8. Chinese Dialects

Chinese is in one sense a single language because, generally, any two places speaking two different dialects of it can be linked by a chain of adjacent immediate places all of which understand their immediate neighbors without difficulty. Looked at very close to, however, it is a baffling mosaic of sub dialects in which, for example, the speech of Baoding is markedly different from that of Beijing less than a hundred miles away. Any sharply defined scheme of division into dialects thus does less justice both to the underlying unity and to the local diversity. This map is the work of Paul Kratochvil, a Czech scholar who studied the problem in China during the 1950s.