Is Chinese a Language or a Family of Languages?

Spoken Chinese comprises many regional and mutually unintelligible variants. In the West, many people are familiar with the fact that the Romance languages all derive from Latin and so have many underlying features in common while being mutually unintelligible. The linguistic evolution of Chinese is similar, while the socio-political context is quite different.

In Europe, political fragmentation created independent states which are roughly the size of Chinese provinces. This created a political desire to create separate cultural and literary standards between nation-states and to standardize the language within a nation-state. In China, a single cultural and literary standard continued to exist while at the same time there was no great desire to standardize the spoken language between different cities and counties. This has created a linguistic context that is very different from that of Europe, and this has profound implications for how to describe spoken variations of Chinese.

For example, in Europe, the language of a nation-state was usually standardized to be similar to that of the capital, making it easy, for example, to classify a language as French or Spanish. This had the effect of sharpening linguistic differences. A farmer on one side of the border would start to model his speech after Paris while a farmer on the other side would model his speech after Madrid. In China, this standardization did not happen, and so even categorizing variations can be difficult, in part because different dialects merge into each other. As a result, linguists will disagree among themselves as to classification.

As a result of the above, Chinese people generally consider Chinese to be one single language. In order to describe dialects, Chinese people typically use the speech of location , for example Beijing hua (北京話) for the speech of Beijing or Shanghai hua (上海話) for the speech of Shanghai - without any "laypeople awareness" that these various hua are then categorized into "languages" based on mutual intelligibility. So although it is true that many parts of north China are quite homogeneous in language, while in parts of south China, major cities can have dialects that are only marginally intelligible even to close neighbours, these are all regarded as hua - equal subvariations under a single Chinese language.

Due to this "self-perception" of a single Chinese language by the majority of its speakers, there are many linguists who follow this definition, and regard Chinese as a single language and its variations as dialects; others follow the intelligibility requirement and consider Chinese to be a group of anywhere from seven to seventeen related "languages", since these languages are not at all mutually intelligible, and show variation comparable to the Romance languages.

It is to be noted that this distinction can have some political overtones. Describing Chinese as different languages can imply that China should actually be several different nations, and that the Hàn (Chinese) race is in fact several different races. For this reason, some Chinese are uncomfortable with the idea that Chinese is not a single language, as this perception might legitimize secessionist movements. On the other hand, supporters of Taiwanese independence also tend to be strong promoters of Min- and Hakka-language education.

However, the linkages between ethnicity, politics, and language can be complex. For example, many Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese speakers, who consider their own tongues to be separate spoken languages, and the Chinese race to be a single entity, do not consider these two positions to be contradictory. Moreover, the government of the People's Republic of China officially states that China is a multinational nation, and that the term Chinese incorporates groups that do not natively speak Chinese at all. (Those that do speak Chinese are called Han Chinese — an ethnic and cultural concept, not a political one.) Similarly on Taiwan, one can find supporters of Chinese unification who are also interested in promoting local language, and supporters of Taiwan independence who have little interest in the topic.

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