Where is your Chinese from?

Chinese Dialect Quiz and Regional Variety Map

This Chinese dialect quiz compares your everyday word choices, written forms, question particles, kinship terms, and pronunciation preferences with broad regional patterns in Chinese. It is designed for Mandarin, Cantonese/Yue, Min/Hokkien, Wu/Shanghainese, Southwestern Mandarin, Northeastern Mandarin, Taiwan Mandarin, and central transition-zone signals.

Instead of asking where you are from, the quiz asks which forms feel natural to you. The result is shown as an approximate match, because Chinese language geography does not split neatly into hard borders. Neighboring regions often share features, and modern speakers may mix standard Mandarin, home dialects, written Cantonese, Taiwanese usage, learner input, and urban speech.

How the map works

The map uses localities from the Linguistic Atlas of Chinese Dialects as a reference layer. The atlas data is interpreted through the dialect geography work of Huang, Grieve, Jiao, and Cai, whose 2024 paper groups atlas locations by how similar their recorded dialect features are. That approach is a useful fit for a quiz result because it highlights stronger regions, weaker margins, and transition zones rather than pretending every answer points to one exact city.

Your result should be read as “your answer pattern is similar to these regional profiles,” not as proof of origin. It is strongest for traditional regional speech patterns and weaker for mixed-background users, learners, people who mostly use Standard Mandarin, and speakers whose everyday language has changed through migration or schooling.

What the questions look for

Some questions test vocabulary, such as words for a child, home, eating, rain, or hot and cold weather. Others look at grammar and written usage, such as negation, question words, Cantonese-specific characters, pronouns, aspect markers, and pronunciation clues. Fast mode asks 12 broad questions, Standard asks 18, and Deep asks 25 for a more detailed comparison.