ABSTRACT
In China there are many spoken language dialects. These dialects may be roughly categorized into 7 or 8 groups, namely, Mandarin, Wu, Jin, Min, Yue, Xiang, Gan, and Hakka (Yuan 1960; Norman 1988; You 1992). What is most striking is that some of the Chinese dialects are so different from one another that a speaker of one dialect will not be understood by a speaker of another. In many ways therefore the Chinese dialects may be seen as different languages (Norman 1988:187). In fact, in some universities in the United States, Cantonese (the Yue dialect spoken mainly in Guangdong province) “is offered alongside the standard language in Asian language departments, just as German and Dutch are both taught in departments of Germanic languages” (Norman 1988:187).
