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 s

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