Are there lots of different dialects of Chinese spoken?
To date, approximately 1500 dialects have been recorded. There are tens of thousands of villages in China however, and not every single one of them has a distinct dialect. We can group villages, cities, or even counties together as belonging to a single dialect. But if every minute detail is considered as a separate dialect, then it is nearly impossible to create an exact count. Since people living in the same region speaking dialects of the same language can more or less understand each other, it is safe to say that each of the Chinese languages have only a few dialects.
100’s…Saying that you speak Chinese is about as informative as saying you speak European…That is why the Chinese government tried to standardize putong hua (common peoples language) –the Beijing dialect as being the norm in China. In china people separated by 30 miles may not speak the same language at all because they have had such little interactions in the past. So Putong Hua gives them the opportunity to at least understand each other.
