Chinese is not one language
The Sinitic languages and China
People from Shanghai, Guangzhou and Xiamen may not understand each other’s home speech at all. To a linguist these are different languages in one family.
Chapter 1
A family
To linguists, “Chinese” is less a language than a branch: Mandarin, Wu, Yue, Min, Hakka, Xiang, Gan… often further apart than Spanish and Italian. What binds them is a common ancestor and a shared written language.
Chapter 2
The same character, 人
Written the same, spoken differently. The differences follow strict correspondences — and those regular patterns are what let linguists reason back to the common ancestor: Middle Chinese, and before it Old Chinese.
| Chinese | rén |
| Wu Chinese | nyin（上海） |
| Cantonese | jan4 |
| Min Nan Chinese | lâng |
| Hakka Chinese | ngìn |
Chapter 3
The vanished checked tone
Middle Chinese had many syllables ending in -p, -t or -k — the “entering tone”. Northern Mandarin lost them around the Yuan dynasty; Cantonese kept them all. That is why some Tang poems rhyme better read in Cantonese than in Mandarin.
| Chinese | Cantonese | |
|---|---|---|
| 十 | shí | sap6 |
| 日 | rì | jat6 |
| 一 | yī | jat1 |
| 六 | liù | luk6 |
| 八 | bā | baat3 |
| 白 | bái | baak6 |
Chapter 4
Across the southern seas
Min is thought to be the earliest branch to split from the rest of Sinitic. From the Ming and Qing dynasties on, Hokkien and Hakka emigrants settled across Southeast Asia, so Min Nan took root in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines; Taiwanese is Min Nan too. English tea set out from here.
Chapter 5
The neighbours of Chinese
Around the Sinitic languages live many unrelated families: other Sino-Tibetan languages such as Tibetan and Yi; Kra-Dai languages such as Zhuang and Kam; Hmong-Mien; Turkic Uyghur and Kazakh; Mongolian; Tungusic; Austroasiatic Wa; even Indo-European Sarikoli. Many of them are quietly fading.