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| | Jordan's China Handbook: The Chinese Language(s) |
 | | Since Chinese tend to name languages after places, and since English tends to use the same names for languages and the people who speak them, it is useful at this point to include a few additional terms you will find in the anthropological literature referring to regional variants of Chinese language or culture. |
| | It is, of course, almost as foreign to speakers of Non-Mandarin variants of Chinese as the old literary standard was, for the languages of China vary not only in pronunciation, but in vocabulary and word order (a fact rarely appreciated by northern Chinese or by Chinese who have been the victims of school system propaganda). |
| | Traditionally, most written Chinese tended to be adialectical, a phenomenon made possible by the hieroglyphic nature of the writing system, as we noted, But literary tastes varied, and some writers more closely followed dialectical usages of one area or another, while others remained closer to a strictly written standard. |
| weber.ucsd.edu /~dkjordan/chin/hbchilang-u.html (6779 words) |
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