Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant passages that answer the question.
Query: Which dialect of Chinese has the most speakers?
Jerry Norman classified the traditional seven dialect groups into three larger groups: Northern (Mandarin), Central (Wu, Gan, and Xiang) and Southern (Hakka, Yue, and Min).
He argued that the Southern Group is derived from a standard used in the Yangtze valley during the Han dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD), which he called Old Southern Chinese, while the Central group was transitional between the Northern and Southern groups. Some dialect boundaries, such as between Wu and Min, are particularly abrupt, while others, such as between Mandarin and Xiang or between Min and Hakka, are much less clearly defined.
Cherokee (, ) is an endangered Iroquoian language and the native language of the Cherokee people. There are approximately 12,000 Cherokee speakers out of more than 300,000 tribal members. It is the only Southern Iroquoian language and differs significantly from the other Iroquoian languages. Cherokee is a polysynthetic language and uses a unique syllabary writing system.
The People's Republic of China (PRC) officially recognizes 56 distinct ethnic groups, the largest of which are Han, who constitute 91.51% of the total population in 2010. Ethnic minorities constitute 8.49% or 113.8 million of China's population in 2010. During the past decades ethnic minorities have experienced higher growth rates than the majority Han population, because they are not under the one-child policy. Their proportion of the population in China has grown from 6.1% in 1953, to 8.04% in 1990, 8.41% in 2000, and 8.49% in 2010. Large ethnic minorities (data according to the 2000 census) include the Zhuang (16 million, 1.28%), Manchu (10 million, 0.84%), Uyghur (9 million, 0.78%), Hui (9 million, 0.71%), Miao (8 million, 0.71%), Yi (7 million, 0.61%), Tujia (5.75 million, 0.63%), Mongols (5 million, 0.46%), Tibetan (5 million, 0.43%), Buyei (3 million, 0.23%), and Korean (2 million, 0.15%).
Chakavian in its actual use is the least spoken Serbo-Croatian dialect, being spoken only by 12% Croats. It is now mostly reduced in southwestern Croatia along the eastern Adriatic: Adriatic islands, and sporadically in the mainland coast, with rare inland enclaves up to central Croatia, and minor enclaves in Austria and Montenegro. All areas of old contacts with Romance languages.
Malay is the main language spoken in the state, although with a different creole from Sarawak Malay and Peninsular Malay. The state has its own slang for Malay which originated either from indigenous words, Brunei Malay, Suluk, Cocos Malay and Indonesian language. The indigenous languages of Sabah can be divided into four language families of Dusunic, Murutic, Paitanic and Sama–Bajau. As the Hakka forms the majority of Chinese in Sabah, the Hakka dialect is the most commonly spoken Chinese dialect in the state apart from Cantonese and Hokkien dialects.
, 400 million people spoke English as their first language, and 1.1 billion spoke it as a secondary language. English is probably the third largest language by number of native speakers, after Mandarin and Spanish. However, when combining native and non-native speakers it may, depending on the estimate used, be the most commonly spoken language in the world. English is spoken by communities on every continent and on oceanic islands in all the major oceans.
Estimates of the number of English speakers who are second language and foreign-language speakers vary greatly from 470 million to more than 1,000 million depending on how proficiency is defined. Linguist David Crystal estimates that non-native speakers now outnumber native speakers by a ratio of 3 to 1. In Kachru's three-circles model, the "outer circle" countries are countries such as the Philippines, Jamaica, India, Pakistan, Singapore, and Nigeria with a much smaller proportion of native speakers of English but much use of English as a second language for education, government, or domestic business,
and where English is routinely used for school instruction and official interactions with the government.
Romani (; also Romany; ) is any of several languages of the Romani people belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family. According to Ethnologue, seven varieties of Romani are divergent enough to be considered languages of their own. The largest of these are Vlax Romani (about 500,000 speakers), Balkan Romani (600,000), and Sinte Romani (300,000). Some Romani communities speak mixed languages based on the surrounding language with retained Romani-derived vocabulary – these are known by linguists as Para-Romani varieties, rather than dialects of the Romani language itself.
Chinese is written almost exclusively in Chinese characters. It requires over 3,000 characters for general literacy, but up to 40,000 characters for reasonably complete coverage. Japanese uses fewer characters — general literacy in Japanese can be expected with 1,945 characters. The use of Chinese characters in Korea is becoming increasingly rare, although idiosyncratic use of Chinese characters in proper names requires knowledge (and therefore availability) of many more characters. However, even today, students in South Korea are taught 1,800 characters.
The majority of the population speak Persian, which is also the official language of the country. Others include speakers of a number of other Iranian languages within the greater Indo-European family, and languages belonging to some other ethnicities living in Iran.
The Balkan dialects are the most extensive group of dialects of the Bulgarian language, covering almost half of the present-day territory of Bulgaria and slightly less than a third of the territory on the Balkans where Bulgarian is spoken. Their range includes north-central Bulgaria and most of the Bulgarian part of Thrace, excluding the Rhodopes, the region of Haskovo and Strandzha. As a result of the mass population movements that affected eastern Bulgaria during the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, the Balkan dialects are now spoken also in vast areas of northeastern Bulgaria, especially the regions of Dobrich and Varna. The most significant feature of the dialects, as in most Eastern Bulgarian dialects, is the pronunciation of Old Church Slavonic ѣ (yat) as or , depending on the character of the following syllable. The Balkan dialects, and in particular, the Central Balkan dialect, lie at the foundation of formal Bulgarian. However, they are not identical to the standard language because many of its features derive from the Western Bulgarian dialects, including the Macedonian dialects, or are a compromise between Eastern and Western standard.For the phonological and morphological characteristics of the individual dialects included in the Balkan dialects, cf. individual articles.
It is difficult to establish exactly how many different Chinese characters are in use today; the new HSK, a widely used proficiency test for Standard Chinese as a second language, tests over 2,600 different characters, whilst in 1988 the People's Republic of China published the "List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese" which contains 7,000 different characters. In Japan, where a smaller set of characters are in general usage, the Japanese Ministry of Education prescribes the teaching of 2,136 kanji in primary and secondary school in a list called the jōyō kanji, meaning "regular-use Chinese characters".
Chakavian or Čakavian , , ( , proper name: "čakavica" or "čakavština" , own name: "čokovski, čakavski, čekavski") is a dialect of the Serbo-Croatian language spoken by a minority of Croats. It has a low mutual intelligibility with Shtokavian. There is much internal diversity, to the point where intelligibility between the northern and southern varieties of Chakavian is low. All three main Serbo-Croatian dialects are named after their most common word for "what?", which in Čakavian is "ča" or "ca". Chakavian is spoken mainly in the northeastern Adriatic: in Istria, Kvarner Gulf, in most Adriatic islands, and in the interior valley of Gacka, more sporadically in the Dalmatian littoral and central Croatia.
The Lao language () is the official language of the Lao People's Democratic Republic and its official script is the Lao alphabet. As the dominant language of most of the Lao Loum and therefore most of the Lao population, the language is enshrined as the dominant language of education, government, and official use. Numerous minority languages are spoken by roughly half the population, and include languages of the Austroasiatic, Sino-Tibetan, Austronesian and Hmong–Mien language families. Although spelling is not fully uniform, despite several reforms to move the language closer to phonetical systems, it has helped stabilise the language. No official standard exists, but the dialect of Vientiane is considered de facto official.
Greek is by far the most widely spoken and the only official language of public life and education in Macedonia. The local Macedonian dialect is spoken alongside dialects from other parts of Greece and Pontic Greek still spoken by some Greeks of Pontic descent. One archaic Greek dialect indigenous to Greek Macedonia and other parts of Northern Greece is that spoken by the Sarakatsani, a traditionally transhument shepherd community whose dialect has undergone very little change through foreign influences. Macedonian Slavic dialects are the most widely spoken minority language while Aromanian, Arvanitic, Megleno-Romanian, Turkish and Romani are also spoken. Ladino is still spoken by some Jews in Thessaloniki.
Tamil (; "" , ) is a Dravidian language predominantly spoken by the Tamil people of India and Sri Lanka, and by the Tamil diaspora, Sri Lankan Moors, Douglas, and Chindians. Tamil is an official language of two countries: Sri Lanka and Singapore and official language of the Indian state Tamil Nadu. It has official status in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and the Indian Union Territory of Puducherry. It is used as one of the languages of education in Malaysia, along with English, Malay and Mandarin. Tamil is spoken by significant minorities in the four other South Indian states of Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana and the Union Territory of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. It is one of the 22 scheduled languages of India.
Isan or Northeastern Thai () is a group of Lao varieties spoken in the northern two-thirds of Isan in northeastern Thailand, as well as in adjacent portions of northern and eastern Thailand. It is the native language of the Isan people, spoken by 20 million or so people in Thailand, a third of the population of Thailand and 80 percent of all Lao speakers. The language remains the primary language in 88 percent of households in Isan. It is commonly used as a second, third, or fourth language by the region's other linguistic minorities, such as Northern Khmer, Khorat Thai, Kuy, Nyah Kur, and other Tai or Austronesian-speaking peoples. The Isan language has unofficial status in Thailand and can be differentiated as a whole from the Lao language of Laos by the increasing use of Thai grammar, vocabulary, and neologisms. Code-switching is common, depending on the context or situation. Adoption of Thai neologisms has also further differentiated Isan from standard Lao.
Literate Chinese speakers can read and write in the Mandarin-based standard written language. However, because the graphemes in Chinese's logographic writing system are not directly linked to pronunciation (though there are quasi-phonetic hints), Cantonese speakers who do not speak Mandarin will read aloud the characters in Cantonese pronunciation only. The resulting speech is Mandarin-based grammar and vocabulary pronounced word-by-word in Cantonese. If the same sentence were to be spoken using regular colloquial Cantonese, it might be quite different. Here is an example:
According to "Ethnologue", the Comorian Swahili variety is divided into four principal dialects: Ngazidja, Ndzwani, Maore and Mwawli. Ngazidja is spoken on the Grande Comore Autonomous Island, and has around 312,000 total speakers. Ndzwani is spoken on the Anjouan Autonomous Island, and has roughly 275,000 total speakers. Maore is spoken on the Comoros, Mayotte and Madagascar islands, and has an estimated 136,500 total speakers. Mwali is spoken on the Moheli Autonomous Island, and has about 28,700 total speakers.
The precise number of creole languages is not known, particularly as many are poorly attested or documented. About one hundred creole languages have arisen since 1500. These are predominantly based on European languages such as English and French due to the European Age of Discovery and the Atlantic slave trade that arose at that time. With the improvements in ship-building and navigation, traders had to learn to communicate with people around the world, and the quickest way to do this was to develop a pidgin, or simplified language suited to the purpose; in turn, full creole languages developed from these pidgins. In addition to creoles that have European languages as their base, there are, for example, creoles based on Arabic, Chinese, and Malay. The creole with the largest number of speakers is Haitian Creole, with almost ten million native speakers, followed by Tok Pisin with about 4 million, most of whom are second-language speakers.
The main language of the Punjabi people is Punjabi and its associated dialects, which differ depending on the region of Punjab the speaker is from; there are notable differences in the Lahnda languages, spoken in the Pakistani Punjab. In the Pakistani Punjab, the vast majority still speak Punjabi, even though the language has no governmental support. In the Indian Punjab, most people speak Punjabi. English is sometimes used, and older people who lived in the undivided Punjab may be able to speak and write in Urdu. The Punjabi languages have always absorbed numerous loanwords from surrounding areas and provinces (and from English).
Chinese languages and dialects vary by not only pronunciation, but also, to a lesser extent, vocabulary and grammar. Modern written Chinese, which replaced Classical Chinese as the written standard as an indirect result of the May Fourth Movement of 1919, is not technically bound to any single variety; however, it most nearly represents the vocabulary and syntax of Mandarin, by far the most widespread Chinese dialectal family in terms of both geographical area and number of speakers. This version of written Chinese is called Vernacular Chinese, or 白話/白话 "báihuà" (literally, "plain speech"). Despite its ties to the dominant Mandarin language, Vernacular Chinese also permits some communication between people of different dialects, limited by the fact that Vernacular Chinese expressions are often ungrammatical or unidiomatic in non-Mandarin dialects. This role may not differ substantially from the role of other linguae francae, such as Latin: For those trained in written Chinese, it serves as a common medium; for those untrained in it, the graphic nature of the characters is in general no aid to common understanding (characters such as "one" notwithstanding). In this regard, Chinese characters may be considered a large and inefficient phonetic script. However, Ghil'ad Zuckermann’s exploration of phono-semantic matching in Standard Chinese concludes that the Chinese writing system is multifunctional, conveying both semantic and phonetic content.
The most widely used variety of Chinese spoken in Sichuan is Sichuanese Mandarin, which is the lingua franca in Sichuan, Chongqing and parts of Tibet Autonomous Region. Although Sichuanese is generally classified as a dialect of Mandarin Chinese, it is highly divergent in phonology, vocabulary, and even grammar from Standard Chinese. Minjiang dialect is especially difficult for speakers of other Mandarin dialects to understand.
Many of the Chinese living in capital city [[Jakarta]] and other towns located in Java are not fluent in Chinese languages, due to New Order's banning of Chinese languages, but those who are living in non-Java cities especially in Sumatra and Kalimantan can speak Chinese and its dialects fluently. The Chinese along the North-Eastern coast of Sumatra, especially in [[North Sumatra]], [[Riau]], [[Riau Islands]] and [[Jambi]] are predominantly Hokkien (Min Nan) speakers, and there are also two different variants of Hokkien being used, such as [[Medan Hokkien]], which is based on the Zhangzhou dialect and [[Riau Hokkien]], which is based on the Quanzhou dialect. There are also Hokkien speakers in Java, Sulawesi and Kalimantan (Borneo). Meanwhile, the Hakkas are the majority in [[Aceh]], [[Bangka-Belitung]] and [[West Kalimantan]] north of Pontianak. Some Hakkas also live in parts of Java. The [[Cantonese people]]s mainly living in big cities like Jakarta, [[Medan]], [[Batam]], [[Surabaya]] and [[Pontianak, Indonesia|Pontianak]]. The Teochew people become the majority in [[West Kalimantan]] especially in Central to Southern area such as [[Ketapang]], Kendawangan and [[Pontianak, Indonesia|Pontianak]], as well as in Riau Islands. There are some Fuzhounese speakers in [[East Java]], especially in [[Surabaya]].
In Taiwan, there are two main dialects: Sixian and Hailu (alternatively known as Haifeng; Hailu refers to Haifeng County and Lufeng County). Most Hakka dialect speakers found on Taiwan originated from these two regions. Sixian speakers come from Jiaying Prefecture (), mainly from the four counties of Chengxiang (now Meixian District), Zhengping (now Jiaoling), Xingning and Pingyuan. Most dialects of Taiwanese Hakka, except Sixian and Dabu, preserved postalveolar consonants (, , and ), which are uncommon in other southern Chinese varieties."Ethnologue" reports the dialects as "Yue-Tai" (Meixian, Wuhua, Raoping, Taiwan Kejia: Meizhou above), "Yuezhong "(Central Guangdong), "Huizhou, Yuebei" (Northern Guangdong), "Tingzhou" (Min-Ke), "Ning-Long" (Longnan), "Yugui, Tonggu."