That China is massive is self-evident. The territory that China spans is roughly comparable to the European continent. Over such a vast territory, one finds a diverse array of landscapes, climates, and cuisines. It only makes sense, then, that a space so large would also be home to a vast array of languages. When mapped out, China's linguistic diversity looks something like this:
Each shade of color on the map above represents a differnt language. Regions in yellow are places where languages from the Chinese family of languages are predominant. The orange region in the southwest is Tibetan. The green region in the North? That's Mongolian. The pink areas in the upper northwest? Those are Turkic languages like Uyghur, or Kazakh. The other colors are China's many other minority languages: Zhuang, Miao, Korean, Yi, Dai, and a couple dozen others.
When I talk about my research, I'm often asked if I'm able to speak Chinese. Yes, I say, I've studied for over seven years. Realistically, though, the answer is a bit more complicated than that. As the "Map of Sinitic Dialects" from Wikimedia user Wyunhe, below, illustrates, even the Chinese language family breaks down in to several, sometimes unintelligible branches:
So, just what does being able to speak Chinese mean, then? Broadly speaking, all the languages on the map above form the Sinitic language family, a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. All of these languages are "Chinese" languages, and all use Chinese characters as written script. While the family is a large one, and contains many subfamilies like Wu (the languages commonly spoken around the Yangtze River delta), Hakka, Yue (more commonly called Cantonese) and Min (commonly spoken in Southeast China and on Taiwan, and also sometimes called Hokkien) the language most commonly identified as "Chinese" (and most commonly taught in classrooms in the United States) is the standard dialect of Mandarin. Based on a northern (specifically Beijing) dialect, Mandarin evolved as northern Chinese speakers interacted with people speaking Manchu and various Mongolian dialects. As the Imperial rulers of China shifted the base of power from Nanjing in the south to Beijing in the North, Mandaring became a standard dialect of the Imperial court, and thus the country as a whole. In Mandarin, this language is variously reffered to as guanhua (官话), putonghua (普通话), or (most commonly) Hanyu (汉语). Simple enough, right?
But wait... there's more.
Mandarin itself isn't a singluar entity. In fact, in addition to the standard dialect (which is taught in schools nationwide), a local dialect, or fangyan (方言) also exists in most regions. The map above indicates the major dialect groups within the Mandarin subfamily, and even these groups break down into even more localized variants. While these dialects all belong to the same family, a quick perusal of the recordings done in different fangyan over at Phonemica, a site dedicated to cataloging and documenting various dialects, will provide an indication of just how difficult it can be for speakers of different dialects to communicate with one another if neither is able to speak standard Mandarin. As the distance from Beijing increases, the difference between the local dialect and standard speech also seem to grow larger. For instance, the Lan-Yin dialect of Mandarin (so named for the two predominant subdialects spoken in the cities of Lanzhou and Yinchuan) possesses phonetic initial-final syllable combinations, and intonations which differ from the standard. The map below shows the various subdialects within the Lan-Yin Mandarin dialect in shades of Yellow.
All this evidences the complex discussion that must go into answering to what is, afterall, a straightforward question: Can you speak Chinese? The completion of my project faces yet another hurdle: minority dialects. While the Hui are considered a Chinese-speaking minoirty, or hanyu minzu (汉语民族) by the state, there are nonetheless features of the language spoken in Hui communities that are distinct from normal, standard Mandarin. In addtion to speaking localized dilaects, Hui communities also utilize a specifc terminology of loanwords from Arabic or Persian related to Islamic religious and cultural practices. Often, these terms have been approximated by using phonetics from Mandarin to make cognates from the Arabic or Persian originals. A script, called Xiao'erjing based on Arabic was devised to record words form Chinese into Arabic as well. In these instances, it's not only necessary to understand local patterns of speech, but to recognize the influence of foreign languages on spoken Chinese as well. Situations like these make the prospect of doing fieldwork in China at once a dizzying, nerve-wracking, and chaotic experience. It also makes it a ton of fun.