6 ms·

Very true. North and South have different food cultures, and dialects between different regions can be borderline incomprehensible to each other, just off the t

Very true. North and South have different food cultures, and dialects between different regions can be borderline incomprehensible to each other, just off the top of my head.

mlindner 5y ago
If you want to nitpick, it's not just different dialects but different languages. Mutual intelligibility is a common line used to split things into separate languages and most of the Sinitic language group "languages" are true languages as they aren't mutually intelligible. It's a bunch of different languages with a shared writing system and more mutual intelligibility in writing than in spoken words.
ryan_j_naughton 5y ago
> dialects between different regions can be borderline incomprehensible to each other That's because they aren't dialects. They are different languages. The CCP has pushed this lie that all Chinese languages are "dialects" instead of separate languages because it aligns with their narrative of a single Chinese people. You can be a single ethnicity and still have differences and different languages, but to the mainland government differences undermine cohesion. The differences between these so called "dialects" are larger than between the Romance languages to each other. Thus, there is more mutual intelligibility between Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian than between Taiwanese, Mandarin, and Cantonese. To call them "dialects" is linguistically incorrect. They are separate languages. Someone will always respond that they are mutually intelligible through writing, and that's true. But that's bc the writing system isn't actually portraying the verbal language. It is a pictographic script.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dmix 5y ago
  There’s also a ton of lesser known languages in China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_China > The Chinese (or 'Sinitic') languages are typically divided into seven major language groups, and their study is a distinct academic discipline. They differ as much from each other morphologically and phonetically as do English, German and Danish, but meanwhile share the same writing system (Hanzi) and are mutually intelligible in written form. There are in addition approximately 300 minority languages spoken by the remaining 8% of the population of China. The ones with greatest state support are Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur and Zhuang.

Very true. North and South have different food cultures, and dialects between different regions can be borderline incomprehensible to each other, just off the top of my head.

mlindner 5y ago

If you want to nitpick, it's not just different dialects but different languages. Mutual intelligibility is a common line used to split things into separate languages and most of the Sinitic language group "languages" are true languages as they aren't mutually intelligible. It's a bunch of different languages with a shared writing system and more mutual intelligibility in writing than in spoken words.

ryan_j_naughton 5y ago

> dialects between different regions can be borderline incomprehensible to each other That's because they aren't dialects. They are different languages. The CCP has pushed this lie that all Chinese languages are "dialects" instead of separate languages because it aligns with their narrative of a single Chinese people. You can be a single ethnicity and still have differences and different languages, but to the mainland government differences undermine cohesion. The differences between these so called "dialects" are larger than between the Romance languages to each other. Thus, there is more mutual intelligibility between Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian than between Taiwanese, Mandarin, and Cantonese. To call them "dialects" is linguistically incorrect. They are separate languages. Someone will always respond that they are mutually intelligible through writing, and that's true. But that's bc the writing system isn't actually portraying the verbal language. It is a pictographic script.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dmix 5y ago
There’s also a ton of lesser known languages in China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_China > The Chinese (or 'Sinitic') languages are typically divided into seven major language groups, and their study is a distinct academic discipline. They differ as much from each other morphologically and phonetically as do English, German and Danish, but meanwhile share the same writing system (Hanzi) and are mutually intelligible in written form. There are in addition approximately 300 minority languages spoken by the remaining 8% of the population of China. The ones with greatest state support are Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur and Zhuang.