How are these defined? Is a language really just a dialect with an Army and Navy?
isn’t it pretty much unintelligible the spoken language rather than the written language?
It’s clear that Cantonese and Mandarin (and twelve other different varieties) are all different languages, in the standard sense of the term:
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=851-16
(That’s the Ethnologue entry on the Chinese branch of the Sino-Tibetan. Yes, I know that Ethnologue is less than perfect. It’s just the best we have at the moment.)
The standard definition is that two varieties are different languages if they are mutually unintelligible. If they are mutually intelligible, they are two dialects of the same language. The various varieties of Chinese are often referred to as dialects, but that’s not accurate given the usual definition of the term. Some people claim that they are dialects because they all use Chinese characters, but that’s really irrelevant. You could do that with any two related languages if you wanted to. The different varieties of Chinese pronounce the characters very differently, have different grammars, and each have words that are expressed by characters that don’t exist in other varieties.
The wisecrack about a language being a dialect with an army and a navy was a joke. It’s an excruciatingly tiresome joke by this point. There are dozens of examples of both mutually intelligible dialects being spoken in different countries and mutually unintelligible (but related) languages being spoken within the same country.
I’m fairly certain they’re considered dialects, but only because China wants them to be considered dialects. However, I think that if you only speak Mandarin, you can’t understand Cantonese, and vice versa, so they should probably be considered separate languages.
On the other hand, I believe that there are “dialects” that really seem to be dialects (vs. Mandarin) according to that definition. I’ve been told that Sichuanese is pretty much the same as Mandarin, though with slightly different pronunciations.
The fact that such dialects might be referred to in the same breath as Cantonese only adds to the confusion, I’m sure.
Yes, if you’ll click on the links (the abbreviations of the language name) in the page that I linked to, you’ll see that most of the fourteen Chinese languages have several dialects themselves.
When my Taiwanese former coworker went to Hong Kong, he had to speak English to the cab drivers.
Also, it is misleading for people to say that Cantonese and Mandarin use the same written language. Educated Cantonese speakers can use standard written Chinese for formal writings. However, this standard written form is entirely based on Mandarin. This is NOT what things would look like if spoken Cantonese is written down verbatim. For informal writings, such as on Internet message boards, or some newspapers, tabloids, magazines, etc, people are increasingly using written Cantonese instead of standard Chinese nowadays. Non-Cantonese speakers, such as new Chinese immigrants in Hong Kong, frequently report great difficulties in comprehending these written materials.
Has the government favored one language over the other? Have they done anything to reduce the problem of a two-language country? Or does everything official get done in the language of whatever region in which it’s happening?
Germans can’t understand Swiss German, which varies a lot in dialects throughout Swiss German-speaking Switzerland.
You’ve been given a line of ‘dog farts’ (goupi). You will have serious trouble understanding a sichuanese speaking accented mandarin. You will find sichuanese to be mutually unintelligible.
ShanghaiM Hangzhou,
suzhou, ningbo all speak mutually understandable dialects. get out to Nanjing and the mutual intelligibility is gone. go north of the Yangzi river and it’s mutually incomprehensible even though the language is only a a wide river away.
China is very far from being just a two-language country. Counting just the languages usually called “Chinese,” it has thirteen languages. (One of the fourteen Chinese languages is only spoken outside of China in central Asia.) Furthermore, there are many non-Chinese languages that have always been spoken in China. Indeed, if you took the areas of China where non-Chinese languages have traditionally been spoken and compared them with the areas of China where Chinese languages traditionally have been spoken, the non-Chinese-speaking areas are actually larger. (Yes, there more speakers of Chinese languages than speakers of non-Chinese languages, but that’s only because the areas where Chinese speakers live are considerably more crowded.) The Chinese government may want the speakers of the dozens (perhaps it’s hundreds, I’m not sure) of all the non-Mandarin speakers to learn Mandarin and give up their native languages, but that would be a horrendously difficult political move.
Here’s a link to the Ethnologue page on the languages of China:
guizot writes:
> Germans can’t understand Swiss German, which varies a lot in dialects
> throughout Swiss German-speaking Switzerland.
Yes, that’s why Ethnologue lists German as actually being a group of related languages rather than a group of dialects:
The government favors - indeed, imposes - Mandarin. Everyone is required to learn Mandarin, from Beijing to Guangdong (“Canton”) to Tibet to Xinjiang - though how well people in far-flung reaches speak it is variable. Then people will speak their own dialect too. And often one or two other dialects, either due to geography or ancestry.
While there are some overlaps (think Italian vs Spanish), there are also some fundamentals that are mutually unintelligible.
E.g.:
Cantonese for “one two three” is “yat yi sam”.
Mandarin for “one two three” is “yi ar san”.
Not certain, but I suspect that Italian and Spanish are a lot more mutually intelligible than Mandarin and Cantonese. Italians and Spaniards can generally make themselves understood to each other if they try.
My wife speaks fluent Cantonese and English, and she took Mandarin as a foreign language in college (in Illinois). It was just about as difficult for her as any other foreign language would have been.
I think Spanish and French may be a better comparison. There are some very significant differences between Mandarin and Cantonese phonology. I’m a native Cantonese speaker, with some knowledge of Mandarin (my parents speak it, but with their own very heavy Indonesian Chinese accent/dialect). I know a little bit of French and Spanish, mostly from taking classes in school, but not very much.
What about, say, Spanish and Portugese? Are those actually any more different than, say, Spanish Spanish and Mexican Spanish?
As a native English speaker who has only studied Spanish in high school I’d say yes. I could converse fairly easily in Spanish with Spaniards, Mexicans, and South Americans. It was much much harder to converse with Brazilians – though maybe that’s a bit removed from Portugal Portuguese.
Yes, actually they are quite different. The written language is very similar and there will be some degree of comprehension in either direction. However, spoken Portuguese uses a lot of elision like French(at least to my ear), so a Spanish-only speaker will understand almost no Portuguese spoken at natural speed outside the classroom. A Lusophone however will often be very successful in understanding spoken Spanish or Italian.
I recently learned that the whole Iberian peninsula is one long language continuum with Spanish at one end, Portuguese at the other end, and dozens of distinct languages in between. Neighboring languages can understand one another, but the intelligibility drops off with distance across the continuum. Probably I’ve oversimplified, but you get the idea. It’s really fascinating.