Varietas bahasa Tionghoa
dalam proses terjemahan
thumb|left|250px|Peta bahasa China Kebanyakan pakar bahasa menganggap semua varian bahasa Cina sebagai bagian dari rumpun bahasa Sino-Tibet dan mereka percaya bahwa dahulu kala pernah ada sebuah bahasa proto yang mirip situasinya dengan bahasa proto Indo-Eropa di mana semua bahasa-bahasa Cina, Tibet dan Myanmar adalah bahasa turunannya. Relasi antara bahasa Cina, di satu sisi dengan bahasa Sino-Tibet lainnya masih belum begitu jelas berbeda dengan bahasa-bahasa Indo-Eropa. Para pakar masih secara aktif merekonstruksi bahasa proto Sino-Tibet. Kesulitan utamanya ialah bahwa meskipun banyak sekali dokumentasi di mana kita bisa merekonstruksi bunyi-bunyi bahasa Cina kuna, tidak ada dokumentasi mengenai sejarah perkembangan dari bahasa proto Sino-Tibet menjadi bahasa-bahasa CIna. Selain itu banyak bahasa yang bisa membantu kita merekonstruksi bahasa proto Sino-Tibet, kurang didokumentasikan dan masih belum dikenal dengan baik.
The maps above depict the subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within Chinese. The seven main groups are Mandarin (represented by the lines drawn from Beijing), Wu, Xiang, Gan, Hakka, Cantonese, and Min (which linguists further divide into of 5 to 7 subdivisions on its own, which are all mutually unintelligible). Linguists who distinguish ten instead of seven major groups would then separate Jin from Mandarin, Ping from Yue, and Hui from Wu. There are also many smaller groups that confound efforts at classification, such as: Dungan, a dialect of northwestern Mandarin spoken among Chinese-descended Muslims in Kyrghyzstan; Danzhou-hua, spoken on Hainan Island; Xiang-hua 乡话 (not to be confused with Xiang 湘), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou-Tuhua, spoken in northern Guangdong. (An informative article written in Chinese may be found at [1].)
In addition to the previously noted divisions, there is also Putonghua and Guoyu, the official languages of the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China, respectively. These are based on the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing, and are intended to transcend all of China as a common language of communication. It is therefore the common Chinese language (as these are often called) that is the language of government, of the media, and of instruction in schools.
There is a lot of controversy around the terminology used to describe the subdivisions of Chinese, with some preferring to call Chinese a language and its subdivisions dialects, and others preferring to call Chinese a language family and its subdivisions languages. There is more on this debate later on. On the other hand, even though Dungan is very closely related to Mandarin, not many people consider it "Chinese", because it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by people outside of China who are not considered Chinese in any sense.
It is common for speakers of Chinese to be able to speak several variations of the language. Typically in southern China, a person will be able to speak the official Putonghua, the local dialect, and occasionally either speak or understand another regional dialect, such as Cantonese. Such polyglots will frequently code switch between Putonghua and the local dialect, depending on situation. See Kapang Syndrome. Sometimes, the various dialects are mixed from other dialects, depending on geographical influence. A person living in Taiwan, for example, will commonly mix pronunciations, phrases, and words from Mandarin and Minnan, and this mixture is considered socially appropriate under many circumstances.
Apakah Bahasa Cina Sebuah Bahasa atau Sebuah Kelompok Bahasa?
Spoken Chinese comprises many regional and mutually unintelligible variants. In the West, many people are familiar with the fact that the Romance languages all derive from Latin and so have many underlying features in common while being mutually unintelligible. The linguistic evolution of Chinese is similar, while the socio-political context is quite different.
In Europe, political fragmentation created independent states which are roughly the size of Chinese provinces. This created a political desire to create separate cultural and literary standards between nation-states and to standardize the language within a nation-state. In China, a single cultural and literary standard continued to exist while at the same time little can be done to standardize the spoken language between different cities and counties. This has been tried since the era of Emperor Qin. The main reason is because of the wide area span of the country, and communication blockage by mountains and geography. It is common in China that a family moved into mountains to escape from war, and was later discovered by the local government that they are speaking the tone of some hundred years ago. This has created a linguistic context that is very different from that of Europe, and this has profound implications for how to describe spoken variations of Chinese.
For example, in Europe, the language of a nation-state was usually standardized to be similar to that of the capital, making it easy, for example, to classify a language as French or Spanish. This had the effect of sharpening linguistic differences. A farmer on one side of the border would start to model his speech after Paris while a farmer on the other side would model his speech after Madrid. In China, this standardization did not happen, and so even categorizing variations can be difficult, in part because different dialects merge into each other. As a result, linguists will disagree among themselves as to classification.
As a result of the above, Chinese people generally consider Chinese to be one single language. In order to describe dialects, Chinese people typically use the speech of location, for example Beijing hua (北京話/北京话) for the speech of Beijing or Shanghai hua (上海話/上海话) for the speech of Shanghai — without any "laypeople awareness" that these various hua are then categorized into "languages" based on mutual intelligibility. So although it is true that many parts of north China are quite homogeneous in language, while in parts of south China, major cities can have dialects that are only marginally intelligible even to close neighbours, these are all regarded as hua — equal subvariations under a single Chinese language.
Due to this "self-perception" of a single Chinese language by the majority of its speakers, there are many linguists who follow this definition, and regard Chinese as a single language and its variations as dialects; others follow the intelligibility requirement and consider Chinese to be a group of anywhere from seven to seventeen related "languages", since these languages are not at all mutually intelligible, and show variation comparable to the Romance languages.
It is to be noted that this distinction can have some political overtones. Describing Chinese as different languages can imply that China should actually be several different nations, and that the Hàn (Chinese) race is in fact several different races. For this reason, some Chinese are uncomfortable with the idea that Chinese is not a single language, as this perception might legitimize secessionist movements. On the other hand, supporters of Taiwanese independence also tend to be strong promoters of Min- and Hakka-language education.
However, the linkages between ethnicity, politics, and language can be complex. For example, many Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese speakers, who consider their own tongues to be separate spoken languages, and the Chinese race to be a single entity, do not consider these two positions to be contradictory. Moreover, the government of the People's Republic of China officially states that China is a multinational nation, and that the term Chinese incorporates groups that do not natively speak Chinese at all. (Those that do speak Chinese are called Han Chinese — an ethnic and cultural concept, not a political one.) Similarly on Taiwan, one can find supporters of Chinese unification who are also interested in promoting local language, and supporters of Taiwan independence who have little interest in the topic.