How are dialects formed?

In the development of Han society, there have been different degrees of differentiation and unification, which gradually led to the emergence of Chinese dialects. There are many factors in the formation of dialects, including social, historical and geographical factors, such as long-term small-scale peasant economy, social division, population migration, mountain and river barriers and so on. There are also factors that belong to the language itself, such as the imbalance of language development and the conflict and influence between different languages.

Dialect refers to the language that is popular in some areas. According to the documents of the Ministry of Education, Chinese dialects are usually divided into ten major dialects, namely, Mandarin, Jin dialect, Wu dialect, Hui dialect, Min dialect, Guangzhou dialect, Hakka dialect, Gan dialect, Xiang dialect and Pinghua dialect.

Dialect is only in a certain area, but it has a complete system. Dialect has phonetic structure system, lexical structure system and grammatical structure system, which can meet the needs of social communication in this region. All kinds of local dialects of the same nation are the same language of the nation, and generally always show the linguistic characteristics of "similarities and differences, differences and similarities". Generally speaking, national homophones are always developed on the basis of a dialect.

Dialects can be divided into regional dialects and social dialects according to their nature. Regional dialect is a language variety caused by regional differences, a branch of national languages in different regions and a regional reflection of unbalanced language development. Social dialects are different social variants formed by social members in the same area due to social differences in occupation, class, age, gender and cultural upbringing.

Among several dialects of modern Chinese in China, the northern dialect can be regarded as the development of ancient Chinese in the vast northern region after thousands of years, while the southern dialect is gradually formed by the continuous southward migration of northern residents in history. The northern Han people went south several times on a large scale, bringing ancient northern Chinese in different periods, spreading to various regions in the south of the Yangtze River, and gradually forming six dialects that are obviously different from each other.

Generally speaking, dialects are formed due to different degrees of differentiation and unity in the development of Han society, and there are many factors. For example, the migration of population, the barrier of mountains and rivers and so on.