Although the term “spoken Chinese” has a more restricted range (0) THAN the broad expression “Chinese,” it too suffers from a lack of precision 1 view of the wide varieties of speech that are usually subsumed 2 this name. “Spoken Chinese” includes the speech that can be heard throughout the area stretching from Manchuria in the northeast to Guangdong in the southeast to Yunnan in the southwest to Gansu in the northwest. The varieties of speech in this huge area are legion—ranging from forms with minor differences to 3 that are mutually unintelligible. Indeed, even among people 4 speech is considered to be the same there are individual differences that lead linguists 5 assert that in fact, no two persons speak exactly alike since each person has his own idiolect which distinguishes him in certain points 6 detail from everyone 7 In a situation of such diversity there is obviously a great danger that a statement true about one kind of spoken Chinese may be completely false 8 respect to another variety. Generalizations about spoken Chinese can be exceedingly misleading when carelessly advanced without qualification.