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Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

#31

Post by maaku »

“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).

Re: Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

#32

Post by 616c »

jamesli wrote: post #19

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 s…

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.

Re: Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

#33

Post by bryze »

jamesli wrote: post #19

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 s…

An excellent summary. Trying to get everyone in China to speak Mandarin would be like getting everyone in Europe to speak English. It will never be 100% unless you obliterate other languages.

Re: Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

#34

Post by abayer »

mmorris wrote: post #29
abayer wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Man…

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.o…

Ok, then the linguists I read tend to be splitters rather than lumpers. =) This is particularly drama-prone in re: the Chinese languages/dialects due to the tendency for Beijing to attempt to cast all speakers of Chinese languages as in fact speakers of a single language, as part of their attempts to create a single unified Han identity.

But in the end, I really believe that if it weren't for the common written language, no one would ever think of Cantonese as being just a dialect of the same language as Mandarin - the differences between the two spoken languages are so massive.

Re: Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

#35

Post by newman314 »

schuke wrote: post #20
afreak wrote: post #2

> 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.

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.

But I like the Scottish accent! Understanding someone from Arberdeen is tough though.

Re: Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

#36

Post by newman314 »

ihsw wrote: post #26
niuzeta wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

who's that and why?

According to his profile[1] he seems to be somewhat of an expert on Chinese languages. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tokenadult

Interesting. On an somewhat related note, I would be interested in hearing his opinion on math textbooks.

Re: Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

#37

Post by newsign »

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...

Re: Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

#38

Post by kyllo »

newsign wrote: post #37

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...

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.

Re: Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

#39

Post by kyllo »

mmorris wrote: post #29
abayer wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Man…

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.o…

The common analogy is that Chinese "dialects" are really different languages in the same Chinese language family (they have a common ancestor), the same way that Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Corsican, Catalan, etc. are different languages in the Romance language family (their common ancestor is Latin).

Where it gets confusing is when nationalism gets involved. Mandarin and Wu are different "dialects" of the same "language" because they're from the same country. Italian and Spanish are different "languages" because they're from different countries. It's a political distinction.

Linguists tend toward using mutual intelligibility as the difference between a language and a dialect, but it's fuzzy. Beijing and Shanghai dialect are almost totally mutually unintelligible, but if you walked from Beijing down to Shanghai, each village, town, or city you pass will speak a dialect that's still mutually intelligible with the immediately neighboring village/town/city's.

But really, the words "dialect" and "language" mean essentially the same thing in English.

Re: Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

#40

Post by zsj888 »

616c wrote: post #32
jamesli wrote: post #19

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 s…

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 Cantones…

Nanning is actually not a province. It's the capital of Guangxi province.
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