The plethora of the linguistic diversity of the Chinese languages in the South and a Mandarin unified in the North might be related to the geographical features of northern China and the South. "Dialects of Chinese Mandarin," are distributed between the plain of yellow and the plateau of Loess that has a flat terrain that promotes tourism and, consequently, easy contact between the people there. Ramsey observes that "this remarkable difference Linguistics between a unified North and a fragmented South is a measure of how much life and society have been affected by geography". As a result of this geography, creates an area of northern Chinese more uniform with mutually intelligible dialects. In contrast, mutually unintelligible dialects are spoken in the areas south of the Yangtze River because there are people stood by mountains and rivers.
The dialects of the North, with almost 900 million speakers, are commonly subdivided into four main varieties: characteristic of the Northwest, North, River, and Southwest. The Northwest variety refers to the dialects spoken in the region of the plateau of loess with the ancient capital city Xi'an as its Center. The variety right North is spoken in areas as Hebei province, province of Shangdong and provinces in the northeast (Manchuria). This variety is the basis of the standard dialect in modern China. The language was formed through immigration large scale persons residing in this area over the past several hundred years. Therefore, Northeast dialects have a strong resemblance to other dialects of the North as in the majority of migrants settle there originally moved from the area of the northern dialect. The River variety spoken in the region to the North of the Yangtze River around the city of Nanjing was once considered the most prestigious dialect of the nation during and after the Ming dynasty. The Southwest variety developed out of several waves of emigrants to settle in the provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan and Guizhou China central after the dynasty Ming.
During the 18th century the Qing emperors sent troops to settle in these remote areas permanently with their families and encouraged immigration on a large scale of Hubei and Hunan provinces to reclaim land in Southwest China. As a result, the Southwest variety in many ways resembles the language spoken in Hubei province. North China usually has fewer tones of Chinese dialects in the South. However, the most notable feature distinguishing Chinese North of the southern Chinese dialects mutually unintelligible is perhaps the lack of stop endings that prevail in many dialects of the South such as Wu, Yue and Min.
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