Dialects are important components of the Chinese language and cultural diversity. Nowadays, because of the dominant usage of Mandarin, dialects, especially southern Chinese dialects such as Cantonese and Hakka are less heard.
So many of you may still be questioning what is the difference between Cantonese or Hakka to Mandarin? The answer is very simple, there are many Chinese dialects in the country and Cantonese just happen to be one of the famous ones because the city of Guangzhou was the only open port of China for thousands of years, and later there is Hong Kong, which is a place that also speaks Cantonese. The first immigrants were also mostly from southern China, who brought their dialects to different places in the world. Fun fact, there are actually 60 million around the world who speak Cantonese and 80 million people who speak Hakka, and many of them are overseas. So if you walk into a local Chinese restaurant, the Chinese you hear might be a dialect.
Chinese dialects are not like accents in English that people could still be able to understand one other; dialects create communion barriers because they are like different languages. That is why Mandarin was established when the country was founded in 1949, based on the Beijing accent, which is the language learned by all Chinese students at school today and used all over the country. One thing important to notice is that throughout time, the phonetics of languages in northern China changed because of all the wars and they adopted from surrounding counties such as Mongolia and Russia, etc. Therefore, Mandarin also lost much ancient Chinese pronunciation. Fortunately, the pronunciation was preserved in many southern dialects, because during ancient times, there were people migrating down south in order to get away from all the battles. There was also less interference from other ethics groups which made the southern dialects today closer to ancient Chinese.
