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this assumes one language per country. it would be more interesting to see a multilingual visualisation, eg how many people are able to communicate in english v
by dcsan 11y ago
this assumes one language per country. it would be more interesting to see a multilingual visualisation, eg how many people are able to communicate in english vs. french, even if it's not their first language. that would give a good idea which languages are winning the homogenization.
also cantonese and mandarin people cannot understand each other, despite sharing some written characters, so lumping them together seems inaccurate, like lumping spanish and italians together because they have the same script.
- DonaldFisk 11y agoIt does say "'Chinese' as macrolanguage includes different languages and dialects", probably to avoid arguments about whether they're languages or dialects. Cantonese is a dialect of Yuht Yúh (粵語), which is, as you say, a distinct language as it is mutually unintelligible with other varieties of Chinese. Though Cantonese speakers usually write in Standard Chinese (i.e. the written form of Mandarin), Yuht Yúh also has its own distinct written form (https://zh-yue.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%B2%B5%E8%AA%9E https://zh-yue.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%B2%B5%E8%AA%9E), as it often uses different words from Mandarin. It's interesting to compare with the Italic languages (Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, French, and Romanian). These are similarly far apart as the Chinese 'dialects'. The Chinese situation is as if the Roman Empire never collapsed, and the Italic language speakers continued to use Classical Latin as a written language, then about 100 years ago decided to replace Latin with Spanish as the written standard throughout the Empire, as it was the most widely spoken language.
- xigency 11y agoWell, that's certainly the best linguistic analogy I've heard in a while.