Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

The thing about languages is that they are constantly changing from generation to generation. Any official attempt to standardize a language effectively fossilizes it, and the disparity between the standard and the actual language that people actually speak, will grow greater and greater over time. And then if you're creating a standard for a large dialect region, the effect is even more exaggerated. So the standard is actually highly artificial--just through the process of standardization, you are artificially creating a language that no one actually speaks natively.

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.

Huh.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese#Vocabulary

Apparently I've never actually been taught written Cantonese. I wonder if my mother is familiar with the difference. I find it odd since she's fluent in both Cantonese and Mandarin (whereas I'm only fluent in Cantonese).

That may also possibly explain some instances where I saw unfamiliar characters and simply assumed that it was my vocabulary that was lacking.

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...

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-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.

I'm currently trying to learn Mandarin. Thanks for posting.