Quick Question

Amz

My brother was asking me today how many different "dialects" there were in Chinese I know dialect is probably the wrong word. Also how do they differ, how common are they? etc.

Thanks
A.M

DEmeant0r

sorry for the late reply, amz, haven't been online lately, as far as I know every provence had their own little dialect if i remember correctly, but then the ruler of the time decided to make a common dialect. They don't differ that much, the writing of it is quite different however.

Amz

Cheers DEmeant0r much appreciated

Don't worry bout delay in replying!

crowbar

erm, do you mean the writing is reasonably similar? there's only two forms of written chinese i'm aware of - 'traditional' and 'simplified' - and they're pretty similar to each other ... well one's the simplification of the other: four dots at the bottom replaced by a line here, complicated bits in the middle replaced with an 'x' there, and so forth.

i've found that people from south-eastern china (hong kong, guangdong province and surrounds) generally speak cantonese and sometimes mandarin, and the rest of china speak mainly mandarin with those from other provinces and their local dialect with those from their own province. though don't trust me on that one, those mandarin dialects all sound like greek to me

ethanf

52 different dialects, the dialects can vary lot when speaking