or Sinitic languages
Family of languages comprising one of the two branches of
They are spoken by about 95% of the inhabitants of China and by many communities of Chinese immigrants elsewhere. Linguists regard the major dialect groups of Chinese as distinct languages, though because all Chinese write with a common system of ideograms, or characters (see {{link=Chinese writing system">Chinese writing system ), and share Classical Chinese as a heritage, traditionally all varieties of Chinese are regarded as dialects. There is a primary division in Chinese languages between the so-called Mandarin dialects
which have a high degree of mutual intelligibility and cover all of the Chinese speech area north of the Yangtze River (Chang Jiang) and west of Hunan and Guangdong provinces
and a number of other dialect groups concentrated in southeastern China. Far more people
more than 885 million
speak a variety of Mandarin Chinese as a first language than any other language in the world. The northern Mandarin dialect of Beijing is the basis for Modern Standard Chinese, a spoken norm that serves as a supradialectal lingua franca . Important dialect groups other than Mandarin are Wu (spoken in Shanghai), Gan, Xiang, Min (spoken in Fujian and Taiwan), Yue (including Cantonese, spoken in Guangzhou [Canton] and Hong Kong), and Kejia (Hakka), spoken by the Hakka . The modern Chinese languages are tone languages, the number of tones varying from four in Modern Standard Chinese to nine in some dialects.