-What is Chinese?

Chinese is a language family. It’s a group of related languages that originated in China, and together they have more native (first language) speakers than any other language in the world. Yes, that includes English. Chinese has roughly 1.3 billion native speakers whereas English as around 400 million. That is more than three times the number of speakers!

-What are Chinese dialects? 

A dialect is one form of a language that is usually spoken by people from a specific region of the world, usually within a given country. The English language, for example, has several dialects: some of the major ones include British English, American English, Canadian English, and Australian English, but there are hundreds more, and each of these major categories can be divided into subcategories. Similarly, in Chinese, there are hundreds, and some argue thousands, of different dialects, or forms of the Chinese language. Let’s talk about the main ones.