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See here for the debate on whether the variations of spoken Chinese should be considered "dialects" or "languages".

1 Classification

Chinese makes a very strong distinction between written language (文 wén) and spoken language (语[語] yǔ), and Chinese tend to conceptualize the variations of Chinese as different spoken languages sharing a common written standard and literary and cultural tradition. Within Chinese, there is a collective term for the Chinese written language (中文 zhongwén), while there is no collective term that encompasses all of the variations of the spoken language. Terms used to describe spoken Chinese, such as 汉语 hànyǔ or 国语 guóyǔ refer only to one specific variation of spoken Chinese.

When forced to conceptualize these variations in terms of language and dialect common in the West, most Chinese do not think of these variations as separate languages because they share a common written standard and literary and cultural tradition, and perhaps just as importantly, is the basis for a single political identity. However, the linguistic distance between different Chinese dialects is often much greater than forms of speech which in other parts of the world would unquestionably be considered distinct languages.

The linguistic diversity is particularly pronounced in southern variations such as Min in which two towns which are five kilometers from each other can speak completely unintelligible types of speech. By contrast, in northern China, there are areas of several hundred kilometers apart which have intelligible forms of Mandarin.

In addition, the categories that speakers use to self-classify the variety they are speaking may not correspond at all to a classification based strictly on linguistic features. For example, two speakers of Cantonese from different cities (say Taishan and Hong Kong) tend to think of themselves as speaking the same dialect, whereas speaker of Wu from Hangzhou and one from Shanghai would tend to think of themselves as speaking the different dialects. Furthermore, a person speaking Sichuanese or Hunanese will think of themselves as speaking a variety of Chinese that is distinct from the national standard Putonghua, notwithstanding the fact that linguists place these forms of Chinese in the same linguistic category.

The various forms of Spoken Chinese are usually classfied into the following broad groups. (See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of individual dialects.)

• Mandarin 北方話/北方话: This is the mother dialect of Chinese living in northern and southwestern China. It is the basis for Standard Mandarin, the official spoken language of Chinese.

One distinctive feature of Mandarin is the partial loss of tones in comparison to Middle Chinese and the other dialects. Another is the loss of consonants on the ends of syllables, so that while Middle Chinese had an inventory of "-p, -t, -k, -m, -n, ng", Mandarin only has "-n, -ng". (A few dialects, such as that of NanjingNanjing (, Pinyin: Nanjing, Wade-Giles: Nan-ching Postal System Pinyin: Nanking is the capital city of Jiangsu Province in the People's Republic of China. It is situated in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River at 32°03'N, 118°47'E. Nanjing is the second, also have /-?/, the glottal stopThe glottal stop or voiceless glottal plosive is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is ?. The glottal stop is the.) In addition, Mandarin underwent fewer tone splits than the other dialects. As a result, many words which sound different in dialects such as Cantonese are homophones in Mandarin. Mandarin has adjusted by developing compound words in order to make up for the development of homophones. The use of compounds is less frequent in other dialects.

• WuThe Wu ( pinyin wu fng yan; pinyin wu y) spoken variations of the Chinese language are spoken in the provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang; and the municipality of Shanghai. Wu includes Shanghainese, Suzhou, Wenzhou, Hangzhou, Yongkang and Shaoxing dialects. 吳語/吴语: spoken in the provinces of JiangsuJiangsu ( Simplified Chinese: , Traditional: , Hanyu Pinyin: Jingsu, Wade-Giles: Chiang-su, Postal System Pinyin: Kiangsu is a province of the People's Republic of China, located along the east coast of the country. The name "Jiangsu" comes from Jiang, sh and ZhejiangZhejiang (, Hanyu Pinyin: Zhejing, Wade-Giles: Che-chiang, Postal system pinyin: Chehkiang or Chekiang is a southeastern coastal province of the People's Republic of China. The word Zhejiang was the old name of the Qiantang River, which passes through Han. Wu includes Shanghai dialectShanghainese (; pinyin: Shanghihua) is a dialect of Wu Chinese spoken in the city of Shanghai. Wu has 87 million speakers as of 1991, and is the second largest form of Chinese after Mandarin (which has some 800 million speakers). of the Chinese dialects s. Wu dialect is notable among Chinese dialects in having kept voiced consonants, such as /b/, /d/, /g/, /z/, /v/, etc. (These may in fact be better described as voiceless consonants that create a voiced breathy element across the syllable: i.e. /p\/, /t\/, etc.)

• Hakka/Kejia 客家話/客家话: spoken by the Hakka people in several provinces across southern China. The term "Hakka" itself translates as "guest families", and the Hakka people are descended from immigrants from North China in ancient times. Hakka is has kept many features of northern Middle Chinese that have been lost in the North. It also has a full complement of nasal endings, -m -n n and occlusive endings -p -t -k, maintaining the four categories of tonal types, with splitting in the ping and ru tones, giving six tones. Some dialects of Hakka have seven tones, due to a splitting in the qu tone. One of the distinguishing features of Hakka phonology is that Middle Chinese voiced initials are transformed into Hakka voiceless aspirated initials.

• Min 閩語/闽语: spoken in Fujian, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Southeast Asia. Min is the only group of Chinese dialects that cannot be directly derived from Middle Chinese. Due to its great internal disparity, Min can be divided into seven groups of dialects: Min Nan (which includes Hokkien, Teochew (Chaozhou), and Taiwanese), Min Dong , Min Bei , Min Zhong , Pu Xian , Qiong Wen , and Shao Jiang .

• Yue 粵語/粤语: spoken in Guangdong province, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, all over Southeast Asia and by Overseas Chinese. Used by linguistics, "Cantonese" covers all the Yue dialects, such as Toishanese, though the term is also used to refer to just the language of Guangzhou and Hong Kong. Some dialects of Yue have intricate sets of tone compared to other Chinese dialects—with varieties having up to nine or ten tones. Yue keeps a full complement of ancient Chinese word-final consonants (p, t, k, m, n, ng)

• Xiang 湘語/湘语: spoken in Hunan province. Xiang is usually divided into the "old" and "new" types, with the new type being significantly closer to Mandarin.

• Gan 贛語/赣语: spoken in Jiangxi province. In the past, it was viewed as closely related to Hakka dialects, because of the way Middle Chinese voiced initials have become voiceless aspirated initials, as those in Hakka. Thus, they were called Hakka-Gan dialects.

(The following three dialect groups are not always classified separately.)

• Hui 徽語/徽语: spoken in the southern parts of Anhui province—usually classified as a sub-branch of Gan.

• Jin 晉語/晋语: spoken in Shanxi province, as well as parts of Shaanxi, Hebei, Henan, and Inner Mongolia. It is often classified together with Mandarin.

• Pinghua 平話/平话: spoken in parts of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. It is sometimes classified together with Cantonese.

Some varieties remain unclassified. These include:

• Danzhou dialect 儋州話/儋州话: spoken in Danzhou , Hainan, this is a dialect that has not yet been put into any category.

• Xianghua 鄉話/乡话: spoken in a small strip of land in western Hunan, this is a group of dialects that have not been conclusively classified.

• Shaozhou Tuhua 韶州土話/韶州土话: spoken at the border regions of Guangdong, Hunan, and Guangxi, this is an area of great linguistic diversity, and has not yet been conclusively described or classified.

In addition, the Dungan language (東干語/东干语) is a language descended from Chinese spoken in Kyrgyzstan, and is akin to northwestern dialects of Mandarin. However, it is written in the Cyrillic alphabet and may not be considered by all to be part of spoken Chinese.