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Originally Posted by The_FD
every chinese people have the same ideograms but don't pronounce them the same way. Which imply they cannot understand each other when talking (what demostrates the pronouciation is not universally written in chinese ideograms).
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I admire FD's insight into Chinese language, and HE is the first person that I know here who understands Chinese language in such a scientific way, because He himself is a scientist.
English is a language spoken primarily by Englishman, and other ethnic groups in the Great Britain priorly did not speak that single language, like Welsh or Scotish, Irish, they just had their own languages, some of them still exist with numerous litterature and speakers. Today's British English is a single language that expands to more than a single ethnic group in that island.
Likewise in China, we Chinese nation comprises more than 56 ethnic groups, here we call minorities, speak their own languages (different from Chinese in writing and pronoucing) and sub-languages (same in writing but different in pronoucing), but as an offical language--the Mandarin--provides a universal language both in writing and speaking uses for ordinary people to use and promote everywhere, not only in Chinese Chinese but also in Foreign Chinese.
And the same emphasis is still shared by these languages other than Mandarin, experts are studying on them separately, their peoples are speaking them, writing them and filing them to continue their ethnic group and every characteristics including the very languages.
So in a universal way, we Chinese understand each other quite well in writing, but not the same in case of speaking communication. Those are just different languages, sometimes.
Primarily, the Chinese linguistic demography can be divided into more than 8 regions, and the languages in these regions is called regionalects.
These data were disclosed in The CambridgeYearbook of Linguistics 1996