade between them and Western nations.
Guest   Fri Mar 23, 2007 7:22 pm GMT
<<China is emerging as the most economically powerful nation on earth. It would make economic sense form them to change their writing sytem from 26,000 or so different characters to a much more sensible Roman alphabet of 26 letters. It would facilitate communication and trade between them and Western nations.>>

I disagree. First of all, while there may very well be 26 000 characters, the vast majority are technical, obsolete, uncommon, etc. Here's what Wikipedia says: "It employs about 5,000 commonly used characters". Granted, that's still a lot, but much research about how we read suggests that we recognize words as a whole rather than reading letters anyway (in English, I mean), so we know at least that many words without finding it particularly difficult.
Second, changing the writing system, even if it did provide long-term savings, would have an enormous one-time cost. Think about all the signs, books, keyboards, printing presses, etc. that would have to be changed, not to mention retraining the entire population of approximately 1.3 billion to read the Roman alphabet. Furthermore, after the shift, reports, publications, and instructions written in the current Chinese system would be useless, or require special training to read, making research of any kind (for school, business, etc.) very difficult.
Finally, changing to the Roman alphabet would do little to facilitate trade. Whether it's written in characters or letters, I will understand about five words of Chinese. If a company was going to do business in China, I don't think the writing system would stop them.
Josh Lalonde   Fri Mar 23, 2007 8:12 pm GMT
Sorry, that Guest was me