The 10 most spoken dialects of the Chinese language

It is also one of the most important dialects of Chinese. The name Wu corresponds to the name of one of the three kingdoms into which China was divided at the end of the Han Dynasty and whose territory roughly corresponded to today's Wu-speaking area. With 81.8 million speakers, Wu is the second most widely spoken dialect of Chinese after Mandarin. It is the variant of Chinese spoken in Shanghai, most of Zhejiang province, the southern part of Jiangsu province and parts of Anhui and Jiangxi.

Speakers of the Wu dialect sometimes inaccurately refer to their mother tongue as "Shanghainese" (上海话 / 上海話) when introducing themselves to foreigners. The northern Wu languages are mutually intelligible, but the southern Wu languages are not.

With 60 million speakers, it is one of the most important Sinitic languages (a subfamily within the Sino-Tibetan languages). Min is the fourth most widely spoken dialect of Chinese after Mandarin, Wu and Cantonese. It is spoken by about 60 million people, mainly in Taiwan and Fujian province. The form of Southern Min spoken in Taiwan is sometimes referred to as Taiwanese, although it differs little from Southern Min, which is spoken in the Xiamen region of southern Fujian.

Many Min languages have retained notable features of the Old Chinese language, and there is linguistic evidence that not all Min varieties are directly descended from the Middle Chinese of the Sui-Tang dynasties. Min languages are believed to have an important linguistic substrate from the languages of the peoples of the region before their linguistic and cultural assimilation into Chinese culture. Min is also the most widely spoken Chinese dialect among Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, particularly in Singapore and Malaysia.

It is a proposed group of varieties of the Chinese language spoken by some 63 million people in northern China, including most of Shanxi province, much of Inner Mongolia, and adjacent areas of Hebei, Henan and Shaanxi provinces. The status of the Jin dialect is disputed among linguists; some prefer to include it with Mandarin, while others consider it a closely related but separate sister group.

Until the 1980s, Jin dialects were consistently counted as part of Mandarin Chinese. In 1985, however, Chinese linguist Li Rong proposed that the Jin dialect be considered a separate high-level dialect group, similar to Yue or Wu. His main criterion was that Jin dialects had retained the entry tone (one of the four syllabic tones of Middle Chinese phonology) as a separate category, still marked as in Wu dialects, but different in this respect from most other Mandarin dialects. Today, some linguists have adopted this classification, while others still consider it part of Mandarin.

The Xiang dialect, also known as the Hunan dialect, belongs to the Chinese family of Sino-Tibetan languages. The Xiang language is spoken by more than 38 million people in China, mainly by the inhabitants of Hunan Province and the Xiangjiang River Basin and its tributaries.

Due to the widespread influence of Mandarin dialects, it is difficult to distinguish the Xiang dialects. Yuan Jiahua divided the Hunan dialect into an old and a new faction based on the presence or absence of sonorous initials. He considers the Hunan dialects that have retained sonorant initials to belong to the old Xiang category, while those that have lost some of the conservative phonological features belong to the new Xiang category.

With 47.8 million native speakers, it is a dialect spoken mainly in southern China by the Hakka (客家人) people. Due to its main use in isolated and scattered regions where communication is limited to the local level, the Hakka dialect has developed numerous varieties or dialects spoken in various provinces such as Guangdong, Jiangxior Hainan, but also in Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia.

In mainland China, Hakka tend to speak Mandarin or Cantonese due to increasing cultural and economic exchanges between different regions, and Hakka is not used for teaching in traditional areas. The younger generation was educated in Mandarin from childhood, so the linguistic heritage is not optimistic. Today, the proportion of the younger generation speaking Hakka is decreasing, and some people have switched to speaking the dominant languages, Mandarin and Cantonese. Orally transmitted traditional Hakka nursery rhymes are rarely recited in full.

In addition, in a small part of the Pearl River Delta, Hakka dialects exist in individual villages and towns in the form of "dialect islands". Under the influence of Cantonese and Mandarin, some Hakka home languages have been transformed into Cantonese or Mandarin. Meixian dialect is a Hakka dialect spoken in Meizhou, Guangdong province, and has always been recognised as a representative of the Hakka dialect. Meixian dialect or Meizhou Hakka dialect is the representative dialect or standard pronunciation of Hakka dialect in linguistics.

Also known as Huizhou (徽话), which literally means "Huizhou language", it is a Sinitic language spoken by about 4.2 million people. Its status is disputed among linguists: some assign it to the Wu dialect, which is part of the Gan dialect, while others consider it a separate dialect branch of Chinese. The main speakers are the Hui ethnic group, from which the name is derived.

Compared to other Chinese languages, Hui is only spoken in a small area. In the historical region of Huizhou, in about a dozen mountains in southeastern Anhui, and in the neighbouring regions of Zhejiang and Jiangxi. Despite its small geographical distribution, the Hui dialect has a high degree of internal variation. For this reason, bilingualism and multilingualism are common among Hui speakers. As with all other varieties of Chinese, there is still much controversy over whether Hui is a language or a dialect.