What exactly does “The Chinese language” mean? Does it mean Mandarin, or are other langs like Cantonese, Hakka, and Teochew included?
I guess I still have a lot to learn… my parents were from China, and they always gave me the impression that they were just dialects. My father spoke(speaks) in an Anhui dialect, and although it sounded like a separate language, if you listened really closely it was really just ‘mandarin’ but distorted. A lot, sure, but it’s all the same language in the end. I guess I just assumed it was the rule, not the exception.
The difference between it being a rule and an exception depends on which side of the North/South dividing line a speaker is from. Generally, people from south and south-east of the Yangtze river speak languages whose most recent common ancestor is Middle Chinese and not Mandarin.
Here’s a map of the Sinitic languages and a map of the varieties of Mandarin.
