Hi, Is there a language called Chinese Or is it Cantonese or Mandarin?

" Chinese " is a language with many dialects,

the Official dialects is " Mandarin ",

" Cantonese " is also one of the major dialects;
common and influential in Guangdong Province CHINA, remains one of the official languages in HongKong, Macao and used by Cantonese-speaking overseas communities around the world.

for more complete info :

1.> " Chinese " is a " Language " , that can wrote into form of "Traditional Chinese" & "Simplified Chinese"; and can be spoke in many " Dialects " !

2.> form of written

" Traditional Chinese "
( which was totally used in mainland China before, and now is still usually used in HongKong, China; Macao, China; Taiwan; Philippines.....)

" Simplified Chinese "
( which is usually used in Mainland China, Singapore.... )

the mainland China start to invent and try of using "Simplifed Chinese" in 1960's, is for the reason of more easier to learn and for promote Chinese globally, but not resticted for using "Traditional Chinese" ! and the generation as old as grandparents was also learned Traditional Chinese in their school time before.

that's the reason why HongKong & Macao are already part of China, and they are still using Traditional Chinese on their official document, newspaper, and on TV !

and also still using by a lot of oversea chinese. and used also at their chinese newspaper. ex. Philippines......

3.> Chinese Dialects :

there are many dialects in "Chinese" (CHINA) ;

the official one is "Mandarin" (官) (Guan) ;

it together with "Yue" (Cantonese) (粵) , "Man" (Taiwanese) (閩), "Wu" (吳) (Shanghainese), "Hakka" (客家), "xiang" (湘) & "Gan" (贛)... are declared by China Government and consider as the " 7 Major Chinese Dialects " in China, which used by a large amount of Chinese people within China and Overseas!

4.> "Cantonese" also known as "Yue" (粵) language

- one of the seven major dialects declared by China Government

- is common and influential in Guangdong Province CHINA!

- and used by Cantonese-speaking overseas communities around the world, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong, China (together with English) and of Macau, China (together with Portuguese).

.

That's a matter of definition. For political reasons (since China is one country - or at least the vast majority of China which is included in the PRC), "Chinese" is often regarded as one language with many different dialects (like Cantonese, Fujian, Shanghai, and so on).

If you look more closely, you will find that there are several dialect groups in China (mainly in the South) which are not in any way mutually intelligible. If China hadn't been a unified country, they would definitely, without any doubt, have been considered as entirely different languages. If you want to be more clear, you better speak of Mandarin if you mean Mandarin, and use the term "Chinese languages" as a plural term if you include both Mandarin and other dialects/dialect groups. There's no consensus about this, however. Neither in practical usage, nor even in theory.

Broadly speaking, in the Northern half (more than half) of China they speak Mandarin, whereas the Southern part is divided between six major dialect groups. In the Mandarin speaking part of China (around 850 million people), most people can understand each other, even if there are considerable differences in local dialects and accents. In South China the situation is entirely different. The six major dialect groups (of which Cantonese is just one, and not even the biggest, which is Wu - including Shanghainese) are not mutually intelligible, and even inside the different dialect groups, the differences are much, much greater than inside the Mandarin dialect group.

If you just speak of Chinese, usually you mean Mandarin. For example, if you buy a Chinese-English dictionary, you can be sure it is Mandarin-English, not Cantonese-English or Shanghai-English.

There is some confusion about the word Mandarin also. Many of the answers above state Mandarin is the "official Chinese". That's only part of the truth. Actually, Mandarin is the translation of two different words in Chinese: "Beifang hua" ("the Northern speech"), which is the generic name for the dialects spoken in Northern China, and "putong hua" ("the common speech"), which is the official Chinese language which every school child in China has to learn in school, regardless of their home dialect, and which is largely (but not entirely) based on the Beijing dialect of the Northern dialect group.

One thing that ties the different Chinese dialect groups more tightly together, though, is that they use more or less the same writing system, so even if they can't understand each other when talking, they easily make themselves understood by writing.

Finally, there are of course many languages spoken in China that are not part of the Chinese language group, for example Uyghur, Mongolian and Tibetan.



Edit: Taiwanese is not a separate dialect group, but a local variant of Hokkien (spoken in Southern Fujian) which is included in the Min dialect group of South-Eastern China. Many Taiwanese today instead speak Taiwanese Mandarin. There are also a few Taiwanese who speak the indigenious Taiwanese (or Formosan) languages, which are not related to Chinese at all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_Minnan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_Mandarin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokkien_dialect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formosan_languages

Chinese is a language. There are many Chinese dialects.

Cantonese is the dialect spoken in the Chinese region of Canton or Guangdong and Hong kong.

Mandarin is the official dialect of Chinese spoken by the Chinese government.

Since Mandarin and Cantonese share the same writing system and grammar, they are classified as the same language: Chinese.

There are great many languages that are all called Chinese, since they are all in the Chinese language family. If people who are not Chinese use the word Chinese, they are almost all speaking of the national language, which is sometimes called Mandarin or Mandarin Chinese. Other Chinese languages typically do not use the name Chinese alone, but sometimes use it as a second word. For example, Cantonese is another language in the Chinese language family, and is usually called Cantonese or Cantonese Chinese.

Cantonese and Mandarin are both dialects in China. Mandarin is spoken by most people, though.

"Chinese" can refer too ALL the languages spoken in China, but when someone say "I speak Chinese", they often mean that they speak Mandarin, although it might be different.

Chinese has many many many different strands of it's language. Mandarin is the standard Chinese dialect. Yue is the Cantonese language, also commonly used.
Gan, Guan, Hui, Jin and many others are also present in China.

Hope this helped!

RE:
Hi, Is there a language called Chinese Or is it Cantonese or Mandarin?

Yeah, Chinese are dialects of languages.

it's Chinese, Cantonese and Taiwanese...

ignorant people who like complicated things usually say
Chinese-Cantonese and Chinese-Mandarin and ingore Taiwanese completely...
you can find them easily if you say "translate this Chinese plz"...
they will ask a stupid question "Which Chinese? There are many Chineses and I know them both"...