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The linguistic diversity of China's dialects and minority languages serve as a window on 6,000 years of development, according to a leading local researcher into language evolution.
'There are probably several hundred languages in China,' said William Wang Shi-yuan,  head of Chinese University's  language engineering laboratory.
'The central government's official figure is that there are 56, but this is a very, very small percentage of the actual linguistic diversity.
'They want to keep the number down for obvious political, administrative and economic reasons, but if we look at the reality of the situation, it is a lot more than that.'
Chinese languages that have become today's  dialects, like Cantonese and Putonghua, were becoming dominant  across Greater China during the Han dynasty (206BC-220AD), but minority languages had retained a foothold in the south and west. 'The Chinese languages belong to a bigger language group called Sino-Tibetan,' Professor Wang said. 'The Santa Fe Institute [in New Mexico] thinks that Sino-Tibetan belongs to an even bigger ancestor, which is called Dene-Caucasian.'
That grouping gives Chinese some surprising relatives.
'Dene-Caucasian includes not only Chinese, but Basque. It includes Ket, which is spoken in the Yenisey   River region of Russia.'
The Basque language, spoken in an area spanning  the border between France and Spain, between Bilbao and Biarritz, has long been regarded as a linguistic anomaly as academics have been unable to link it to any other extant European languages.
Ket is the only remaining language of the Yeniseian  language group, spoken by just a few hundred people in an isolated part of Siberia. It is also linguistically unrelated to the languages spoken by any surrounding ethnic groups.
Professor Wang said his research showed Chinese had begun to break away from other Sino-Tibetan languages about 6,000 years ago.
Although dialects of Chinese were 'in a sense all the same age', they had evolved separately and some had retained archaic pronunciations that had been lost in others.
'In genetics we know that there are certain mutations that take place. In languages we have linguistic mutations. These mutations can take the form of change in the morphological makeup - prefixes, suffixes - or it could take the form of sound change,' Professor Wang said.
'The places where you have the most cultural diversity and migration or interaction, these are the places where the languages change fastest.
'Because Beijing has been capital of China for 800 years, the dialect of Beijing is by far the most simplified, by far the most evolved. It is like the way London English has in some ways lost more distinctions that are preserved in Yorkshire, preserved in Lancashire and other parts of England.'
And while Hong Kong Cantonese was evolving rapidly due to the city's role as a global meeting place, that had not been the case historically.
'Cantonese is actually very, very useful for studying the history of Chinese because it is the most conservative dialect,' he said.
'A lot of things lost in lots of other dialects - in fact, most other dialects - are preserved in Cantonese for whatever reason.'
One example was the hard consonants at the end of Cantonese syllables - final -k, -p, or -t sounds after the vowel - which have entirely disappeared in northern dialects of Chinese. In Putonghua, syllables only end in vowels, except for -n or -ng.
'If you trace these consonants, you can go way back. In Mandarin, they are all lost.' But that did not mean Cantonese had remained completely free of outside influences.
'Hong Kong Cantonese has a lot of loan words from the Zhuang, from the Miao [minority groups],' Professor Wang said.
Place names such as Pok Fu Lam and Kowloon were examples of Cantonese vocabulary that was originally borrowed from the Zhuang's  language.
'We see the characters [for Kowloon, gao long] and we think, 'Oh, of course, nine dragons',' he said. 'But it is not that. It actually has a different source.'
An equivalent in English was the fact that in some regions of the United States, asparagus was known as 'sparrow grass'.
'But it has nothing to do with birds and nothing to do with grass,' he said.



A diversity of Chinese tongues and dialects stretching back 6,000 years