The plethora of linguistic diversity of Chinese languages in the south and one unified Mandarin in the north might be related to the geographical characteristics of China’s north and south. “Mandarin dialects,” are spread across the Yellow Plain and the Loess Plateau which has a flat terrain that promotes travel and, consequently, easy contact among the people there. Ramsey observes that “this remarkable linguistic difference between a unified North and a fragmented South is a measure of how much life and society have been affected by geography.” As a result of this geography, a more uniform Northern Chinese area is created with mutually intelligible dialects. In contrast, mutually unintelligible dialects are spoken in the areas south of the Yangtze River because people there were barricaded by mountains and rivers.
The Northern dialects, with nearly 900 million speakers, are commonly subdivided into four major varieties: Northwestern, Northern proper, River, and Southwestern. The Northwestern variety refers to the dialects spoken around the Loess Plateau region with the ancient capital city Xi’an as its center. The Northern proper variety is spoken in the areas such as Hebei province, Shangdong province, and provinces in the northeast (Manchuria). This variety constitutes the basis of the standard dialect in modern China. The language was formed through large-scale immigration of the people residing in this area over the last several hundred years. Therefore, Northeastern dialects bear a strong resemblance to other Northern dialects as most migrants settling there originally moved from the Northern dialect area. The River variety spoken in the region north of the Yangtze River around the city of Nanjing was once considered the most prestigious dialect of the nation during and after the Ming dynasty. The Southwestern variety developed out of several waves of migrants settling in the provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan, and Guizhou from central China after the Ming dynasty.
During the late eighteenth century the Qing emperors dispatched troops to settle in these remote areas permanently with their families and encouraged large-scale immigration from Hubei and Hunan provinces to reclaim the land in southwestern China. Consequently, the Southwestern variety in many ways resembles the language spoken in Hubei province. Northern Chinese typically has fewer tones than Chinese dialects in the south. However, the most remarkable feature distinguishing Northern Chinese from the mutually unintelligible Southern Chinese dialects is perhaps the lack of stop endings that are prevalent in many Southern dialects like Wu, Yue, and Min.
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