Chinese dialects: the list, where they are spoken and how many speak them

The ten groups

The speakers are first-language speakers in China, from the Language Atlas of China (2012)¹. Each group has millions more speakers abroad, above all Yue, Min and Hakka in Southeast Asia and the Americas.

Mandarin itself spans a huge area: the speech of Harbin, Beijing, Xi’an and Chengdu are all Mandarin, and the standard (普通话, pǔtōnghuà) is based on Beijing’s¹. Jin, Huizhou and Pinghua were split off as their own groups in 1987; older lists give seven¹.

Dialect or language?

In Chinese they are all 方言, “place speech”, a word used for anything from one village’s speech to a group as big as Wu¹. Linguists note that many are not mutually intelligible: they differ at least as much as the Romance languages, and Min is the most varied of all, with neighbouring counties, and in western Fujian even neighbouring villages, that cannot understand each other¹. So in English they are often called languages, and Chinese a family of languages.

What holds them together is writing. A newspaper in Guangzhou and one in Beijing are in the same standard written Chinese, read aloud in Cantonese in one city and Mandarin in the other.

How different they sound

The same word, with the same character, in five cities, from the colloquial readings in Peking University’s survey, written in the International Phonetic Alphabet without tones¹:

The southern groups keep endings Mandarin lost centuries ago: 日 ends in -t in Xiamen, Meixian and Guangzhou, and in a catch of the throat (-ʔ) in Suzhou. They also have more tones: Hong Kong Cantonese has six, against Mandarin’s four³.

你会说你们那儿的方言吗？

方fāng言yán

Noun

dialect

Can Chinese people understand each other?

Not always in their own dialects. In a 2009 study across 15 provinces, older rural listeners were tested on words spoken by students from every province: there was a lot they could not understand, even within the Mandarin group, in a few cases fewer than 70% of the words of speakers from their own province, and speakers from Beijing were the best understood¹.

Standard Mandarin closes the gap. In 2007 just over half of China, 53%, could communicate in it; by 2020 it was over 80%². Schools, television and work all run in Mandarin, and in many cities younger people speak it better than their grandparents’ dialect².

Cantonese, Hokkien, Shanghainese and Taiwanese

• Cantonese (粤语): the Yue of Guangzhou, the first language of most people in Hong Kong and Macau¹, with spoken words that have characters of their own, like 唔 (not) and 嘅 (of)⁴.
• Hokkien (闽南语): Southern Min, spoken in southern Fujian and, as Taiwanese (台语), in Taiwan; in Singapore’s 1957 census it was the first language of 39.8% of Chinese Singaporeans, before Mandarin took over¹.
• Shanghainese (上海话): a Wu variety, which, like many city dialects, is giving way to Mandarin among the young².
• Taiwanese Mandarin: not a dialect group but Mandarin as Taiwan speaks it, with traditional characters and some words of its own.

Our guide to Mandarin vs Chinese compares them with Mandarin and says which to learn.

Which one to learn

Mandarin, unless you have family or work in Hong Kong, Guangdong or Fujian. It is the standard everyone in China learns at school, the language of nearly all television, films, books and the internet, and the one the HSK tests. Every dialect speaker you meet will also speak it.

The fastest way to fluency is to meet Mandarin in real Chinese: the Library has graded stories from HSK 1 with every word explained, and the extension gives the meaning and pinyin of any Chinese word on any page or video.

Questions

How many Chinese dialects are there?

Ten groups by the usual count (Mandarin, Min, Wu, Yue, Jin, Gan, Hakka, Xiang, Huizhou and Pinghua), or seven in older lists that keep Jin in Mandarin and leave out Huizhou and Pinghua. Within the groups there are hundreds of local varieties, many not mutually intelligible.

What is the most spoken Chinese dialect?

Mandarin, the first language of about 800 million people in China, two in three. Min, Wu and Yue (Cantonese) come next, with about 68 to 75 million each in China.

Is Cantonese a dialect of Mandarin?

No. Cantonese is the main variety of Yue, a separate group of Chinese. Mandarin and Cantonese speakers cannot understand each other’s speech without learning it, though they read the same standard written Chinese.

Do all Chinese dialects use the same characters?

Nearly all write standard Chinese the same way. Cantonese and Hokkien also have spoken words with characters of their own, like Cantonese 唔 (not), used in chat, comics and subtitles.

Which Chinese dialect should I learn?

Mandarin: it is the national standard, taught in every school in China and Taiwan, spoken by over 80% of people in China, and the language of the HSK.

Sources

Checked on 28 October 2026. Prices and features change; tell us if one has.

1. Wikipedia: Varieties of Chinese (the seven groups, hundreds of varieties, share of speakers)
2. Wikipedia: Standard Chinese (53% could communicate in it in 2007, over 80% by 2020)
3. Wikipedia: Cantonese phonology (its tones and final stops)
4. Wikipedia: Written Cantonese (its own characters, like 唔 and 嘅)