Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Chinese classifier" in English language version.
In general, the Southern dialects have a greater number of classifiers than the Northern. The farther north one travels, the smaller the variety of classifiers found. In Dunganese, a Gansu dialect of Northern Chinese spoken in Central Asia, only one classifier, 個 [kə], is used; and this same classifier has almost become the cover classifier for all nouns in Lánzhou of Gansu too. The tendency to use one general classifier for all nouns is also found to a greater or lesser extent in many Shanxi dialects, some Shandong dialects, and even the Shanghai dialect of Wu and Standard Mandarin (SM). The choice of classifiers for individual nouns is particular to each dialect. For example, although the preferred classifier across dialects for 'human being' is 個 and its cognates, 隻 in its dialect forms is widely used in the Hakka and Yue dialects of Guangxi and western Guangdong provinces as well as in the Northern Min dialects and some Xiang dialects in Hunan.
