Snaked up on ya, didn’t it?
I hope nobody makes a mess or we’ll need a Pit viper.
I thought everyone knew that Cleopatra killed herself by clutching a beast to her ass.
Putongha = “common speech” = Beijing dialect
On September 11, I wasn’t paying very close attention, and I’d been listening to the news on the radio on the way to work for 10-15 minutes before it finally clicked with me that they were talking about something that’s happening now, and not about the '93 bombing. I don’t know why I thought they’d be spending so much time playing archival tapes from an eight-year-old event, but that was the conclusion the 5% of my brain that I was actually devoting to the radio came to.
I’m not so quick on the uptake sometimes.
However, I rock at Trivial Pursuit, as long as I can keep hitting the Science & Nature spaces. 
furt: My point is that the PRC government doesn’t call the official language Mandarin.
That’s because Mandarin is an English word. They don’t call their country China, either.
See, and this is the type of in-depth discussion I expect to go into each and every one of those darned pub quiz questions before they ask them. Is that too much to ask!?!? Is it!?!??
Oh, it is? Ok then. Nevermind.
Just remembered something, Eonwe. There used to be somewhat of an industry to publish books which were composed of corrected Trivial Pursuit cards.
Depends on definitions. Shanghaiese, Cantonese, Sichuanese, Nanjingese, Wuhanese, Hakka, Taiwanese, various Fujian tounges, etc, are allmutually incomprehensible to native speakers. Now if you want to classify them as a single language Mandarin Chinese or as dialects is to argue over definitions. End of the day, when a native speaker of any of the above named (and many others I haven’t named) tounges tries to communicate with a speaker of another tounge, they can’t and especially vice versa. Not a little bit. Simply can not.
So, do you define the above as a separate language or a dialect? To me it doesn’t matter because they are mutually incomprehensible.
Mandarin has made a lot of inroads but it is not fair to say that a Mandarin speaker can be understood throughout China. Native Mandarin speakers are usually the worst at understanding other Chinese tounges.
As for the written language, newspapers from Taiwan, Hong Kong and China are difficult for native speakers to understand as a lot of different terminology is used. Kinda like reading papers from the US, UK and India.