what are the two dialects of chinese?
Qingtian dialect Standard Mandarin
contradiction
 Standard Mandarin , a variety of Mandarin based on the Beijing dialect , is the official national language of China and is used as a lingua franca in the country between people of different linguistic backgrounds . 

neutral
 Chinese characters are also used within China to write non @-@ Han languages . The largest non @-@ Han group in China , the Zhuang , have for over 1300 years used Chinese characters . Despite both the introduction of an official alphabetic script in 1957 and lack of a corresponding official set of Chinese characters , more Zhuang people can read the Zhuang logograms than the alphabetic script . 

neutral
 Some Chinese characters have been adopted as part of the writing systems of other East Asian languages , such as Japanese , Korean , and ( formerly ) Vietnamese . 

entailment
 Chinese uses traditional logograms for writing the unit names , while in Japanese unit names are written in the phonetic katakana script ; in both cases , symbols are also written using the internationally recognised Latin and Greek characters . 

contradiction
 There are as many as 292 living languages in China . The languages most commonly spoken belong to the Sinitic branch of the Sino @-@ Tibetan language family , which contains Mandarin ( spoken natively by 70 % of the population ) , and other Chinese varieties : Wu ( including Shanghainese ) , Yue ( including Cantonese and Taishanese ) , Min ( including Hoochew , Hokkien and Teochew ) , Xiang , Gan , and Hakka . Languages of the Tibeto @-@ Burman branch , including Tibetan , Qiang , Naxi and Yi , are spoken across the Tibetan and Yunnan – Guizhou Plateau . Other ethnic minority languages in southwest China include Zhuang , Thai , Dong and Sui of the Tai @-@ Kadai family , Miao and Yao of the Hmong – Mien family , and Wa of the Austroasiatic family . Across northeastern and northwestern China , minority ethnic groups speak Altaic languages including Manchu , Mongolian and several Turkic languages : Uyghur , Kazakh , Kyrgyz , Salar and Western Yugur . Korean is spoken natively along the border with North Korea . Sarikoli , the language of Tajiks in western Xinjiang , is an Indo @-@ European language . Taiwanese aborigines , including a small population on the mainland , speak Austronesian languages . 
