Author Description

"This book is an invaluable and essential guide to speech forms such as Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, and Shanghainese, which are very distinct from one another. It also outlines commonly encountered varieties of nonstandard Mandarin, both those varieties that are spoken as people's native language and those that are spoken by those who have learned Mandarin as a second language but are influenced by their native language when speaking Mandarin. In addition, this book provides background information about the most important Sinitic languages and dialects, including their geographical distribution and position in the societies where they are spoken. It describes and compares the major Sinitic language families to reveal both their similarities and their considerable structural diversity. It also delineates several common varieties of non-standard Mandarin that have been influenced by the non-Mandarin Sinitic languages, presenting the results of research in Chinese dialectology in a way that will be interesting and useful for both beginning students of Chinese linguistics and scholars of the Chinese language, while also providing knowledge about language contact and linguistic change in Sinitic language-speaking societies"--