中国の方言は南方が豊富
中国語の方言間の違いはヨーロッパの各言語間の違いより顕著で、たとえば上海で話される呉方言は普通語との間で共通する語彙は31パーセントしかなく、これは英語とフランス語の違いに相当する。
Many of the Han dialects are almost entirely mutually incomprehensible, more distinct than languages from disparate regions of Europe.
"No one can clearly answer the question how many dialects there are in China," said Zhang Hongming, a professor of Chinese linguistics at the University of Wisconsin who is in China doing fieldwork. "The degree of difference among dialects is much higher than the degree of difference among European languages. In Europe they call them languages, but in China we share a culture, so the central government would like to consider that one language is shared by many different peoples. It is simply a different definition."
中国の方言は南方が豊富で特に移民の波に何度も洗われた福建省は方言が多い。中国語で福建省の複雑な言語事情を表したものに、「十里不同俗，百里不同音」があって村が違うと全く言っていることが分からないことが普通にある。
"We have an expression, that if you drive five miles in Fujian the culture changes, and if you drive 10 miles, the language does," said Zhang Zhenxing, a linguist from Fujian at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. "In recent years, because of economic growth things have been getting better, but there are still an extraordinary number of dialects in Fujian."
