Chinese language
Nomenclature

The designation of various Chinese branches remains controversial. Some linguists and most ordinary Chinese people consider all the spoken varieties as one single language, as speakers share a common national identity and a common written form. Others instead argue that it is inappropriate to refer to major branches of Chinese such as Mandarin, Wu, and so on as "dialects" because the mutual unintelligibility between them is too great. However, calling major Chinese branches "languages" would also be wrong under the same criterion, since a branch such as Wu, itself contains many mutually unintelligible varieties, and could not be properly called a single language.

There are also viewpoints pointing out that linguists often ignore mutual intelligibility when varieties share intelligibility with a central variety (i.e. prestige variety, such as Standard Mandarin), as the issue requires some careful handling when mutual intelligibility is inconsistent with language identity.

The Chinese government's official Chinese designation for the major branches of Chinese is 方言; fāngyán; ' regional speech ', whereas the more closely related varieties within these are called 地点方言; 地點方言; dìdiǎn fāngyán; ' local speech '.

Because of the difficulties involved in determining the difference between language and dialect, other terms have been proposed. These include topolect, lect, vernacular, regional, and variety.
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