10 ms·

Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

52 points by tareqak 13y ago

afreak 13y ago
> Of the 70% of the population who can speak Mandarin, many do not do it well enough, a ministry spokeswoman told Xinhua news agency on Thursday. Keep in mind that there are many dialects of Mandarin and what this ministry is referring to is the fact that people do not speak the Beijing dialect well, which is the national standard.
- speeder 13y ago
  He said that 70% do not speak Mandarin, and most of these do not speak "well". I guess only the "speak well enough" is related to dialects. The other 30% I think he is referring to people that speak cantonese, and all other interesting languages that exists there, including the mongolian languages (almost everything in China west of the great wall, was originally part of mongolia, like Tibet for example... and thus they have not much to do with China actually, specially Han people). I hope someday people will figure a way to keep mongolians peaceful without erasing their culture or resorting to extreme tyranny.
  - flanbiscuit 13y ago
    I knew China had different languages but wow there are quite a lot of them http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_China#Spoken_languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_China#Spoken_langu...
    - laumars 13y ago
      The history of the language is quite an interesting one, in my opinion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Chinese_phonology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Chinese_phonology
    - gaoshan 13y ago
      And some of them sound rather radically different from Mandarin. My wife speaks something called Hangzhou dialect (spoken just a few hours away from Shanghai) and when other Chinese hear it they sometimes think she is visiting from another country. On one occasion some people thought she was speaking English (it sounds nothing like English). An example of the differences... in Mandarin to say "It is." you would say "Shi de." but in Hangzhou dialect you would say something that sounds like "Zede ye." The adverb "very" is "hen" in Mandarin but sounds like "molaolao" (though colloquially people often just say "mo") in Hangzhou dialect. The differences between the various dialects are fascinating sometimes radical and they must have developed for many centuries in near isolation from one another to get where they are today.
      - laumars 13y ago
        I'm no expert, but I always wondered if it was a result of the language being tonal. In England, you have dialects that can sound so different that it could be another language to the untrained ear. However as English isn't tonal, there's a larger margin for error (so to speak) - accents can exist without transforming the word. Whereas with a tonal language, an accent could change the language more dramatically. Though what's also interesting is some of the different languages and dialects in China also have different sentence structures (eg verb placements).
        notahacker 13y ago
        The multisyllabic nature of English and relatively complex sentence structure probably aids comprehension with different accents too.
        gaoshan 13y ago
        >However as English isn't tonal, there's a larger margin for error True. The tones are critical in a way that can be very difficult for non-native speakers to grasp. Here are the four tones used with the words mā (mother), má (hemp), mǎ (horse) and mà (to curse) with an extra for ma indicating a question http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRkCf6Djprs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRkCf6Djprs. And in that video she pronounces them far clearer than would be used in actual conversation.
  - cwhy 13y ago
    Han people take part of about 91% percent... This 70% may refer to the "standard" mandarin, more like comparing to accents of the same language.
    - speeder 13y ago
      I guess my comment confused people... Cantonese for example is a Han language. There are lots of non-mandarin but Han languages, and beside those.there are the languages of non-Han people.
  - abayer 13y ago
    Tibet is not Mongolian - they've now got connections in terms of their religious background, but Tibetan is part of the Sino-Tibetan language family, while Mongolian is, unsurprisingly, in the Mongol language family (or if you accept the Altaic hypothesis, it's also part of the larger Altaic family with Turkic and Tungusic languages). And what's more, take a look at the current state of Mongolia some time - it's a functioning democracy with pretty decent respect for civil liberties and no tendency to invade their neighbors. Yes, there's a long history of semi-nomadic tribes coming out of Central Asia and invading the civilized cultures along the edges of the Eurasian steppes, but that pattern wasn't unique to the Mongols (various Indo-European, Turkic, Tungusic (i.e., Manchu), Magyar and other peoples have played that role over the millennia), and that's been a thing of the past since horse archers became ineffective in war (i.e., once firearms were widespread).
- jamesli 13y ago
  "Keep in mind that there are many dialects of Mandarin and what this ministry is referring to is the fact that people do not speak the Beijing dialect well, which is the national standard." Strictly speaking, 1) there are many dialects of Chinese, not Mandarin. 2) the language many Beijing people speak is not a dialect. It is an accent. Cantonese is a dialect. Wu Chinese is a dialect. Beijing Chinese is an accent. It is definitely not the national standard, although it is the closest to the national standard, compared to other accents.
  - abayer 13y ago
    Generally, linguists would disagree with that - Cantonese is not mutually intelligible with Mandarin, so it's not a dialect, it's a different language, as are Wu, Hakka, etc... There are fairly profound differences between these languages in their spoken form. It is true that they all share a single written language, and a common language ancestry, but Cantonese (the spoken language) is at least as different from Mandarin (the spoken language) as Spanish and Portuguese, or Dutch and German.
    - deleted 13y ago
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    - mmorris 13y ago
      I am not a linguist, per se, but my understanding is that there is no formal definition (or even agreement) on what constitutes a separate language versus a separate dialect. Rather, a number of factors are taken into consideration (including political factors), and the distinction is almost always debatable. While it is desperate for citations, it looks like the Wikipedia article supports that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect#Dialect_or_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect#Dialect_or_language There is also an episode of one of my favorite podcasts (Slate's Lexicon Valley) that focuses on this issue, particularly in regards to what has sometimes been called "Ebonics": http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2012/02/lexicon_valley_is_black_english_a_dialect_or_a_language_.html http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2012/0...
      - 13y ago
- melling 13y ago
  I see 400 million potential customers that I didn't have before. :-) https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h4-chinese-lite/id689851382?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h4-chinese-lite/id689851382?... I'll have audio in 2-3 months. Now I just need that cheaper iPhone for emerging markets.
  - jarek 13y ago
    And to compete with the Chinese state, which has always made an enormous effort to get its subjects to speak a common language. But iPhone!
- schuke 13y ago
  I think you mean Beijing accent. By Chinese standards if one speaks Mandarin with an accent as heavy as Scottish accent is to English, she is deemed to speak Madarin not well enough.
  - newman314 13y ago
    But I like the Scottish accent! Understanding someone from Arberdeen is tough though.
- deleted 13y ago
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- deleted 13y ago
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cwhy 13y ago
So you prefer them to communicate using English, a language that is even more unrelated?
w1ntermute 13y ago
Waiting for tokenadult to comment on this...
- niuzeta 13y ago
  who's that and why?
  - ihsw 13y ago
    According to his profile[1] he seems to be somewhat of an expert on Chinese languages. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tokenadult https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tokenadult
    - newman314 13y ago
      Interesting. On an somewhat related note, I would be interested in hearing his opinion on math textbooks.
snake_plissken 13y ago
Mandarin is a very interesting language because there are hundreds if not thousands of dialects across China that can vary substantially. For a while I lived in China and could speak the Beijing dialect well enough to get to know someone and engage in small talk about the NBA. I took a train trip from Beijing to Lanzhou which is like 1500 km west. My buddies and I got off the train and couldn't understand a lick for the first 2 days. Then there's southern China which speaks Cantonese, which is about 100 million people give or take.
weu 13y ago
It's worth noting that China has a 90% literacy rate so while they speak may not speak Mandarin they still have some ability to read (and of course use their local dialect): http://world.time.com/2013/08/15/what-the-word-toad-can-tell-you-about-chinas-modernization/ http://world.time.com/2013/08/15/what-the-word-toad-can-tell...
saraid216 13y ago
I recently went and saw The Grandmaster, and one of the more interesting subtleties I noticed was that the Northerners were speaking in Mandarin while the Southerners were speaking in Cantonese. That isn't noted in subtitles anywhere. (I'm ethnically Chinese, grew up in a household speaking Cantonese, and took some lessons for Mandarin.)
jamesli 13y ago
Many people think Mandarin and Cantonese are basically the same language, or Cantonese is an accent of Mandarin. It is understandable since the majority of early Chinese immigrants were from Canton Province (or Guangdong Province), where Cantonese is the dominant language. Cantonese is a dialect, with very different sound system, although it shares the same writing system with Mandarin. The difference between their sound systems could be larger than that between English and German, or between Russian and and Bulgarian. It makes sense if one considers the size of China. It is as big as Europe sans Russian. There are as many dialects in China as languages in Europe. In some remote parts in East China, the people in the towns next to each other could not understand each other's dialects. So a common writing system was enforced more than 2000 years ago so that people could communicate with each other in writing. Native Cantonese speakers is less than 5% of total population in China. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language. It is mostly spoken in Canton and Hongkong. A helpful analogy (not accurate definitely) is to think of it as Spanish in the scope of Europe. A native Mandarin speaker will not understand Cantonese if he doesn't study it, just as a native English speaker will not understand Spanish without study.
- contravert 13y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an...
- 616c 13y ago
  Good point. As someone who lived in Nanning (not Nanjing, Nanning is the province across is the one above the Vietnamese border, across from Guandong/Hong Kong), it is intriguing to me how few people know they border on almost completely separate languages. I took time to learn Mandarin, and could string sentences together. I could not even say thank you in Cantonese, once, without others laughing at me. The Cantonese-speaking kids I knew just say just give up. Then I moved onto Arabic, that is another fun story.
  - zsj888 13y ago
    Nanning is actually not a province. It's the capital of Guangxi province.
jl6 13y ago
While it makes me uncomfortable to think of anyone being forced into a new language, I like the idea that this increases the number of people who can talk to each other.
- jccc 13y ago
  People in the western world have been able to talk to each other culturally, economically, etc. without necessarily speaking English. But the Communist Party might have a better time influencing culture/economy/policy/ideology across all of China with more people speaking the official language.
maaku 13y ago
“A dialect is a language without an army or navy.” Chinese dialects are totally separate languages, in some cases only distantly related. A Mandarin speaker with no previous exposure to dialect X would find it incomprehensible. It'd be like calling Swedish and Portuguese dialects of the common language “Euro-nese” (as was once the case with 'vulgar' Latin before we started calling it French, Spanish, Italian, etc.) The Chinese government calling these languages 'dialects' is Orwellian new-speak that makes “language unity” sound like speech therapy instead of the linguistic genocide that it is (a practice which, to be fair, predates both Orwell and Mao).
- saraid216 13y ago
  Except that the Chinese writing system is basically the same across all dialects. This is one of the most remarkable oddities of the Chinese language. This isn't true of the various Romance languages, which will cheerfully include random additional letters all over the place. And nevermind that Swedish is descended from Germanic whereas Portuguese is descended from Latin, so your comparison is closer to Cantonese with Hindu.
  - maaku 13y ago
    No, the Chinese written language is not common to all sino languages; most local languages are not written down, ever. People write in Mandarin. A century ago, people wrote in classical Chinese, which is an entirely separate literary language. When you go to Shanghai or Chenzhou you see signs, books, advertisements, etc. written in Mandarin, not the local languages of Shanghainese or Dzao Min. There are some exceptions -- Cantonese and Yi come to mind -- but these are very specific historical exceptions. I purposely chose Swedish from the Germanic language family to prove a point. When this topic ever does get brought up, people usually make the comparison to Latin and the romance languages in Europe, harkening back to a time when all written communication was in Latin, and the vulgar or Germanic languages were spoken only. But would you seriously claim that Latin was the written form of Old German? Or that the Latin literary culture of the time was inclusive and representative of Germanic cultural norms? Many (most, depending on how you count) of the local and minority languages in China are only distantly related to Chinese, in the same way that Swedish and Portuguese are both Indo-European languages. What we call China was a culturally, ethnically, religiously, and especially linguistically diverse place when it was politically unified by Qin Shi Huang 2200 years ago. Many of those languages still exist today, in the same regions. But thanks to 2,000 years of linguistic suppression these languages have no written form or literary culture, and very few people are even conscious of the loss.
newsign 13y ago
India is also in similar situation where many dont speak Hindi - its like a Britain or American cant speak English ... being multi dialect/language country shouldn't be an excuse of not being able to speak the national language - i guess past and present government is to be blamed...
- kyllo 13y ago
  That's because Hindi is no-one's native language, it's an artificial language that was invented by a committee. Mandarin is almost the same situation, except that it is very very close to the native language of Beijing and Northeast China. So it's almost like they're forcing the entire country to learn Beijing dialect.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > That's because Hindi is no-one's native language, it's an artificial language that was invented by a committee. More accurately, Modern Standard Hindi (like Modern Standard Urdu) is a committee-standardized register of the Hindustani (also known as "Hindi-Urdu") language. (prior to standardization, "Hindi", "Urdu", and "Hindustani" all referred to the same language, apparently.) > Mandarin is almost the same situation, except that it is very very close to the native language of Beijing and Northeast China. Hindustani has 240 million native speakers.
    - newsign 13y ago
      Also those people are purely native speakers, meaning people whose first language is Hindi - while there are many whose command over Hindi is very strong but their first language is Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi etc. If you count all those people who can speak/write Hindi then the count goes way over 500 Million ....
  - redditmigrant 13y ago
    Hindi is the native language of 180 million people (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindi), most of who live in India. While Hindi being the national language might have been the decision of a committee, the language itself is not artificial.
tokenadult 13y ago
A lot of the commenters aren't believing what this news report says. But the news report kindly submitted here matches the facts of an earlier news report from China, reporting that "The survey of half a million people shows that 53.06 percent of the population can effectively communicate orally in mandarin."[1] [1] http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838.htm http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838... In other words, hundreds of millions of persons in China cannot have a telephone conversation with one another, or ask for directions and get a comprehensible answer if they travel to each other's home regions, and so on. National common language promotion in China still has a very long way to go (although of course it is farther along in the younger generation than in the older, and farther along in urban areas than in rural areas). For this issue of national policy, the relevant issue is whether or not people can understand one another when they have a conversation. Many, many, many groupings of citizens of the P.R.C. would include people none of whom have a common language mutually understood by any other person in the group. By contrast, Taiwan has been much, much, much more successful, much earlier in history, in making Modern Standard Chinese (Mandarin) a common language in a region where historically "Taiwanese" (the Taiwan dialect of Southern Min Chinese) was the majority language and Hakka was a significant regional minority language. After 1949, when the defeated Nationalist forces retreated to Taiwan, perhaps 10 percent (mostly soldiers) was added to Taiwan's population, but not all of those persons were speakers of (mutually understandable) Mandarin either, yet Mandarin was thereafter treated as the sole national language in Taiwan. My wife grew up speaking Taiwanese to her parents (who spoke Japanese to each other, because of their prewar education in occupied Taiwan, then a colony of the Japanese empire), and Mandarin to her siblings and classmates. I met her in 1982. She spoke perfectly adequate (Taiwanese-accented) Mandarin as young adult, and she often impressed visitors from the P.R.C. to the United States in the mid-1980s when we were both students with the quality of her Mandarin. My nieces are now generally more proficient in Mandarin than in Taiwanese, although both languages are still used among our relatives in Taiwan. (Mandarin and Taiwanese are cognate Sinitic languages, but no more similar than English and German are, and certainly NOT mutually comprehensible.) Taiwan achieved much more rapid spread of Mandarin by having a stronger economy in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and thus much more use of personal telephone calls and radios and televisions and much more internal travel. China still has a lot of catching up to do. The book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by John DeFrancis http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFrancis/dp/0824810686 http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci... does a lot to disentangle the issues of speech versus writing, and dialect versus language, that are discussed in several of the interesting comments that preceded my comment here. Here's an example of 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. Contrast that 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. Even the traditional Chinese character writing system doesn't bring about mutual understanding among people from all parts of China.

52 points by tareqak 13y ago

> Of the 70% of the population who can speak Mandarin, many do not do it well enough, a ministry spokeswoman told Xinhua news agency on Thursday. Keep in mind that there are many dialects of Mandarin and what this ministry is referring to is the fact that people do not speak the Beijing dialect well, which is the national standard.

speeder 13y ago
He said that 70% do not speak Mandarin, and most of these do not speak "well". I guess only the "speak well enough" is related to dialects. The other 30% I think he is referring to people that speak cantonese, and all other interesting languages that exists there, including the mongolian languages (almost everything in China west of the great wall, was originally part of mongolia, like Tibet for example... and thus they have not much to do with China actually, specially Han people). I hope someday people will figure a way to keep mongolians peaceful without erasing their culture or resorting to extreme tyranny.
- flanbiscuit 13y ago
  I knew China had different languages but wow there are quite a lot of them http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_China#Spoken_languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_China#Spoken_langu...
  - laumars 13y ago
    The history of the language is quite an interesting one, in my opinion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Chinese_phonology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Chinese_phonology
  - gaoshan 13y ago
    And some of them sound rather radically different from Mandarin. My wife speaks something called Hangzhou dialect (spoken just a few hours away from Shanghai) and when other Chinese hear it they sometimes think she is visiting from another country. On one occasion some people thought she was speaking English (it sounds nothing like English). An example of the differences... in Mandarin to say "It is." you would say "Shi de." but in Hangzhou dialect you would say something that sounds like "Zede ye." The adverb "very" is "hen" in Mandarin but sounds like "molaolao" (though colloquially people often just say "mo") in Hangzhou dialect. The differences between the various dialects are fascinating sometimes radical and they must have developed for many centuries in near isolation from one another to get where they are today.
    - laumars 13y ago
      I'm no expert, but I always wondered if it was a result of the language being tonal. In England, you have dialects that can sound so different that it could be another language to the untrained ear. However as English isn't tonal, there's a larger margin for error (so to speak) - accents can exist without transforming the word. Whereas with a tonal language, an accent could change the language more dramatically. Though what's also interesting is some of the different languages and dialects in China also have different sentence structures (eg verb placements).
      - notahacker 13y ago
        The multisyllabic nature of English and relatively complex sentence structure probably aids comprehension with different accents too.
      - gaoshan 13y ago
        >However as English isn't tonal, there's a larger margin for error True. The tones are critical in a way that can be very difficult for non-native speakers to grasp. Here are the four tones used with the words mā (mother), má (hemp), mǎ (horse) and mà (to curse) with an extra for ma indicating a question http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRkCf6Djprs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRkCf6Djprs. And in that video she pronounces them far clearer than would be used in actual conversation.
- cwhy 13y ago
  Han people take part of about 91% percent... This 70% may refer to the "standard" mandarin, more like comparing to accents of the same language.
  - speeder 13y ago
    I guess my comment confused people... Cantonese for example is a Han language. There are lots of non-mandarin but Han languages, and beside those.there are the languages of non-Han people.
- abayer 13y ago
  Tibet is not Mongolian - they've now got connections in terms of their religious background, but Tibetan is part of the Sino-Tibetan language family, while Mongolian is, unsurprisingly, in the Mongol language family (or if you accept the Altaic hypothesis, it's also part of the larger Altaic family with Turkic and Tungusic languages). And what's more, take a look at the current state of Mongolia some time - it's a functioning democracy with pretty decent respect for civil liberties and no tendency to invade their neighbors. Yes, there's a long history of semi-nomadic tribes coming out of Central Asia and invading the civilized cultures along the edges of the Eurasian steppes, but that pattern wasn't unique to the Mongols (various Indo-European, Turkic, Tungusic (i.e., Manchu), Magyar and other peoples have played that role over the millennia), and that's been a thing of the past since horse archers became ineffective in war (i.e., once firearms were widespread).
jamesli 13y ago
"Keep in mind that there are many dialects of Mandarin and what this ministry is referring to is the fact that people do not speak the Beijing dialect well, which is the national standard." Strictly speaking, 1) there are many dialects of Chinese, not Mandarin. 2) the language many Beijing people speak is not a dialect. It is an accent. Cantonese is a dialect. Wu Chinese is a dialect. Beijing Chinese is an accent. It is definitely not the national standard, although it is the closest to the national standard, compared to other accents.
- abayer 13y ago
  Generally, linguists would disagree with that - Cantonese is not mutually intelligible with Mandarin, so it's not a dialect, it's a different language, as are Wu, Hakka, etc... There are fairly profound differences between these languages in their spoken form. It is true that they all share a single written language, and a common language ancestry, but Cantonese (the spoken language) is at least as different from Mandarin (the spoken language) as Spanish and Portuguese, or Dutch and German.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - mmorris 13y ago
    I am not a linguist, per se, but my understanding is that there is no formal definition (or even agreement) on what constitutes a separate language versus a separate dialect. Rather, a number of factors are taken into consideration (including political factors), and the distinction is almost always debatable. While it is desperate for citations, it looks like the Wikipedia article supports that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect#Dialect_or_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect#Dialect_or_language There is also an episode of one of my favorite podcasts (Slate's Lexicon Valley) that focuses on this issue, particularly in regards to what has sometimes been called "Ebonics": http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2012/02/lexicon_valley_is_black_english_a_dialect_or_a_language_.html http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2012/0...
    - 13y ago
melling 13y ago
I see 400 million potential customers that I didn't have before. :-) https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h4-chinese-lite/id689851382?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h4-chinese-lite/id689851382?... I'll have audio in 2-3 months. Now I just need that cheaper iPhone for emerging markets.
- jarek 13y ago
  And to compete with the Chinese state, which has always made an enormous effort to get its subjects to speak a common language. But iPhone!
schuke 13y ago
I think you mean Beijing accent. By Chinese standards if one speaks Mandarin with an accent as heavy as Scottish accent is to English, she is deemed to speak Madarin not well enough.
- newman314 13y ago
  But I like the Scottish accent! Understanding someone from Arberdeen is tough though.
deleted 13y ago
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cwhy 13y ago

So you prefer them to communicate using English, a language that is even more unrelated?

w1ntermute 13y ago

Waiting for tokenadult to comment on this...

niuzeta 13y ago
who's that and why?
- ihsw 13y ago
  According to his profile[1] he seems to be somewhat of an expert on Chinese languages. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tokenadult https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tokenadult
  - newman314 13y ago
    Interesting. On an somewhat related note, I would be interested in hearing his opinion on math textbooks.

snake_plissken 13y ago

Mandarin is a very interesting language because there are hundreds if not thousands of dialects across China that can vary substantially. For a while I lived in China and could speak the Beijing dialect well enough to get to know someone and engage in small talk about the NBA. I took a train trip from Beijing to Lanzhou which is like 1500 km west. My buddies and I got off the train and couldn't understand a lick for the first 2 days. Then there's southern China which speaks Cantonese, which is about 100 million people give or take.

weu 13y ago

It's worth noting that China has a 90% literacy rate so while they speak may not speak Mandarin they still have some ability to read (and of course use their local dialect): http://world.time.com/2013/08/15/what-the-word-toad-can-tell-you-about-chinas-modernization/ http://world.time.com/2013/08/15/what-the-word-toad-can-tell...

saraid216 13y ago

I recently went and saw The Grandmaster, and one of the more interesting subtleties I noticed was that the Northerners were speaking in Mandarin while the Southerners were speaking in Cantonese. That isn't noted in subtitles anywhere. (I'm ethnically Chinese, grew up in a household speaking Cantonese, and took some lessons for Mandarin.)

jamesli 13y ago

Many people think Mandarin and Cantonese are basically the same language, or Cantonese is an accent of Mandarin. It is understandable since the majority of early Chinese immigrants were from Canton Province (or Guangdong Province), where Cantonese is the dominant language. Cantonese is a dialect, with very different sound system, although it shares the same writing system with Mandarin. The difference between their sound systems could be larger than that between English and German, or between Russian and and Bulgarian. It makes sense if one considers the size of China. It is as big as Europe sans Russian. There are as many dialects in China as languages in Europe. In some remote parts in East China, the people in the towns next to each other could not understand each other's dialects. So a common writing system was enforced more than 2000 years ago so that people could communicate with each other in writing. Native Cantonese speakers is less than 5% of total population in China. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language. It is mostly spoken in Canton and Hongkong. A helpful analogy (not accurate definitely) is to think of it as Spanish in the scope of Europe. A native Mandarin speaker will not understand Cantonese if he doesn't study it, just as a native English speaker will not understand Spanish without study.

contravert 13y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an...
616c 13y ago
Good point. As someone who lived in Nanning (not Nanjing, Nanning is the province across is the one above the Vietnamese border, across from Guandong/Hong Kong), it is intriguing to me how few people know they border on almost completely separate languages. I took time to learn Mandarin, and could string sentences together. I could not even say thank you in Cantonese, once, without others laughing at me. The Cantonese-speaking kids I knew just say just give up. Then I moved onto Arabic, that is another fun story.
- zsj888 13y ago
  Nanning is actually not a province. It's the capital of Guangxi province.

jl6 13y ago

While it makes me uncomfortable to think of anyone being forced into a new language, I like the idea that this increases the number of people who can talk to each other.

jccc 13y ago
People in the western world have been able to talk to each other culturally, economically, etc. without necessarily speaking English. But the Communist Party might have a better time influencing culture/economy/policy/ideology across all of China with more people speaking the official language.

maaku 13y ago

“A dialect is a language without an army or navy.” Chinese dialects are totally separate languages, in some cases only distantly related. A Mandarin speaker with no previous exposure to dialect X would find it incomprehensible. It'd be like calling Swedish and Portuguese dialects of the common language “Euro-nese” (as was once the case with 'vulgar' Latin before we started calling it French, Spanish, Italian, etc.) The Chinese government calling these languages 'dialects' is Orwellian new-speak that makes “language unity” sound like speech therapy instead of the linguistic genocide that it is (a practice which, to be fair, predates both Orwell and Mao).

saraid216 13y ago
Except that the Chinese writing system is basically the same across all dialects. This is one of the most remarkable oddities of the Chinese language. This isn't true of the various Romance languages, which will cheerfully include random additional letters all over the place. And nevermind that Swedish is descended from Germanic whereas Portuguese is descended from Latin, so your comparison is closer to Cantonese with Hindu.
- maaku 13y ago
  No, the Chinese written language is not common to all sino languages; most local languages are not written down, ever. People write in Mandarin. A century ago, people wrote in classical Chinese, which is an entirely separate literary language. When you go to Shanghai or Chenzhou you see signs, books, advertisements, etc. written in Mandarin, not the local languages of Shanghainese or Dzao Min. There are some exceptions -- Cantonese and Yi come to mind -- but these are very specific historical exceptions. I purposely chose Swedish from the Germanic language family to prove a point. When this topic ever does get brought up, people usually make the comparison to Latin and the romance languages in Europe, harkening back to a time when all written communication was in Latin, and the vulgar or Germanic languages were spoken only. But would you seriously claim that Latin was the written form of Old German? Or that the Latin literary culture of the time was inclusive and representative of Germanic cultural norms? Many (most, depending on how you count) of the local and minority languages in China are only distantly related to Chinese, in the same way that Swedish and Portuguese are both Indo-European languages. What we call China was a culturally, ethnically, religiously, and especially linguistically diverse place when it was politically unified by Qin Shi Huang 2200 years ago. Many of those languages still exist today, in the same regions. But thanks to 2,000 years of linguistic suppression these languages have no written form or literary culture, and very few people are even conscious of the loss.

newsign 13y ago

India is also in similar situation where many dont speak Hindi - its like a Britain or American cant speak English ... being multi dialect/language country shouldn't be an excuse of not being able to speak the national language - i guess past and present government is to be blamed...

kyllo 13y ago
That's because Hindi is no-one's native language, it's an artificial language that was invented by a committee. Mandarin is almost the same situation, except that it is very very close to the native language of Beijing and Northeast China. So it's almost like they're forcing the entire country to learn Beijing dialect.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > That's because Hindi is no-one's native language, it's an artificial language that was invented by a committee. More accurately, Modern Standard Hindi (like Modern Standard Urdu) is a committee-standardized register of the Hindustani (also known as "Hindi-Urdu") language. (prior to standardization, "Hindi", "Urdu", and "Hindustani" all referred to the same language, apparently.) > Mandarin is almost the same situation, except that it is very very close to the native language of Beijing and Northeast China. Hindustani has 240 million native speakers.
  - newsign 13y ago
    Also those people are purely native speakers, meaning people whose first language is Hindi - while there are many whose command over Hindi is very strong but their first language is Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi etc. If you count all those people who can speak/write Hindi then the count goes way over 500 Million ....
- redditmigrant 13y ago
  Hindi is the native language of 180 million people (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindi), most of who live in India. While Hindi being the national language might have been the decision of a committee, the language itself is not artificial.

tokenadult 13y ago

A lot of the commenters aren't believing what this news report says. But the news report kindly submitted here matches the facts of an earlier news report from China, reporting that "The survey of half a million people shows that 53.06 percent of the population can effectively communicate orally in mandarin."[1] [1] http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838.htm http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838... In other words, hundreds of millions of persons in China cannot have a telephone conversation with one another, or ask for directions and get a comprehensible answer if they travel to each other's home regions, and so on. National common language promotion in China still has a very long way to go (although of course it is farther along in the younger generation than in the older, and farther along in urban areas than in rural areas). For this issue of national policy, the relevant issue is whether or not people can understand one another when they have a conversation. Many, many, many groupings of citizens of the P.R.C. would include people none of whom have a common language mutually understood by any other person in the group. By contrast, Taiwan has been much, much, much more successful, much earlier in history, in making Modern Standard Chinese (Mandarin) a common language in a region where historically "Taiwanese" (the Taiwan dialect of Southern Min Chinese) was the majority language and Hakka was a significant regional minority language. After 1949, when the defeated Nationalist forces retreated to Taiwan, perhaps 10 percent (mostly soldiers) was added to Taiwan's population, but not all of those persons were speakers of (mutually understandable) Mandarin either, yet Mandarin was thereafter treated as the sole national language in Taiwan. My wife grew up speaking Taiwanese to her parents (who spoke Japanese to each other, because of their prewar education in occupied Taiwan, then a colony of the Japanese empire), and Mandarin to her siblings and classmates. I met her in 1982. She spoke perfectly adequate (Taiwanese-accented) Mandarin as young adult, and she often impressed visitors from the P.R.C. to the United States in the mid-1980s when we were both students with the quality of her Mandarin. My nieces are now generally more proficient in Mandarin than in Taiwanese, although both languages are still used among our relatives in Taiwan. (Mandarin and Taiwanese are cognate Sinitic languages, but no more similar than English and German are, and certainly NOT mutually comprehensible.) Taiwan achieved much more rapid spread of Mandarin by having a stronger economy in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and thus much more use of personal telephone calls and radios and televisions and much more internal travel. China still has a lot of catching up to do. The book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by John DeFrancis http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFrancis/dp/0824810686 http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci... does a lot to disentangle the issues of speech versus writing, and dialect versus language, that are discussed in several of the interesting comments that preceded my comment here. Here's an example of 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. Contrast that 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. Even the traditional Chinese character writing system doesn't bring about mutual understanding among people from all parts of China.