LANGUAGE GROUPS

The next level below the language family is the "group" (yuzu). When classifying members of the Indo-European family of modern languages, for example, one usually thinks in terms of its main groups (Indic, Iranian, Hellenic, Romance, Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Baltic) & the individual languages belonging to them. Thus, in the Indic group there are Hindi-Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Singhalese, Assamese, & others. In the Iranian group, there are Pashto, Farsi (Persian), Kurdish, & Baluchi. In the Celtic group, there are Irish, Scots Gaelic, Breton, & Welsh. In the Romance group, there are Rumanian, Rhaeto-Romanic (Romansch), Italian, French, Provençal, Catalan, Spanish, & Portuguese. In the Germanic group, there are (High) German, Low German, Dutch, Frisian, English, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, & Icelandic. In the Slavic group, there are Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovene, Czech, Slovak, & Polish.
A similar classification scheme may be applied to the still somewhat hypothetical Sino- Tibetan language family. Among its groups are Sinitic (also called Han), Tibeto-Burmese, Tai (or Dai), Miao-Yao, & so on. If we consider Sinitic languages as a group of the great Sino-Tibetan family, we may further divide them into at least the following mutually unintelligible tongues: Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese (Yue), Hunan (Xiang), Hakka, Gan, Southern Min, & Northern Min.*2 These are roughly parallel to English, Dutch, Swedish, & so on among the Germanic group of the Indo-European language family. If we pursue the analogy further, we may refer to various supposedly more or less mutually intelligible*3 dialects of Mandarin such as Peking, Nanking, Shantung, Szechwan*5, Shensi*5, Dungan*7 & so on just as English may be subdivided into its Cockney, Boston, Toronto, Texas, Cambridge, Melbourne, & other varieties. The same holds true for the other languages in the Sinitic & Germanic groups. Where Dutch has its Flemish & Afrikaans dialects, Wu has its Shanghai & Soochow forms. Likewise, Yue has its Canton, Taishan, & other dialects; Xiang has its Changsha, Shuangfeng, & other dialects; Hakka has its Meishan, Wuhua, & other dialects; Gan has its Nanchang, Jiayu, & other dialects; Southern Min has its Amoy, Taiwan, & other dialects; & Northern Min has its Foochow, Shouning, & other dialects. For the purposes of this article, we do not need to enter into the matter of sub-dialects.
Another level of classification is the "branch" (yuzhi) which embraces several closely related languages of a group. Germanic, for instance, has two surviving branches --West (German, Dutch, Frisian, English) & North or Scandinavian (Icelandic, Faeroese, Norwegian, Swedish). The Altaic group has a Turkish branch (Uighu., Kazakh, Uzbek, Tatar, Kirghiz, etc.), a Mongol branch (Kalmuk, Buryat, etc.), & a Tungusic branch (Manchu, Sibo, etc.). Determination of the branches of the Sinitic group of languages has not yet been achieved.
Thus far in our investigation, we have determined that all the a lot of natural tongues of the world are commonly classified (in descending order of size) into the following categories: family, group, branch, language, dialect, sub-dialect. Is "Chinese" (it remains to be seen exactly what this means) so utterly unique that it cannot fit within this scheme, but requires a separate system of classification?