What Different Chinese Dialects Are Spoken?
As expected in a big country like China, there are scores of dialects spoken by the people in different parts of the country. In some parts of the country, especially in the south, a traveller may come across different dialects in villages only a few miles apart. Sometimes even people of neighbouring villages may have difficulty in understanding one another. Some dialects are similar to one another, such as the ones spoken in northern China, while others do not even sound remotely similar, such as the Cantonese dialect and the Shanghai dialect. These two dialects are completely different not only in their vocabulary, but also in the pronunciation of various characters used in the written language. Also, some dialect words are only spoken but have no written form. Indeed, but for the written language, people from different parts of China would have serious difficulty in understanding one another. Fortunately and amazingly, although the Chinese speak many widely different dialects, they
