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> In fact many would argue Chinese languages were never unified (mandarin/cantonese/etc) but the scripts were. This is, in fact, the default stance held by mos

> In fact many would argue Chinese languages were never unified (mandarin/cantonese/etc) but the scripts were. This is, in fact, the default stance held by most non-CCP linguists. If you read what experts in the Chinese language family say, it's basically "Chinese languages are mutually unintelligible and more distinct than the Romance languages, but because the government of China says they're just dialects and we (as linguists) recognize that the line between dialect and language is basically arbitrary, we'll call them dialects so we can just study the languages and avoid getting sucked into nasty political discussions." As the saying goes, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy—and this works both to define distinct languages that are otherwise mutually intelligible and to merge dialects that aren't.

djtango 2y ago
I'm sure there are plenty of scholarly academics with a whole body of literature to argue otherwise, but I've never bought all the arguments of how different Cantonese and Mandarin are. To my mind assimilating Cantonese from Mandarin or vice versa is way easier than French <> Italian or Italian <> Spanish. Spanish <> Portuguese is an interesting contender. Good luck pretending Mandarin and Cantonese are distinct languages while comparing German and French lol. I say this as someone with a whole lot of Cantonese dna in my heritage before people get all up in arms. I've personally always figured the barriers to learning both Mandarin and Cantonese was cultural and there are plenty of people in Guangzhou who are perfectly bilingual
- broken_clock 2y ago
  How many of these languages do you speak? I currently speak and understand English, Spanish, Cantonese and Mandarin to varying degrees. I was forced to take French for 2 years in high school. Never even took it seriously. But because of that, after 6 weeks of private Spanish tutoring, I was able to hold hour+ long conversations with strangers while backpacking LatAm. I've spoken Cantonese my entire life (but not truly native level). I took an entire year of college level accelerated "Mandarin for Other Chinese Language Speakers". I took it quite seriously. I'm backpacking China right now. I still can't even talk to anyone for more than a couple minutes without having to use a translator or look up words. > there are plenty of people in Guangzhou who are perfectly bilingual There are also plenty who move to Guangzhou and Shenzhen and can't pick up Cantonese at all. Turns out having an authoritarian government force Mandarin on you will make the Cantonese speakers bilingual rather quickly.
  - djtango 2y ago
    I have learned to varying degrees Mandarin Teochew Cantonese Japanese Spanish French German (and Latin lol) I was shocked at how intuitive Italian was when simply walking around Italy after having a grounding in so many adjacent languages (and learning classical music). Admittedly I am atypical in my exposure to languages and I do enjoy linguistics but it seems to me there's a high initial barrier to the dialects but after the initial wall is overcome it just becomes a mapping exercise and a handful of idioms. I'd be curious to know which bits of Mandarin you find difficult? Vocab? The grammar is close enough that you have a huge advantage over almost every other language in the world especially for the everyday stuff. Reading and writing, if you know traditional you'll pick up simplified in no time (speaking from experience backpacking through China armed with only a paper dictionary we didn't have smartphones back in my day) the Cantonese tones are quite wild but if you can do tones you have a huge advantage of languages which don't have tones. If I'm allowed an uncharitable take, my experience has been that a lot of people from China don't feel a drive to learn more languages maybe with the sole exception of English. Maybe it's the result of being in a country of a billion+ that all ostensibly speak the same language. I've always found it so frustrating encountering people who move to the UK to study and they can barely hold a conversation in English despite doing A levels, Bachelor's and Masters in the UK sometimes. For all the complaints that dialects are hard a lot of south east Asian people back in the day would pick up a handful of them and often learn the basics of other languages like Bahasa. This kind of mindset and interaction reminds me more of Europe in the sense that people are more adaptable out of necessity
GranularRecipe 2y ago
I think it's also an issue of translation. "Dialect" in English is variety of a language. 方言 (fangyang, translated as dialect) in Chinese is a regional language or speech. Linguistically, Cantonese and other varieties of Chinese are recognised to be part of the Chinese language group / family. Cf https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E6%B1%89%E8%AF%AD/22488993?fromtitle=%E6%B1%89%E8%AF%AD%E8%AF%AD%E6%97%8F&fromid=5097410#1 https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E6%B1%89%E8%AF%AD/22488993?fro...
int_19h 2y ago
Linguists often use terms like "isolect" these days just to dodge this whole debate and the associated (often very toxic) politics. Not just with Chinese - it's also an issue around e.g. Serbo-Croatian.
niceguy1827 2y ago
> In fact many would argue Chinese languages were never unified (mandarin/cantonese/etc) but the scripts were. This is the correct understanding, even within mainland China, and across all times. The practice of assigning a "mandarin" based on where the capital is/was dates back at least hundreds of years, if not thousands. You can easily Google "Mandarin in Republic of China" to see the Republic of China's attempt to standardize its mandarin. It's really not a CCP issue.

djtango 2y ago

I'm sure there are plenty of scholarly academics with a whole body of literature to argue otherwise, but I've never bought all the arguments of how different Cantonese and Mandarin are. To my mind assimilating Cantonese from Mandarin or vice versa is way easier than French <> Italian or Italian <> Spanish. Spanish <> Portuguese is an interesting contender. Good luck pretending Mandarin and Cantonese are distinct languages while comparing German and French lol. I say this as someone with a whole lot of Cantonese dna in my heritage before people get all up in arms. I've personally always figured the barriers to learning both Mandarin and Cantonese was cultural and there are plenty of people in Guangzhou who are perfectly bilingual

broken_clock 2y ago
How many of these languages do you speak? I currently speak and understand English, Spanish, Cantonese and Mandarin to varying degrees. I was forced to take French for 2 years in high school. Never even took it seriously. But because of that, after 6 weeks of private Spanish tutoring, I was able to hold hour+ long conversations with strangers while backpacking LatAm. I've spoken Cantonese my entire life (but not truly native level). I took an entire year of college level accelerated "Mandarin for Other Chinese Language Speakers". I took it quite seriously. I'm backpacking China right now. I still can't even talk to anyone for more than a couple minutes without having to use a translator or look up words. > there are plenty of people in Guangzhou who are perfectly bilingual There are also plenty who move to Guangzhou and Shenzhen and can't pick up Cantonese at all. Turns out having an authoritarian government force Mandarin on you will make the Cantonese speakers bilingual rather quickly.
- djtango 2y ago
  I have learned to varying degrees Mandarin Teochew Cantonese Japanese Spanish French German (and Latin lol) I was shocked at how intuitive Italian was when simply walking around Italy after having a grounding in so many adjacent languages (and learning classical music). Admittedly I am atypical in my exposure to languages and I do enjoy linguistics but it seems to me there's a high initial barrier to the dialects but after the initial wall is overcome it just becomes a mapping exercise and a handful of idioms. I'd be curious to know which bits of Mandarin you find difficult? Vocab? The grammar is close enough that you have a huge advantage over almost every other language in the world especially for the everyday stuff. Reading and writing, if you know traditional you'll pick up simplified in no time (speaking from experience backpacking through China armed with only a paper dictionary we didn't have smartphones back in my day) the Cantonese tones are quite wild but if you can do tones you have a huge advantage of languages which don't have tones. If I'm allowed an uncharitable take, my experience has been that a lot of people from China don't feel a drive to learn more languages maybe with the sole exception of English. Maybe it's the result of being in a country of a billion+ that all ostensibly speak the same language. I've always found it so frustrating encountering people who move to the UK to study and they can barely hold a conversation in English despite doing A levels, Bachelor's and Masters in the UK sometimes. For all the complaints that dialects are hard a lot of south east Asian people back in the day would pick up a handful of them and often learn the basics of other languages like Bahasa. This kind of mindset and interaction reminds me more of Europe in the sense that people are more adaptable out of necessity

GranularRecipe 2y ago

I think it's also an issue of translation. "Dialect" in English is variety of a language. 方言 (fangyang, translated as dialect) in Chinese is a regional language or speech. Linguistically, Cantonese and other varieties of Chinese are recognised to be part of the Chinese language group / family. Cf https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E6%B1%89%E8%AF%AD/22488993?fromtitle=%E6%B1%89%E8%AF%AD%E8%AF%AD%E6%97%8F&fromid=5097410#1 https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E6%B1%89%E8%AF%AD/22488993?fro...

int_19h 2y ago

Linguists often use terms like "isolect" these days just to dodge this whole debate and the associated (often very toxic) politics. Not just with Chinese - it's also an issue around e.g. Serbo-Croatian.

niceguy1827 2y ago

> In fact many would argue Chinese languages were never unified (mandarin/cantonese/etc) but the scripts were. This is the correct understanding, even within mainland China, and across all times. The practice of assigning a "mandarin" based on where the capital is/was dates back at least hundreds of years, if not thousands. You can easily Google "Mandarin in Republic of China" to see the Republic of China's attempt to standardize its mandarin. It's really not a CCP issue.