What is the difference between mandarin and Cantonese?
The Chinese language family consists of multiple dialect groups. Traditionally, the seven dialect groups recognized as constituting the Chinese language are Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, Min, Xiang, Hakka, and Gan. Dialect groups—and the individual dialects of which they are comprised—refer to spoken varieties of the Chinese language. While Chinese dialects are generally mutually unintelligible, written Chinese is consistent across all dialects.
