Hakka forms a language group of varieties of Chinese, spoken natively by the Hakka people in parts of Southern China and some diaspora areas of Taiwan, Southeast Asia and in overseas Chinese communities around the world.
Jiangxi is an inland province in the east of the People's Republic of China. Its major cities include Nanchang and Jiujiang. Spanning from the banks of the Yangtze river in the north into hillier areas in the south and east, it shares a border with Anhui to the north, Zhejiang to the northeast, Fujian to the east, Guangdong to the south, Hunan to the west, and Hubei to the northwest.
There are hundreds of local Chinese language varieties forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family, many of which are not mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast part of mainland China. The varieties are typically classified into several groups: Mandarin, Wu, Min, Xiang, Gan, Jin, Hakka and Yue, though some varieties remain unclassified. These groups are neither clades nor individual languages defined by mutual intelligibility, but reflect common phonological developments from Middle Chinese.
Wu is a major group of Sinitic languages spoken primarily in Shanghai, Zhejiang Province, and the part of Jiangsu Province south of the Yangtze River, which makes up the cultural region of Wu. Speakers of various Wu languages sometimes labelled their mother tongue as Shanghainese when introduced to foreigners. The Suzhou dialect was the prestige dialect of Wu as of the 19th century, but had been replaced in status by Shanghainese by the turn of the 20th century. The languages of Northern Wu are mutually intelligible with each other, while those of Southern Wu are not.
The history of Jiangxi stretches from Lower Paleolithic times to the present, as Jiangxi was already inhabited by humans one million years ago. Until recently, the earliest known Jiangxi pottery was dated to around 11000 BC,; however, recent finds show that the absolutely earliest known pottery, from ca. 18,000 BC, comes from Xianren Cave in Jiangxi. In this Chinese province the full Neolithic period began before 8000 BC, as represented by Xianrendong culture in discovering cultivated rice over 10,000 years ago. This period is followed by the Bronze Age around 2000 BC, represented by Wucheng culture and Dayangzhou culture, and by the Iron Age prior to 500 BC.
Xiang or Hsiang, also known as Hunanese, is a group of linguistically similar and historically related Sinitic languages, spoken mainly in Hunan province but also in northern Guangxi and parts of neighboring Guizhou, Guangdong, Sichuan, Jiangxi and Hubei provinces. Scholars divided Xiang into five subgroups, Chang-Yi, Lou-Shao, Hengzhou, Chen-Xu and Yong-Quan. Among those, Lou-shao, also known as Old Xiang, still exhibits the three-way distinction of Middle Chinese obstruents, preserving the voiced stops, fricatives, and affricates. Xiang has also been heavily influenced by Mandarin, which adjoins three of the four sides of the Xiang-speaking territory, and Gan in Jiangxi Province, from where a large population immigrated to Hunan during the Ming dynasty.
The Han Chinese people can be defined into subgroups based on linguistic, cultural, ethnic, genetic, and regional features. The terminology used in Mandarin to describe the groups is: "minxi", used in mainland China or "zuqun", used in Taiwan. No Han subgroup is recognized as one of People's Republic of China's 56 official ethnic groups, in Taiwan only three subgroups, Hoklo, Hakka and Waishengren are recognized.
The Fuzhou language, also Foochow, Hokchew, Hok-chiu, or Fuzhounese, is the prestige variety of the Eastern Min branch of Min Chinese spoken mainly in the Mindong region of Eastern Fujian Province. As it is mutually unintelligible to neighbouring varieties in the province, under a technical linguistic definition Fuzhou is a language and not a dialect. Thus, while Fuzhou may be commonly referred to as a 'dialect' by laypersons, this is colloquial usage and not recognised in academic linguistics. Like many other varieties of Chinese, the Fuzhou dialect is dominated by monosyllabic morphemes that carry lexical tones, and has a mainly analytic syntax. While the Eastern Min branch it belongs to is relatively closer to other branches of Min such as Southern Min or Pu-Xian Min than to other Sinitic branches such as Mandarin, Wu Chinese or Hakka, they are still not mutually intelligible.
Shaozhou Tuhua, also known as Yuebei Tuhua (粤北土话), is an unclassified Chinese variety spoken in northern Guangdong province, China. It is mutually unintelligible with Xiang, Cantonese, and Mandarin.
The Sinitic languages, often synonymous with the Chinese languages, are a group of East Asian analytic languages that constitute a major branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. It is frequently proposed that there is a primary split between the Sinitic languages and the rest of the family. This view is rejected by a number of researchers but has found phylogenetic support among others. The Macro-Bai languages, whose classification is difficult, may be an offshoot of Old Chinese and thus Sinitic; otherwise Sinitic is defined only by the many varieties of Chinese unified by a shared historical background, and usage of the term "Sinitic" may reflect the linguistic view that Chinese constitutes a family of distinct languages, rather than variants of a single language.
Sichuanese or Szechwanese (simplified Chinese: 四川话; traditional Chinese: 四川話; Sichuanese Pinyin: Si4cuan1hua4; pinyin: Sìchuānhuà; Wade–Giles: Szŭ4-ch'uan1-hua4), also called Sichuanese/Szechwanese Mandarin (simplified Chinese: 四川官话; traditional Chinese: 四川官話; pinyin: Sìchuān Guānhuà), is a branch of Southwestern Mandarin spoken mainly in Sichuan and Chongqing, which was part of Sichuan Province until 1997, and the adjacent regions of their neighboring provinces, such as Hubei, Guizhou, Yunnan, Hunan and Shaanxi. Although "Sichuanese" is often synonymous with the Chengdu-Chongqing dialect, there is still a great amount of diversity among the Sichuanese dialects, some of which are mutually unintelligible with each other. In addition, because Sichuanese is the lingua franca in Sichuan, Chongqing and part of Tibet, it is also used by many Tibetan, Yi, Qiang and other ethnic minority groups as a second language.
Southwestern Mandarin, also known as Upper Yangtze Mandarin, is a Mandarin Chinese dialect spoken in much of Southwestern China, including in Sichuan, Yunnan, Chongqing, Guizhou, most parts of Hubei, the northwestern part of Hunan, the northern part of Guangxi and some southern parts of Shaanxi and Gansu.
Chang–Du or Chang–Jing, sometimes called Nanchang or Nanchangese after its principal dialect, is one of the Gan Chinese languages. It is named after Nanchang and Duchang County, and is spoken in those areas as well as in Xinjian, Anyi, Yongxiu, De'an, Xingzi, Hukou, and bordering regions in Jiangxi and in Pingjiang County, Hunan.
The history of Gan Chinese, a variety of Chinese spoken in modern-day China, stretches back to the beginning of the Qin dynasty. This long stretch of time is divided into Old Gan, late Old Gan, and Middle Gan periods.
The Gan-speaking Chinese or Jiangxi people or Jiangyou people or Kiang-Si people are a subgroup of Han Chinese people. The origin of Gan-speaking people in China are from Jiangxi province in China. Gan-speaking populations are also found in Fujian, southern Anhui and Hubei provinces, and linguistic enclaves are found on Shaanxi, Sichuan, Zhejiang, Hunan, Hainan, Guangdong, Fujian and non-Gan speaking southern and western Jiangxi.
New Xiang, also known as Chang-Yi is the dominant form of Xiang Chinese. It is spoken in northeastern areas of Hunan, China adjacent to areas where Southwestern Mandarin and Gan are spoken. Under their influence, it has lost some of the conservative phonological characteristics that distinguish Old Xiang. While most linguists follow Yuan Jiahua in describing New Xiang as a subgroup of Xiang Chinese, Zhou Zhenhe and You Rujie classify it as Southwestern Mandarin. However, New Xiang is still very difficult for Mandarin speakers to understand, particularly the old style of New Xiang.
The Xong language is the northernmost Hmongic language, spoken in south-central China by around 0.9 million people. It is called Xiangxi Miaoyu in Chinese, as well as Eastern Miao (东部苗语). In Western sources, it has been called Meo, Red Miao, and North Hmongic. An official alphabet was adopted in 1956.
The Language Atlas of China, published by Hong Kong Longman Publishing Company in two parts in 1987 and 1989, maps the distribution of both the varieties of Chinese and minority languages of China.
She or Shehua is an unclassified Sinitic language spoken by the She people of Southeastern China. It is also called Shanha, San-hak (山哈) or Shanhahua (山哈话). She speakers are located mainly in Fujian and Zhejiang provinces of Southeastern China, with smaller numbers of speakers in a few locations of Jiangxi, Guangdong and Anhui provinces.
The Xiangxiang dialect is a dialect of Xiang Chinese, spoken in Xiangxiang, Hunan province, China. It is part of a group of dialects called the Central Xiang dialects.
