Hokkien Chinese, also called Minnan, originated in the Minnan region of Fujian province, located in Southeastern China. Despite being the common lingua franca in overseas Chinese communities, as well as being spoken in Taiwan and many countries in Southeast Asia and Indochina, Hokkien only has about 50 million speakers.

Unlike the Wu and Hokkien dialects, Xiang Chinese shares many similarities with Mandarin and has been greatly influenced by it, as well as by the Gan Chinese dialect. This is because, during the Ming Dynasty, a large group of people migrated to Hunan province. Today, there are approximately 36 million native speakers.

Of all seven dialects, Xiang Chinese is perhaps the most difficult to find resources for online. However, one common phrase to use to greet people in Xiang is as follows:.

Out of every Chinese dialect, Gan is most similar to Hakka in terms of pronunciation and phonetics. Today, 60 million people speak it. A large population of Han Chinese people migrated to Jiangxi province as a result, and during the Han Dynasty, the Gan dialect grew as the population of the Yuzhang Commandery stationed in Jiangxi increased to 1,, in AD Unlike other dialects, the vocabulary of Gan Chinese is primarily ancient and contains words that are rarely used in Mandarin today.

While the history of Hakka is a bit uncertain, most believe that it originated due to multiple migrations from Northern to Southern China towards the end of the Western Jin period because of war.

As of today, 80 million people speak the Hakka dialect. Brooke Bagley is a freelance writer and passionate language learner. If you liked this post, something tells me that you'll love FluentU, the best way to learn Chinese with real-world videos.

Experience Chinese immersion online! But the truth is far more complex than that. Mandarin Chinese alone is the most widely spoken native language in the world: nearly a billion within China alone and 1. This is yet another aspect of China and Chinese society that is easy to see as a monolith, but doing so would allow this number to obscure the many complexities and subtleties of the real story. The point of all this is that Mandarin is one of many dialects, and it is important to understand the diversity of dialects within China.

Linguists have split Chinese into somewhere between seven and ten main language groups—the largest being Mandarin also known as Northern , Wu, Min, and Yue—and each group also has a number of sub-dialects. For instance, Wu includes the dialects of Shanghai, Suzhou, and Hangzhou, which are, to an extent, mutually intelligible, but also includes a number of other dialects that are not really mutually intelligible with these three.

For instance, in English, our concept of a dialect is more similar to our concept of accents: that is, much more based on the pronunciation differences between American English, British English, Australian English, Irish English, and a few others, as well as some occasional sub-dialects within those groups ex: the Cork Irish accent.

However, unless the accent is particularly thick, most English have little to no trouble conversing. Not so in Chinese. The most prominent example is probably Cantonese and Mandarin, which are both considered Chinese but are completely unintelligible to each other.

Living in Shanghai, most of my experience with dialect has of course been with Shanghainese. Though it took some getting used to, I have found Shanghainese very easy to distinguish because it has a very smooth flow and uses consonants that are not used in Mandarin. The most common language in China is Standard Chinese. It is a language rooted in central Mandarin, however, the total amount of languages spoken in China is , according to the last Ethnologue survey. This is also the national language.

It is worth noting that Chinese autonomous regions, such as Hong Kong, do not obey this rule. For example, the Tibet Autonomous Region has Tibetan as its official language, while Mongolian is the official language in Inner Mongolia. Due to its vast linguistic diversity, the United Nations have made April 20 th the Chinese Language day. A thing you should know before visiting the country is that China does not refer to its languages as such, rather, they call them dialects.

Despite the disagreement of linguists around the world, political reasons have made it so that they are referred to as such.

However, that is a bit disingenuous, as Mandarin speakers will be unable to understand, say Cantonese. Formed the written standard for Qing dynasty China. Used in the beginnings of Peking opera. Some actually consider this a dialect of Mandarin. Used in Pingtan, Yue and Shanghai opera. Sometimes labelled incorrectly as Shanghainese.

The most divergent language of Wu and a reputation for being the least comprehensible dialect for the average Mandarin speaker. Differs from village to village so from one county or township to the next they often cannot communicate.

Estimated 46 million speakers. Spoken by around 48 million people. Also known as Hunanese. Mao Zedong spoke a form of Xiang. Has a greater dialectal diversity than any other subgroup of Chinese. Mountain villages can have varieties that are mutually unintelligible.

Spoken by 1. Sometimes classified as a variety of Gan. An official language in Taiwan. Some dialects are not mutually intelligible with one-another. This is by no means an extensive list, but hopefully gives you an idea of the scale of the amount of other languages and influence upon existing languages within China. Bai 12 dialects 1. Having visited Longsheng and heard this dialect, it sounds nothing at all like Mandarin.

Yao communities in the same area speak a totally different dialect and some elderly speakers of Linglinghua that we met could not speak Mandarin. As well as much unique vocabulary. The tones between dialects range from 7 to This means the 11 tone dialect s have more tones than any officially recognised Chinese dialects. The following dialects have relatively low mutual intelligibility.

Most closely related to Burmese. Nuosu is the representative language and has around 2 million speakers.