| has gloss | eng: Chinese forms part of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Currently, about one-fifth of the people in the world speak some variety of Chinese as their native language. Internal diversity between the Chinese languages (or dialects, see below), with respect to grammar, vocabulary, and syntax, is comparable to that of the Romance languages. However, owing to China's sociopolitical and cultural situation, whether these variants should be known as languages or dialects is a subject of ongoing debate. Some people call Chinese a language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family and its subdivisions languages. If the definition of "dialect" includes mutual intelligibility, this confusion would resolve into a paradigm of mutually incomprehensible languages, such as Cantonese and Mandarin, broken down into groups of mutually intelligible dialects, such as Beijing and Sichuan speech as rather easily mutually intelligible dialects of Mandarin. |
