Almost no one speaks perfect Mandarin. There’s always some influence of the native dialect (Beijing/Tianjin is closest but nowhere near identical to Mandarin).
This.
There are dozens if not hundreds of different Mandarin dialects. Beijing dialect is now the official dialect, but some of the dialects are different enough as to mutually unintelligible between Mandarin speakers.
Some of my favorite videos:
I don’t understand or speak any type of Chinese, which I’ll define as Mandarin and Cantonese. But have watched hundreds of Mandarin and Cantonese movies for decades and have developed an ear for the dialects / language. Yes, I’ll stay clear of the debate whether Cantonese is a Chinese dialect or language.
Comparing Northern vs Southern Mandarin dialects: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfNbq3s_51o I got them all correct, but I cheated because I used their physical appearance in addition to their verbal inflections.
This is from Off the Great Wall. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e73btaVo868 in which Ben speaks fluent Beijing dialect since he studied there. Carmen is definitely la mei !!!
In this Chinese with Jessie video, she talks about Beijing Dialect vs Standard Mandarin. I absolutely love her, but she has a bias and to my untrained ears Southern accent. She’s from Jiangxi. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLm7mwdh5jc
So this is the part that many find so incredulous.
FWIW, some Native American phonologies (unlike English and most other languages) have “voiceless vowels” (Cheyenne for example). They are often described as “whispered”. Not silent but no vocal cord vibration. If someone knows the word being said, knows the sound as salient already, grew up with it, and more so also sees the word being said, then that someone will hear the sound. The rest of us will hear nothing, a space between other sounds maybe, filtering out the sound that is there as noise.
Given how unusual voiceless vowels in other languages are I’d bet that was being shown.
Ah. There we go. Now this is interesting. I remember learning about voiceless vowels in a university linguistics class many years ago, but I don’t recall actually hearing any examples. (My morphology and syntax course seemed to always deal with indigenous languages, but few audio examples were actually given.) I found this video. It’s really interesting to me, and must be what Jim was going on about:
I think you said Mandarin half a dozen times when you meant Chinese. Mandarin is the prestige dialect of Chinese. There are no dialects of Mandarin. It is if anything, the most standardized and codified dialect of Chinese, and arguably of any language anywhere.
She critiques other speakers Mandarin pronunciation and dialects as not standard Mandarin, where to my ears she has a Southern dialect accent. Standard Mandarin is officially Putonghua, Beijing (Northern) dialect.
From what I learned from my Chinese history courses, the official dialect/language changed as the rule and the capital moved South and North. With hanzi (Chinese characters) being the means of communication through the various regions.
A bit of trivia. The Chinese classics, particularly poems are written and better enunciated as Cantonese , rather than Mandarin.
“Research has shown that Cantonese is in fact a blend of ancient Chinese, which can be traced back to the Tang dynasty, and the dialects of the Lingnan region of southern China. It is the closest surviving dialect to ancient Chinese.
“Cantonese is always regarded as a preferred language in reading Chinese classical literature such as poetry, as almost all poetic devices for those classical poems, like rhythm and rhyme, remain. Those devices do not work well if a poem is read in Putonghua.
I may be incorrect, but i prefer not to use the term Chinese when referring to the language of China because of the diversity of dialects and languages throughout the country and Taiwan. IMO, it would be insulting to ask if someone spoke Chinese. Mandarin? Cantonese? Shanghainese? Hokkien? et.al, with many being mutually unintelligible to the speakers.
Watch the video (one of many) comparing Northern vs. Southern Chinese (Mandarin), especially the speaker from Guangzhou and while you could correctly state they’re all speaking Chinese. IMO, each dialect is distinct enough to be respectively classified as (dialect) Mandarin. .
Your choice to to be incorrect then. Whether Chinese is one language or not is one question, but referring to anything as “Southern Mandarin” makes absolutely no sense.
I may be incorrect, but I’m in good company with a good number of Chinese, many native speakers in making a distinction between Northern and Southern Mandarin. ;-p
There are a large number of ways in which languages can differ, including in phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. Within each of those categories, there are many ways that languages can differ. Every language differs a little in each of those. There is nothing unique about the different choices in all of those things that any language makes. Each of the dialects of Chinese is no more unique in those choices than any of the dialects of English or the dialects of any other language are. For any one such choice that a given dialect or a given language makes, there are nearly always other languages that make that same choice. “Unique” is a poor term to describe a language. It’s not easy to categorize all the ways that languages can differ without some considerable training in linguistics. No language makes all the same choices as any other language, but seldom is any one choice that it makes something that no other language makes.
There are artificial languages with (relatively) simplified phonology and grammar, but that does not completely negate the effect of whatever your native language is, and also practice making perfect (how many people in your town are fluent in Esperanto?)
I can think of some examples where that’s entirely believable:
English-speaking students are played a recording of a word where the first sound is a glottal stop. Let’s say the word is /ʔɑlpɑ/. The students listen and hear /ɑlpɑ/. The teacher may instruct them to listen for the initial consonant, but they just won’t hear it.
Similarly for a French-speaking audience hearing a word with an initial /h/.
