Chinese place names are the names of places in China. Since the Chinese language has not had any sort of phonetic alphabet until only about a few hundred years ago (compared to the thousands of years the Chinese characters have been used), there has been a lot of confusion on naming places in Chinese. Since Chinese characters are a logographic writing system, meaning that the writing mainly shows the words' meaning rather than its pronunciation, it can be used to write down words in many different languages. On top of all this, the Chinese language is not one unified language, but an entire branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Many of the Chinese languages or dialects are mutually unintelligible, which means a speaker of one language or dialect cannot understand a speaker of another unless one of them already knew the other's language or dialect. For example, Mandarin and Cantonese are both dialects of Chinese, but they are so different from each other than their speakers cannot understand the other unless at least one speaker knew both. Therefore, knowing which spoken dialect to use when writing out the name in the Roman alphabet, which is a phonetic writing system and not a logographic one, can be challenging. For example, while the name of the city is written as 北京 in Chinese, it is called "Běijīng" in Mandarin and "Bak1 Ging1" in Cantonese.