5 ms·

Does anyone know why articles like this, which often seem to involve consulting experts, always count all of China as one language? Aside from the many differe

by evmar 11y ago

Does anyone know why articles like this, which often seem to involve consulting experts, always count all of China as one language? Aside from the many different languages of China[1], Wikipedia also says that "Chinese"/Hanyu in different regions is mutually unintelligible[2], which as far as I know is the same as the difference between similar languages like Italian and Spanish. I don't mean this as a middlebrow dismissal -- I am not very knowledgeable about Chinese and I am hoping someone has a good explanation for this. For example, maybe it's the case that everyone speaks their local language and a unified dialect as well; or maybe it's that the vast majority of people all speak one dialect (Mandarin?) such that these articles are only counting those people; or maybe it's some other thing I don't understand. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_China [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language

LiweiZ 11y ago
Many Chinese in mainland China can speak Putonghua (probably just another name for Mandarin). Each place has its own dialect. The adoption of mandarin as a "unified dialect" should be the result of central government's policy. Some regions of China still keep their dialects as daily spoken languages. I did not read the article. Just provide some basic info here.
snogglethorpe 11y ago
Mandarin is effectively a Chinese lingua-franca these days... I know people from all areas of China and Chinese-origin countries like Taiwan, and they happily chat away when they meet, although their native dialects are supposedly not mutually comprehensible. Also the written language, which varies far less, has always served as sort of an anchor and connecting point. Historically, language was one of the central factors underlying the entire concept of "China" and "Chinese" (China as a country in the modern sense is a very recent phenomena).
beisner 11y ago
While the different dialects of Chinese (Mandarin/普通话/putonghua being the most common, followed by Cantonese/广东话/Guangdonghua, etc.) sound entirely different spoken, the written character representations of the dialects are essentially the same. That means that the syntax, grammar, and other conventions of written Chinese underpin all spoken dialects. This extends to both written Traditional and Simplified Chinese, which are just two parallel character sets that represent the same fundamental characters (Simplified characters are just simplified versions of the Traditional characters, and were introduced in the 1940's and '50s to promote literacy). So while two people speaking different dialects may not be able to speak to each other because the tones and pronunciations of words are different, they most certainly can communicate by writing with each other because each dialect is just a different vocal representation of the same underlying language.
- mc32 11y ago
  Not only that (well, ignoring traditional Chinese characters versus simplified --where someone versed in traditional can make out simplified, but those versed in simplified normally have a harder time reading traditional characters) but everyone learns the Beijing dialect in school --it's, after all, the official language.
- DougMerritt 11y ago
  This is a good comment, but oddly leaves out the fact that, for many decades, it has been quite infamous that there is no universal agreement -- indeed it has been quite controversial -- as to whether the the different Chinese languages/dialects are in fact languages or dialects. The by-now ancient joke is that a "language is a dialect with an army and navy". Less jokingly, the different Chinese "dialects" share a written language, as above, but the other spoken "dialects" are largely unintelligible to those who have been exposed to only one of those spoken "dialects".
- mchaver 11y ago
  >> So while two people speaking different dialects may not be able to speak to each other because the tones and pronunciations of words are different, they most certainly can communicate by writing with each other because each dialect is just a different vocal representation of the same underlying language. That's actually not true. Modern written Chinese is pretty much Mandarin Chinese. You can pronounce written Chinese with a non-Mandarin dialect but most of the times that is not how the dialect is spoken, and if you write the spoken form of a non-Mandarin dialect, there is a good chance that a lot of pieces of it won't make sense to someone who doesn't speak that dialect, on top of the fact that most dialects don't have a standardized written form in Chinese Characters. Most people speaking two different dialects can communicate via characters because they have learned written Mandarin.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - beisner 11y ago
    Interesting - thanks for the correction. I have been learning Mandarin for a few years now, and made the assumption that since the accepted writing system was standard nationally (and practiced by all literate Chinese speakers, regardless of regional dialect) that the spoken languages were all underpinned grammatically by the same writing system. As you pointed out, this is not the case. Adding to what you said (and correct me if I'm wrong here, this is based on some quick research [1]), while written Mandarin is by far the most common - and official - writing system, most dialects have completely different sets (i.e. non-1-to-1 mappings) of words than Mandarin, and many have supplemental character sets that wouldn't make any sense to someone reading Mandarin. The Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set, for instance, is a set of characters that are specific to the Cantonese dialect, and don't have close/exact relatives in standard written Mandarin [2]. Additionally, while the grammar of the different dialects seem rather close (similar to the relationships between Romance languages), the number of syllables used to represent vocabulary varies from dialect to dialect, which suggests vastly different etymology between the dialects. What I find particularly interesting is that given these substantial differences in vocabulary, one's native spoken language and one's native written language can be at odds with one another. Perhaps this is mitigated by the fact that spoken Mandarin is so widespread, but I wonder how this affects written communication for those who don't speak Mandarin natively. [1] https://www.quora.com/Linguistically-speaking-how-similar-are-the-various-dialects-of-Chinese https://www.quora.com/Linguistically-speaking-how-similar-ar... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese
jaimebuelta 11y ago
According to this [1], which separates Chinese (as macro language) by language, Mandarin has 848 M, while Cantonese (yue) has 62 M, but shows quite a few other languages of China. [1] http://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size http://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size
GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
China is the mysterious 'Other' and is not allowed nuance.
tokenadult 11y ago
You ask a very good question. The different regional speech varieties of Han people in China would be called "languages" in a context of Roman-descended Europeans, and they should be called "languages" for clarity in discussing issues of language policy. My wife is from Taiwan and grew up speaking the southern Min language as it is spoken on Taiwan (that is, "Taiwanese") and was also forced to learn Mandarin in school. Taiwanese and Mandarin are at least as different, linguistically and practically, as English and German. I have learned some of each of those languages, and also some Cantonese and some Hakka. Those are all different (to be sure, cognate) languages, and a speaker of one of those languages cannot understand a speaker of the others. A linguistic survey conducted by the P.R.C. regime discloses that barely more than half the population of China is conversant in the standard form of Mandarin.[1] Of course younger persons rather than older, and urban persons rather than rural, are more likely to be able to communicate with one another in standard Mandarin ("Putonghua"), but there are many people who have a need to communicate by speech who cannot. Contrary to much myth about the issue, I have NEVER seen two Chinese persons who cannot speak a mutually comprehensible language resort to writing out Chinese characters for one another in an attempt at conversation. To the contrary, I have seen many more examples of Chinese people (some from one place, some from another in China) speaking to one another in English as a useful interlanguage, although these days most people who can do that can also use Putonghua as an interlanguage. Chinese characters still represent SPEECH (not ideas or abstract concepts) and do so in a way that is specific to the particular Chinese (Sinitic) language that one speaks. The long story about this can be found in the books The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy[2] or Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems[3] by the late John DeFrancis or the book Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning[4] by J. Marshall Unger. The book Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention[5] by Stanislas Dehaene is a very good book about reading in general, and has a good cross-cultural perspective. I'll give an example here of how Chinese characters reflect speech more than they reflect meaning-as-such. Many more examples are possible. How you might write the conversation "Does he know how to speak Mandarin? "No, he doesn't." 他會說普通話嗎？他不會。 in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write "Does he know how to speak Cantonese? "No, he doesn't." 佢識唔識講廣東話？佢唔識。 in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters. Many other examples of words, phrases, and whole sentences that are essentially unreadable to persons who have learned only Modern Standard Chinese can be found in texts produced in Chinese characters by speakers of other Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects"). Similar considerations apply to Japanese, which is not even a language cognate with Chinese, and also links Chinese characters to particular speech morphemes (whether etymologically Japanese or Sino-Japanese) rather than with abstract concepts. [1] http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838.htm http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838... [2] http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFrancis/dp/0824810686/ http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci... [3] http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Asian-Interactions-Comparisons/dp/0824812077/ http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Asian-Interactions-Comp... [4] http://www.amazon.com/Ideogram-Chinese-Characters-Disembodied-Meaning/dp/0824827600/ http://www.amazon.com/Ideogram-Chinese-Characters-Disembodie... [5] http://readinginthebrain.pagesperso-orange.fr/intro.htm http://readinginthebrain.pagesperso-orange.fr/intro.htm
jcranmer 11y ago
The short answer is that language is far, far more complex than any simple attempt at classification can admit. To start with, the basic dictum of mutual intelligibility falters on the (potentially) surprising fact that mutual intelligibility is not bidirectional: Portuguese speakers, for example, can often understand Spanish, but Spanish speakers generally cannot understand Portuguese. It's worth noting that Chinese itself uses a different terminology to distinguish between different Chinese languages versus non-Chinese languages (and the same term for what modern linguists would call distinct dialects versus distinct languages)--this is often translated as "dialect," although "variety" is probably a better translation today. In practice, most Chinese speak Mandarin (Wikipedia lists ~70% of native-language, and I think I recall seeing 90% if second language is included), and the Chinese government itself actively discourages schools (both inside and outside the country) from trying to teach non-Mandarin variants. For all intents and purposes, "Chinese language" and "Mandarin" can be used interchangeably (with the former being preferred to the lay person). It's a bit like calling Prussia of the 1700s and 1800s Germany: it's not quite correct, but the difference is small enough that it's usually not worth arguing over.

by evmar 11y ago

LiweiZ 11y ago

Many Chinese in mainland China can speak Putonghua (probably just another name for Mandarin). Each place has its own dialect. The adoption of mandarin as a "unified dialect" should be the result of central government's policy. Some regions of China still keep their dialects as daily spoken languages. I did not read the article. Just provide some basic info here.

snogglethorpe 11y ago

Mandarin is effectively a Chinese lingua-franca these days... I know people from all areas of China and Chinese-origin countries like Taiwan, and they happily chat away when they meet, although their native dialects are supposedly not mutually comprehensible. Also the written language, which varies far less, has always served as sort of an anchor and connecting point. Historically, language was one of the central factors underlying the entire concept of "China" and "Chinese" (China as a country in the modern sense is a very recent phenomena).

beisner 11y ago

While the different dialects of Chinese (Mandarin/普通话/putonghua being the most common, followed by Cantonese/广东话/Guangdonghua, etc.) sound entirely different spoken, the written character representations of the dialects are essentially the same. That means that the syntax, grammar, and other conventions of written Chinese underpin all spoken dialects. This extends to both written Traditional and Simplified Chinese, which are just two parallel character sets that represent the same fundamental characters (Simplified characters are just simplified versions of the Traditional characters, and were introduced in the 1940's and '50s to promote literacy). So while two people speaking different dialects may not be able to speak to each other because the tones and pronunciations of words are different, they most certainly can communicate by writing with each other because each dialect is just a different vocal representation of the same underlying language.

mc32 11y ago
Not only that (well, ignoring traditional Chinese characters versus simplified --where someone versed in traditional can make out simplified, but those versed in simplified normally have a harder time reading traditional characters) but everyone learns the Beijing dialect in school --it's, after all, the official language.
DougMerritt 11y ago
This is a good comment, but oddly leaves out the fact that, for many decades, it has been quite infamous that there is no universal agreement -- indeed it has been quite controversial -- as to whether the the different Chinese languages/dialects are in fact languages or dialects. The by-now ancient joke is that a "language is a dialect with an army and navy". Less jokingly, the different Chinese "dialects" share a written language, as above, but the other spoken "dialects" are largely unintelligible to those who have been exposed to only one of those spoken "dialects".
mchaver 11y ago
>> So while two people speaking different dialects may not be able to speak to each other because the tones and pronunciations of words are different, they most certainly can communicate by writing with each other because each dialect is just a different vocal representation of the same underlying language. That's actually not true. Modern written Chinese is pretty much Mandarin Chinese. You can pronounce written Chinese with a non-Mandarin dialect but most of the times that is not how the dialect is spoken, and if you write the spoken form of a non-Mandarin dialect, there is a good chance that a lot of pieces of it won't make sense to someone who doesn't speak that dialect, on top of the fact that most dialects don't have a standardized written form in Chinese Characters. Most people speaking two different dialects can communicate via characters because they have learned written Mandarin.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- beisner 11y ago
  Interesting - thanks for the correction. I have been learning Mandarin for a few years now, and made the assumption that since the accepted writing system was standard nationally (and practiced by all literate Chinese speakers, regardless of regional dialect) that the spoken languages were all underpinned grammatically by the same writing system. As you pointed out, this is not the case. Adding to what you said (and correct me if I'm wrong here, this is based on some quick research [1]), while written Mandarin is by far the most common - and official - writing system, most dialects have completely different sets (i.e. non-1-to-1 mappings) of words than Mandarin, and many have supplemental character sets that wouldn't make any sense to someone reading Mandarin. The Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set, for instance, is a set of characters that are specific to the Cantonese dialect, and don't have close/exact relatives in standard written Mandarin [2]. Additionally, while the grammar of the different dialects seem rather close (similar to the relationships between Romance languages), the number of syllables used to represent vocabulary varies from dialect to dialect, which suggests vastly different etymology between the dialects. What I find particularly interesting is that given these substantial differences in vocabulary, one's native spoken language and one's native written language can be at odds with one another. Perhaps this is mitigated by the fact that spoken Mandarin is so widespread, but I wonder how this affects written communication for those who don't speak Mandarin natively. [1] https://www.quora.com/Linguistically-speaking-how-similar-are-the-various-dialects-of-Chinese https://www.quora.com/Linguistically-speaking-how-similar-ar... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese

jaimebuelta 11y ago

According to this [1], which separates Chinese (as macro language) by language, Mandarin has 848 M, while Cantonese (yue) has 62 M, but shows quite a few other languages of China. [1] http://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size http://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size

GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago

China is the mysterious 'Other' and is not allowed nuance.

tokenadult 11y ago

You ask a very good question. The different regional speech varieties of Han people in China would be called "languages" in a context of Roman-descended Europeans, and they should be called "languages" for clarity in discussing issues of language policy. My wife is from Taiwan and grew up speaking the southern Min language as it is spoken on Taiwan (that is, "Taiwanese") and was also forced to learn Mandarin in school. Taiwanese and Mandarin are at least as different, linguistically and practically, as English and German. I have learned some of each of those languages, and also some Cantonese and some Hakka. Those are all different (to be sure, cognate) languages, and a speaker of one of those languages cannot understand a speaker of the others. A linguistic survey conducted by the P.R.C. regime discloses that barely more than half the population of China is conversant in the standard form of Mandarin.[1] Of course younger persons rather than older, and urban persons rather than rural, are more likely to be able to communicate with one another in standard Mandarin ("Putonghua"), but there are many people who have a need to communicate by speech who cannot. Contrary to much myth about the issue, I have NEVER seen two Chinese persons who cannot speak a mutually comprehensible language resort to writing out Chinese characters for one another in an attempt at conversation. To the contrary, I have seen many more examples of Chinese people (some from one place, some from another in China) speaking to one another in English as a useful interlanguage, although these days most people who can do that can also use Putonghua as an interlanguage. Chinese characters still represent SPEECH (not ideas or abstract concepts) and do so in a way that is specific to the particular Chinese (Sinitic) language that one speaks. The long story about this can be found in the books The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy[2] or Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems[3] by the late John DeFrancis or the book Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning[4] by J. Marshall Unger. The book Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention[5] by Stanislas Dehaene is a very good book about reading in general, and has a good cross-cultural perspective. I'll give an example here of how Chinese characters reflect speech more than they reflect meaning-as-such. Many more examples are possible. How you might write the conversation "Does he know how to speak Mandarin? "No, he doesn't." 他會說普通話嗎？他不會。 in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write "Does he know how to speak Cantonese? "No, he doesn't." 佢識唔識講廣東話？佢唔識。 in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters. Many other examples of words, phrases, and whole sentences that are essentially unreadable to persons who have learned only Modern Standard Chinese can be found in texts produced in Chinese characters by speakers of other Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects"). Similar considerations apply to Japanese, which is not even a language cognate with Chinese, and also links Chinese characters to particular speech morphemes (whether etymologically Japanese or Sino-Japanese) rather than with abstract concepts. [1] http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838.htm http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838... [2] http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFrancis/dp/0824810686/ http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci... [3] http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Asian-Interactions-Comparisons/dp/0824812077/ http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Asian-Interactions-Comp... [4] http://www.amazon.com/Ideogram-Chinese-Characters-Disembodied-Meaning/dp/0824827600/ http://www.amazon.com/Ideogram-Chinese-Characters-Disembodie... [5] http://readinginthebrain.pagesperso-orange.fr/intro.htm http://readinginthebrain.pagesperso-orange.fr/intro.htm

jcranmer 11y ago

The short answer is that language is far, far more complex than any simple attempt at classification can admit. To start with, the basic dictum of mutual intelligibility falters on the (potentially) surprising fact that mutual intelligibility is not bidirectional: Portuguese speakers, for example, can often understand Spanish, but Spanish speakers generally cannot understand Portuguese. It's worth noting that Chinese itself uses a different terminology to distinguish between different Chinese languages versus non-Chinese languages (and the same term for what modern linguists would call distinct dialects versus distinct languages)--this is often translated as "dialect," although "variety" is probably a better translation today. In practice, most Chinese speak Mandarin (Wikipedia lists ~70% of native-language, and I think I recall seeing 90% if second language is included), and the Chinese government itself actively discourages schools (both inside and outside the country) from trying to teach non-Mandarin variants. For all intents and purposes, "Chinese language" and "Mandarin" can be used interchangeably (with the former being preferred to the lay person). It's a bit like calling Prussia of the 1700s and 1800s Germany: it's not quite correct, but the difference is small enough that it's usually not worth arguing over.