引文：
I took my parents on their first trip to Vietnam recently and they were intrigued by what they heard on the streets of Hanoi. My father thought Vietnamese sounded similar to Cantonese while my mother said it reminded her of her own native Sze Yap, a dialect related to “standard” Cantonese but which is spoken in the area west of the Pearl River Delta.
They’re not widely off the mark; some 60 per cent of Vietnamese vocabulary is of Chinese origin and the parts of China that are closest to Vietnam are the Cantonese-speaking regions of Guangxi and Guangdong. A person who knows Cantonese will be struck by the many Vietnamese words that sound similar, such as nguyen lieu (“raw materials”, yuen liu in Cantonese) and dac biet (“special”, dac beet in Cantonese).
In ancient times, the coastal areas south of the Yangtze all the way down to present-day northern Vietnam were home to the Bai Yue or “100 Yue” peoples, who were ethnically and linguistically separate from the Han Chinese to the north. Following millennia of Han colonisation and cultural domination, as well as intermarriages, the Yue people practically disappeared from China.
It’s possible that some remnants of the Yue and their culture can be found in the minority ethnic groups of present-day southern China and northern Vietnam."
中國至少有二十幾種方言，根本不存在所謂標準的“古漢語語音”
在漢語中，各地方存在著口語性差距極大的語言變體，這些變體都統稱為漢語方言。
漢語的差異化程度隨地域而別。在官話區內，往往相距數百公裏的居民也能勉強溝通；而在華南地區，有著“十裏不同音”的說法，有些地方的差異程度就連同城居民也無法溝通的程度。不過在書寫上除了部分用詞之外，漢語的書麵語卻十分統一：在古代有產生於漢語分化前的文言文，現代則有以官話為基礎產生並製定的白話文。
「漢語方言」被認為是一個極具漢民族特色的稱呼，因為雖稱為“方言”，但其實方言內部的語言差異甚至比歐洲諸語之間的差異更大，甚至方言內部的次方言之間的差異也比一些歐洲語言間的差異要大（如閩語內部的差異）。因此一部分西方學者比照歐洲語言的劃分，認為漢語內部的方言應該集體升格為語言，即漢語族下的諸語言。
漢語方言的劃分主要是以“對古代漢語的繼承關係”來劃分的。若以聽感為準，比如閩語內部及吳語內部的各個次方言之間都無法完全通話，但由於有共通的語法邏輯、特定常用詞匯等同源因素，因此皆被視為閩語或吳語。若依「方言」的字麵意義「地方的語言」依地域劃分，則福建省（閩）內居民並非都使用閩語，亦有客、吳兩語的使用者；同時，閩語不隻通行於福建，也通行於海南、台灣、浙江南部，甚至到新加坡與馬來西亞。
因為根本不存在所謂單一的標準的“古漢語語音”,那篇所謂“金啟孮批評北京話”的文章，說滿語改變了古漢語語音”, 純屬無稽之談。那篇所謂“金啟孮批評北京話”的文章是在他去世後由無恥小人偽造的，早就被人揭露了。該文章中的作者沒有任何言語學知識，編造拙劣的讓人嘔吐。
