198 CultureShock! China
in Mandarin, though perhaps with a heavy accent. Still, it is
worth being aware that dialects exist so you aren’t frustrated
when you learn to say ‘hello’ in Mandarin (‘ni hao’), only
to hear ‘nonghoe’ in Shanghai, ‘lei ho’ in Guangdong, and
so on.
For those who like to know details, the Chinese break
their language into seven major dialect groups, each with
further sub-groups and variations. The Mandarin group is the
largest. Numbers are disputed, but by many estimates nearly
700 million Chinese speak Mandarin as their mother dialect,
and some 1.1 billion speak it in some form. Since 1949,
Mandarin has been called officially in Chinese ‘Putonghua’,
or the ‘common language’. Because Mandarin is the most
common dialect, except where otherwise noted, all Chinese
words listed throughout this book are written as pronounced
in Mandarin.
The next-largest dialect group is Wu, which includes
Shanghainese and several other sub-dialects from the Yangtze
River delta region in East China. Wu is mother dialect to some
100 million Chinese. Next Yue (Cantonese), native to China’s
South-eastern coastal areas centred in Guangdong (Canton), is
mother dialect for some 70 million people in China and, due
to historical emigration patterns, for most overseas Chinese.
Next is the Xiang (Hunanese), dialect group of South-central
China and mother dialect for some 65 million speakers.
Next comes Min, native to Fujian and Hainan and parts of
Taiwan, mother dialect for some 60 million. Next come the
Hakka (Kejia) dialects, spoken by scattered groups across
Guangxi and Fujian Provinces, but also (due to historical in-
migration patterns—‘Hakka’ means ‘guest people’) in Taiwan
and in Yunnan and Sichuan in China’s South-west. Hakka is
mother dialect for some 50 million Chinese. Finally, Gan is
mother dialect for some 30 million Chinese in Jiangxi, Hubei
and parts of Hunan. Mandarin, Wu and Gan are somewhat
mutually intelligible with patient listening, but the other
groups are not.
Note that these seven dialect systems (Mandarin, Wu, Yue,
Xiang, Min, Hakka and Gan) are all considered subcategories
of Chinese, the native language of the Han people who