In China, in which regions is Cantonese typically spoken and in which regions is Mandarin typically spoken?
Roughly what percentage of the population speaks Mandarin? What percentage speaks Cantonese??
Is it true that both of these languages are identical when written, but they sound completely different? How did this happen??
If you already knew one of these languages, how difficult would it be to learn the other?
Thanks.
Cantonese is spoken, oddly enough, in Canton. Mandarin is spoken as a primary language by the Han who are mainly the provicens in central and northern China but it is taught in all of China as the “common language” (putong hua). There are a bunch of other languages and dialects. Cantonese gets more billing because it is spoken by more people and by more overseas Chinese.
They are written (almost identically) alike because they use symbols for words so the same symbol is used for “table” in the different languages just like English, French and Spanish use the same symbol for 5 even though the English say “five”, the French “cinq” and the Spanish “cinco”.
If you already know one language you still need to learn the other as a new language but you would have an advantage over western people in that the writing is the same, you already master the tones, and the structure is pretty similar.
Cantonese is the dialect spoken in southern China. “Canton” is an anglicisation of Guangdong, which is the province just north of Hong Kong. Its use is mainly in this region, and also in Hong Kong and Macau.
Not sure of the proportion of speakers, but Canto is a definite minority.
Cantonese can’t really be written per se - writing and speaking are rather divorced from each other; written Chinese is a formal way of communicating. It’s generally safe to assume that any literate Chinese dialect speaker can read the same book or newspaper. They don’t sound totally different - they’re dialects (though personally I think the relationship between them is more similar to Spanish vs. Italian than Spanish vs. Mexican).
Cantonese is more difficult to learn than Mandarin due to the larger number of tones used. However, a friend of mine who was fluent in Mandarin picked up Cantonese relatively quickly, because he understood the principles.
Modern linguists consider Mandarin, Cantonese, etc., to be separate languages rather than dialects of one language.
For information about languages, including Mandarin and Cantonese, you can check out the language profile site of the University of California at Los Angeles – http://www.lmp.ucla.edu/lmpweb/profiles/profc01.htm
Note this –
There is no concensus that I’m aware of regarding the debate of “seperate language versus dialect.” Generally, I’ve seen that if it uses written Chinese characters, it is usually considered a dialect of Chinese.
Canton or Guangdong province has around 85 million population. Most of those are some sort of Cantonese speakers. Toss in HK and Macao, plus overseas Chinese, and you’ve got a rough guesstimate of 100 million canto speakers out of 1.3 billion or less than 10%. http://www.visitgd.com/english/aboutgd/Introduction/dialect.htm
There are not a lot of people that speak “mandarin” as a native language. Heck, go to Beijing, the center for Mandarin speakers, and most people speak a local dialect that is pretty frickin’ hard to understand if you are not used to it. Go to the north, and it’s a Mandarin derivative as opposed to something like Shanghaiese, but it sure isn’t “broadcast” Mandarin.
Really, I found it odd coming to China in 1985 speaking pretty good mandarin, and it was rare in my travels to find people who spoke something intelligible as their local language. Many if not most people these days can speak Mandarin, but not as their first language.
Here’s another link but the numbers seem pretty off. YMMV
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_iso639.asp?code=zh
A couple of additions/modifications to the information already presented.
Cantonese can be written, it is written exactly the same as Mandarin, but as noted before, the words sound different. Some sound a little different, for example, “me” is (roughly) “ngo” in Cantonese and “Wo” in Mandarin. Some of the sounds are very different. For example, the rough equivalent of the verb “to be” is “see” in Cantonese, “shr” in Mandarin.
One big complication in that written Cantonese (Chinese) is not always the same as spoken Cantonese. When a Cantonese speaker says “he” or “she”, the word used is pronounced “koy” (not really, but there is no like sound in English. When writing “he” or “she”, though, a different character is used, pronounced “Ta”, which is very similar to the Mandarin pronunciation. There are hundreds of these types of words, so the result is that it is extremely difficult (near impossible) for a native Mandarin speaker to understand spoken Cantonese. A native Cantonese speaker, however, can usually understand Mandarin, as it is pretty close to “written” Cantonese.
Both Languages have tones (the same sound means different things depending on the tone). Mandarin has 4. Cantonese has, depending on whom you ask, 7 to 11 (I say 7, any more is just being fussy). These include not only whether the tone is high, medium, or low, but also whether it is level, rising, or falling. This can get tricky for a non-native. I knew a man in Hong Kong whose last name I never mentioned, as it was the exact same sound as the Cantonese equivalent of the F word, but with a slightly different tone.
Hope this is helpful.
I don’t think thats a good measure: there are quite a few peoples who don’t speak anything like Mandarin at all, yet still write using that script.
Example? I don’t know that much about dialects, but it does seem like they all have common roots.
Unfortunately I wrote a long post that got eaten, but I’ll sum it up again simply: spoken Cantonese can and is written. It appears in comics, newspapers (in quotes and “light” articles) ads and message boards. It uses a combination of characters that are only used in Cantonese and many more that are simply “borrowed” for their pronunciation. Combine that with many words that do use standard Chinese but are expressed differently (a parallel might be British and American English) and colloquial written Cantonese is largely unreadable to speakers of other dialects.
By definition, any two related languages have common roots, such as Bengali and Assamese, English and Frisian, Catalan and Occitan, etc.
Okay, okay, so my wording was vulnerable to nit-picking. What I mean is, although different dialects sound totally different, those I know anything about are basically related to written Chinese. In my limited experience, I have yet to come across people who write Chinese like everyone else but are speaking something completely unrelated, with the exception of ethnic minorities who speak Mandarin and read Chinese as a second language but have their own absolutely-not-Chinese dialect. That’s just what I ran across though, I’m just a “half bucket of water.”
Well, isn’t that, essentially, what we’re talking about here? Cantonese (Yüeh), Guangxi, Hakka, Northern Min, Southern Min, and Wu are by many accounts, such as this one – http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/texts/chinlng2.html – as different from each other as French and Italian are from each other. Now, there can be no rigorous test for whether two modes of speech are separate language or two dialects of the same language, but it seems to me that more and more linguistic texts prefer to treat them as languages.
The point about the written language is that these languages or dialects or whatever do not (as I understand it) have a formal, standardised written form that is taught in schools. If you learn Chinese in school, you are taught Mandarin. So it’s pretty much the case that they are all writing in the same language.
If, on the other hand, you’re saying that when you listen to people speaking in Cantonese or Taiwanese and you find it to be more or less indistinguishable from Mandarin … Is that what you’re saying?
Calling Cantonese and Mandarin totally different helped me get more credit with my university, but in my eyes it’s not strictly true. No, obviously they don’t sound the same- they sound really, really different, taken as a whole- but if you’re familiar with the way the differences go you can often hear the parallels. The same has held true with other dialects that I’ve asked people about- though in that case I’m just talking about “say xxxxx in Fukienese,” I am only really equipped to say anything about Mandarin and Canto.
But since it was Smiling Bandit I was replying to, I would like to know what he meant by people who write Chinese who “don’t speak anything like Mandarin at all.” My position is that, sure, Cantonese or Shanghainese sound totally different from Mandarin, but they aren’t completely different and totally removed from the written language.
I have always been puzzled by this question - not because it is a mystery, but because as a child (not of Chinese descent) the reason seemed ‘obvious’ to me, but I’ve never seen a reference that stated it plainly. I’ve begun to wonder if there wasn’t some cultural reticence (pre-dating the revisions of Mao’s Great Cultural Revolution) about discussing some of the more culturally coercive elements of China’s imperial past. However, my readings in Chinese history seem to have a similar plain-spokenness (and lack thereof ) as my readings of European history.
[Warning - WAG ahead]
My WAG (mentioned only because I hope someone will be able to point me at a reference to confirm or disprove it) is that the Shang dynasty [ca. 1600-116 BC] pictograms evolved to ideograms and logograms through the Zhou (and Qin) dynasties [ca 1100-200 BC] and settled into something like the present mostly logographic form in the Han dynasty [ca 200BC- 200AD] The Han had considerably larger scope and area of influence than the Roman Empire, and I presume that the scribes and messengers required to maintain such a vast empire would have imposed a de facto written standard among the literate class. Many local languages may not have had a written form, while others (like Cantonese) did, but the Han writing system prevailed, as the Roman alphabet did in much of Europe.
Under the Confucian social system of the Han dynasty, learning and ambition tended to center on the imperial seat, and fluency in the imperial script would have been as essential as Latin in medieval Europe. During the era of the Three Kingdoms (each claiming to be thr rightful successor of the Han) and especially in the reunified Jin dynasty, we could expect fossilization of the Han script as a symbol of the Han lineage. By the end of the Jin dynasty, the Han script had prevailed for many centuries, and its grip was secure. I believe that is why we call it “the Mandarin system” in the west: ‘mandarin’ is a Western term for the 9 highest levels of Chinese imperial officaldom. In general, Chinese (and other nearby, but linguistically unrelated languages like Japanese and Korean) tend to have distinct layers of usage that have no counterpart in Europe
[e.g. in Japanese, the spoken language is written phonetically in the hiragana “alphabet” (more properly a ‘syllabary’), sprinkled (optionally) with kanji (ideographic symbols adapted from Chinese), with words of other foreign origin written phonetically in katakana. Sometimes foriegn words were spelled out in ‘romanji’ (Roman alphabet) but not in common usage (it would require knowing the foreign language) Acronyms, like WTO or CIA, are more often written in romanji]
Local variations and usages eventually arose, of course, but since the script wasn’t a phonetic representation, as in Europe, the usual drift in the spoken language would have exerted far less pressure on the local script. Chinese reverence for the past and (by European standards) ancient writings would have further stabilized the script. The Chinese are more likely to routinely read texts that are many centuries old (I ching, etc.) while Chaucer (ca AD1400) is well-nigh undecipherable to most contemporary English speakers.
[/end WAG]
I believe that the mandarin writing system is generally considered logographic, because it is built on words (Greek: logos) - specifically symbols for short (mono- or bisyllabic) in Mandarin. This is why some Chinese speakers in this thread have said “Yes, the writing is the same but it is pronounced differently”, which might puzzle those of us who aren’t fluent in Chinese languages. Saying that a written European is pronounced differently than its spoken form would make no sense for a phonetic language (even one as quirky and idiosyncratic as English). However, I would argue, based on my limited understanding of the subject, that they could be more accurately called “ideographic” with reference to spoken languages like Min. Except for a small percentage of local variant words, they are not logographic to Min, but only to mandarin.
Of course that was just a childhood deduction, and many things I believed turned out to be wrong. I’d very much enjoy any links or other cites to the history of the Han character system - or correcting the ugly menagerie of misconceptions I’ve undoubtedly picked up over the years.
I would disagree slightly with this description of the Japanese writing system.
I have heard tell that most of the first immigrants to the USA (many until just recently actually) were from the Canton area of China. This is why Chinese Food tends to be Cantonese and would explain why every Chinese person, except one, that I’ve met speaks Cantonese.
True?
Pretty much, I guess. Partially accounted for by the fact that Guangdong has historically been a big-money region. Hong Kong people in particular are more likely to be able to afford to emigrate, and largely don’t want to be part of China anyway. But with other regions catching up financially, Mandarin seems to be becoming more common stateside. Or maybe I just noticed it more once it stopped being inidentifiable gibberish to me, I dunno.
an anecdote - once i was approaching an indian shopkeeper for something when i saw that he had a problem communicating with an old chinese lady. she does not speak mandarin or cantonese so i couldn’t understand her words. no problem, she signals, then indicated to the shopkeeper for a pen. voila, she writes out rock sugar in chinese and i told the shopkeeper so. problem solved.
The Cantonese immigrated in the 1800’s not because they were rich, but because they were poor and China was a horrible mess at that time.
The differences between Mandarin and Shanghaiese would be classified as a separate language in Europe. However because of the unifying script (although newspapers in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong are at least troublesome for a native speaker of any of the dialects to read through), the Chinese language is generally broken down into dialects rather than seperate languages. Of course, the exceptions would be the non-Han Chinese (Miao, Tibetans, Mogolians, etc.).
I have seen more people in the past few years moving toward these are seperate languages.
In my humble experience, there are a lot of similarities between the dialects but one has to actually study them. Some of the common words are pronounced a little differently, so one can get used to them. For example, “you” as in “you jerk” is “ni” in mandarin and “lei” in cantonese. Same word or at least the same character with a different although maybe recognizeably related pronounciation. Now take “like” as in “I like you”, is “xihuan” in Mandarin and “zhongyi” in Cantonese. These are different characters and different words. Now, I found that if one learns say 100 of the same words with a different pronunciation and some of the common but different words, then you can follow a reasonable amount of conversation if you know the context. YMMV. At least it worked for me with Cantonese and Shanghaiese. However, if you don’t learn these words then it’s a pretty unitelligible mismash.
Sez I at least, who has spent 15 years in areas of China where Mandarin is not the native language.
Mexicans do not speak “Mexican” there is no such language. There is Nahuatl, which is what the Mexíca or the Aztecs spoke, but the name is Nahuatl, NOT Mexican. If you are speaking of Mexican Spanish, no, the similarities are far closer to Peninsular Spanish than they would be to Italian. There are regional dialectal forms of Spanish in Mexico that incorporate native words, but you put a Spaniard in a room with a Mexican and Italian and the Mexican is going to be able to understand the Spaniard FAR better (and probably perfectly) than the Italian ever would.
The comparison was relating Peninsular Spanish to Mexican Spanish meaning a dialectical difference, and Peninsular Spanish to Italian as a language difference with some mutual comprehension. Sorry if I wasnt’ clear enough.
For comparitive purposes, here’s 1 to 10 in Mandarin and Cantonese (transliteration from my head only - not official).
Mandarin: Yi Er San Ser Wu Liu Chi Bai Jiu Shr
Cantonese: Yat Yi Sam Sey Ng Lok Chat Bat Gau Sap
You can see some similarities, but also gross differences: the Canto number for two is the same as the Mandarin number for one, for example. But, of course, they’re written the same.