Hacker News Reader

Well that example is rather radical. As long as you know (or can guess) traditional characters you can read a HK newspaper just fine with a stutter here and there.

That's because newspapers in HK are still written in Modern Standard Chinese most of the time. In less formal contexts such as social media, however, written Cantonese is rather more common.

So the subtitles on HK videos, tv etc are usually sanitized to be standard?

Often yes. For video only the really local content (eg. 100Most) are subtitled in exactly the same characters as the ones actually spoken.

(Edit: actually I just rewatched some 100Most content after I wrote the above and no, sadly even their videos are subtitled in Standard Modern Chinese.)

The Taiwanese equivalent would be:

Does he know how to speak Taiwanese?

他會曉講台語無?

No, he doesn't.

他毋會。

The above is actually somewhat close to the Mandarin version, although many other phrases can vary much more significantly.

This is because we speak Mandarin Chinese in Taiwan, using Traditional, rather than Simplified characters, whereas people in Hong Kong speak Cantonese using Traditional characters. It's a different language entirely.

Similar to how you can use Chinese characters (traditional or simplified, whatever) to write Vietnamese and Korean and Japanese, as used to happen many years ago.

Taiwanese is as different from Mandarin as Cantonese is.

Mandarin is the most commonly spoken language in Taiwan, partly because the Taiwanese language was more or less outlawed during Martial Law rule from 1949 to 1987. It's also the primary language for education.

Taiwanese is still commonly spoken as well though, especially in southern Taiwan, and is actually becoming increasingly common (partly for political reasons, which are a different topic).

For comparison:

他會曉講台語無？ (Taiwanese)

他會講台語嗎？ (Mandarin)

I also intentionally used 講 instead of 說 for the Mandarin version, since both are valid and it makes it more similar.

A bigger difference would be the standard greeting:

你好 (Mandarin)

你食飽未？ (Taiwanese)

The examples you gave are in Traditional Chinese.

Which doesn't really matter in this case. The character for "he" in vernacular Cantonese is "佢", which isn't used at all in Mandarin.

The characters for "don't know how" in vernacular Cantonese are written as "唔識" in traditional Chinese or "唔识" in simplified Chinese, which are used in Mandarin, but never in this context (as the example given, the common way of saying "don't know how" in Mandarin is "不會" in traditional Chinese or "不会" in simplified Chinese").

In a sense, the relationship between various Chinese "dialects" and standard Mandarin Chinese is similar to the Scots language's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language) relationship to English.

Cantonese to Mandarin is like Ebonics to English.

https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hk/%E7%B2%A4%E8%AF%AD#.E4.BF.9D....

In your example:

> 第一及第二人稱用「我」、「你」，與官話相同，但粵語音「我」（ngo5）更保留了中古漢語唐音（*ngɑ̌ ）之疑母（ng-）。第三人稱不用「他」，而是「渠」（俗寫「佢」；東漢《孔雀東南飛》：「雖與府吏要，渠會永無緣」），跟吳語一樣。複數人稱不用「們」，而是上溯至端系的同源形式 [taʔ] 或 [ti]（現代粵語寫作「哋」，本字為「等」，見聖公會的公禱書）。粵語用「係」而不用「是」來代表正面答覆，「係」是明清兩代常用字。這些字眼在中共接管政權初期，仍然有作書面語用，例如李儼《中算史論叢》第一冊 (1955年版本，第210頁) 提及18世紀數學家 Issac Wolfram 時，就寫為「渠係荷蘭礮隊副隊長」。

TL:DR Cantonese is Middle Age "Mandarin" in disguise, plus some Ancient Vietnamese dialects.

IIRC Hakka is closer to an antiquated mandarin than Cantonese is. Also the Chinese "dialects" are different languages. Calling them dialects is like saying Icelandic and Swedish are different dialects of Norse. They're all closely related but not mutually intelligible.