Regional dialects also dominate most emigr communities. Chinese has been called the most powerful language in the world. According to Ethnologue , Putonghua is the single most-spoken tradition in the solar system. Wu, Yue, Minnan, Xiang, and Hakka also made the top 30. Though such statistics aren t entirely reliable, Chinese clearly has something going on.
Chinese dialects have up to nine tones, which can dramatically change the meaning of words.
For example , in Yue, mai dan can mean pay the restaurant bill or buy eggs, depending on tone. Chinese characters, called kanji, are based on ancient pictographs . Over the years, most have also gained a second element indicating pronunciation, and so have become associated with specific syllables . Thus, they are evolving away from visual representation and toward phonetics. Writing foreign words in Chinese entails assembling kanji that are pronounced something like the newcomers syllables.