Putonghua in the context of multilingual China and the world

China is home to many languages and dialects. Chinese is very diverse and is
usually divided into seven dialect groups: Mandarin, Wu, Xiang, Yue, Kejia, Gan
and Min. Each of these consists of sub- groups, vernaculars and accents. The
differences both within and across dialect groups are significant. Within the
Mandarin group, for example, there are four sub- groups which vary as much as
British and American English. The differences between the dialect groups, which
are mainly in phonology, lexicon and, to a lesser degree grammar, are akin to the
differences between Romance languages and often make them mutually unintelligible (DeFrancis, 1984; Norman, 1988). There are also over 130 languages spoken by the ethnic minorities, covering the Sino- Tibetan, Altaic, Austronesian, Austro- Asiatic and Indo- European language families (Zhou, 2019). Among this linguistic diversity, one kind of Mandarin, called Putonghua (普通话), is in the unique position of being the national standard language.