Languages in a modernizing China

A recent estimate put the number of native speakers of Chinese globally at 1,110 million in 1995, with English a distant second at 372 million; more significantly, the same estimate put the number of native speakers of Chinese aged 15-24 in 2050 at 166 million, and the number of speakers of English at 65 million, after Hindi/Urdu (73.7 million) and Arabic (72.2 million). These statistics derive from the fact that Chinese is the official language of the most populous country on earth - China, with a population of 1,300 million in 2006 - and is also used by overseas Chinese communities scattered extensively around the world, with a total population estimated to be in the vicinity of 30-40 million. What we know as Chinese, however, comprises dozens or hundreds of mutually unintelligible dialects. These fall into nine major groups, each of which in turn consists of a number of subgroups. The names of the major groups of Chinese dialects, their populations and geographical distribution in China are presented in Table 1. As Table 1 shows, Mandarin is by far the largest group of Chinese dialects in terms of population and geographical distribution. All of the other dialects apart from Jin - notably Wu, Cantonese, Min and Hakka - are often referred to as Southern dialects because they are mostly spoken in areas south of the Yangtze River. The origin and path of evolvement of the Chinese dialects is currently a field of robust research in historical linguistics and dialectology, and there are still many unresolved issues and unanswered questions.