Leatherback sea turtle nesting in Mexico, Panama, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. The continental United States offers two major Pacific leatherback feeding areas. One well-studied area is just off the northwestern coast near the mouth of the Columbia River. The other American area is located in California. Further north, off the Pacific coast of Canada, leatherbacks visit the beaches of British Columbia. Estimates by the WWF suggest only 2,300 adult females of the Pacific leatherback remain, making it the most endangered marine turtle subpopulation. A third possible Pacific subpopulation has been proposed, those that nest in Malaysia. This subpopulation, however, has effectively
Varieties of Chinese their own standard languages. In China, however, Literary Chinese maintained its monopoly on formal writing until the start of the 20th century. The logographic writing, read with varying local pronunciations, continued to serve as a source of vocabulary and idioms for the local varieties. The new national standard, Vernacular Chinese, the written counterpart of spoken Standard Chinese, is also used as a literary form by speakers of all varieties. Dialectologist Jerry Norman estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese. These varieties form a dialect continuum, in which differences in speech generally become more pronounced as distances