Chinese Dialects Introduction
By James Campbell

How to Use This Site
How to View This Site
Terminology

The Chinese Dialects have been largely misunderstood not only by the rest of the world but also by linguists themselves for centuries. I remember arguing the point with professor Botne back in linguistics classes, a specialist in Bantu "languages", that these are in fact separate, unintelligible languages, or we could in fact call Bantu under the analogy, one language with a thousand dialects. The fact that there are so many dialects does not actually mean that they cannot be divided up into separate languages. In fact, with the size and antiquity of the Chinese nation, there is no doubt that the linguistic variation could be in fact as diverse as Europe's. And we have proof of that. The term "Chinese" also does not do the linguistic situation in China any justice. It could not be summed up better than in William Hannas' book, Asia's Orthographic Dilemma (1996:6):

[An] approach to the terminological difficulty is to follow common usage and accept the word "Chinese" as a generic label that encompasses the languages spoken today and ancestrally. This approach makes sense, because it accommodates the historical facts while clearing a path for solution of a more grievous misconception concerning the structure of Chinese as it is currently spoken. Not only is Chinese not a language for all times, it is not a "language" at all. Rather, it is a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family (Mair 1991a:4). Depending on the criteria, there are seven or eight--or as many as several hundred--mutually unintelligible varieties of modern Chinese, which in any other context would be considered languages in their own right, but which Chinese people (especially Mandarin speakers) and governments call "dialects" of a single Chinese "language." To most linguists, the claim is utter nonsense.

Well, I know that it is not so to all linguists. In regards to mutual intelligibility, two varieties that have more than 90% intelligibility can be considered the same language. On this site, you can find the calculated distances between dozens of pairs of dialects and languages (here) that calculate phonological distance, lexical distance, and overall intelligibility. It is quite obvious that even within languages such as Mandarin and Wu, there is much less than 90% intelligibility giving rise to perhaps more individual languages. So the traditional names we have given to the ten languages: Mandarin, Jin, Huainan, Wu, Xiang, Gan, N. Min, S. Min, Kejia, and Yue are in fact cover terms for more varieties that exist within them. We can also identify a Pinghua language in Guangxi. Northern and Southern Wu are quite unintelligible, as are three regions within S. Min (Fujian, Guangdong, Hainan). Northern Min is in fact a cover term for Eastern Min, Northern Min, Central Min, and Puxian. If English and Russian (lexical similarity of 24%--source: Ethnologue) or German and French (lexical similarity of 29%--source: Ethnologue) can be considered separate languages, then so can most of the southern Chinese languages all with under 25% lexical similarity.

In fact, the lexical differences between the Mandarin dialects themselves make the intelligible distance between them farther than that of any of the Romance languages!

How to Use This Site
This site is designed not just for serious researchers and linguists, but also for anybody interested in the field. However, the data presented here requires some previous knowledge of Chinese lingistics, phonology, or at least some elementary study of one of the languages. If you have no knowledge of this subject, you're still welcome, but currently this site is not intended to teach you Chinese, Chinese characters, or any of the languages; it is provided as a reference.

This website has hyperlinked cross-references and information on hundreds of dialects. Many researchers will find this information useful as it is all in one location.

On the main page are listed the main Chinese languages. Choose a language for a more detailed list of dialects. Most dialects have tone data, which is listed in master tone lists by language. There is also some tone sandhi data available. Some major dialects have complete phonological data available provided with IPA characters in charts that Chinese dialectologists commonly use. A tutorial is given how to read these charts.

How to View This Site
This site is UTF-8 encoded using Unicode. Therefore, you do not need a Chinese system to read the contents; all you need is a Unicode font installed (this site primarily uses Arial Unicode) and everything should appear correctly, and if not, check your computer's settings. I recommend using the most up-to-date browsers and systems that support Unicode fonts.

Terminology
You may be more famliar with certain terms that do not appear on this site. In order to maintain consistency throughout, the Mandarin names of the languages shall be used, except for Mandarin itself that has a suitable translation. Please note the terminology used here:

Your Term /	Site's Term
Cantonese /	Yue
Guanhua /	Mandarin
Guoyu /	Mandarin
Hakka /	Kejia
Hokkien /	Minnan (language)
Hunanese /	Xiang
Huayu /	Mandarin
Putonghua /	Mandarin
Shanghaiese /	Wu (a dialect thereof)
Taiwanese /	Minnan
Teochew /	Chaozhou (dialect of Minnan)
Zhongwen /	Chinese
Other dialect names /	By city name in pinyin
Karlgren's Ancient Chinese /	Middle Chinese (中古)
Karlgren's Archaic Chinese /	Ancient Chinese (上古)

Please note the uses of the following names at this site:
Taipei = Minnan spoken in Taipei
Taibei = Mandarin spoken in Taipei (pinyin spelling)