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Comment by tonylinn80 | Hacker News Reader

It's funny to see how westerners talk about dialects in China. Western propaganda worked pretty well I guess :)

And yeah, most Chinese are bi-lingual by default. Now I know I can speak tons of northern Chinese languages. That's a big upgrade!

We all learn classical Chinese at school, and that must be a completely different language. Wait, are "classical Chinese" a single language? Should we count each of those spoken in different dynasty and different regions all as different language? Oh man, I can't even count how many languages I can speak

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I think it's even funnier to see how many Chinese people - even those Chinese people who are fluent in English - take the folksy word 方言 and try and shoehorn that into the precise linguistic term "dialect". For whatever reason Chinese the world over seem to believe in literal 1:1 translations of Chinese -> English terms, when they really don't mean the same thing. It makes it very hard to talk to them.

We all learn classical Chinese at school, and that must be a completely different language.

Of course it's a different language. It's not completely different. Languages can be related to each other. Old English is a different language than English. If English was written in Logograms instead of a phonetic alphabet, many of us could probably read Beowulf the same many of you can read the works of 老子.

Again, if I had the Chinese mindset, there would be a language called "Indo European" which would have various dialects like "Persian" and "Russian" and "Icelandic". There would also be "Standard Indo-European" - aka, English. It makes no sense.

Sure, I love the fact that I can speak many languages. Why not.

If you don't like the translation form 方言 to dialect, should I just call it fangyan or 方言? Or is there a more precise linguistic term for that?

Our definition for "Language" is also different then. Should we call it "Yuyan" instead?

Terms in different languages don't map 1:1. You're trying to fit Chinese square pegs into English round holes. I think this is due to Chinese education methods, since you all do it - even very fluent writers such as yourself.

I'd translate "方言" to "dialect" when it's mutually understandable, and "language" when it's not. So Singapore Hokkien and Taiwan Hokkien are both dialects of the Hokkien language. But I'd translate 方言 to "language" when talking about Mandarin and Hokkien. They're languages not dialects in English because you cannot have a conversation - but they are part of the same language family.

A language is a dialect with army and navy.

If you can fluently understand people across northern China without explicitly learning to, then that means they speak “dialects” of your language.

But hundreds of millions of other people in China natively speak hundreds of other mutually unintelligible Chinese languages. Most of them are (at least) bilingual.

Here is a grossly simplified map showing major language groups: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_sinitic_languages_...

So, even though most people cannot understand some southern dialects when they hear it, they can fluently understand other dialects without explicitly learning to do so when it's written down. Even when you explicitly write down exactly what you say in the dialects (like the Cantonese version of Wikipedia pages), people can still understand it, without much difficulties. And yes, there're some words used differently from standard Chinese, but the difference is not much bigger than the difference between UK and US English.

For that reason, we define them as dialects not languages. We can "speak" other dialects but we can certainly "read" and understand them.

If you find that definition unsatisfying, sure you can call them different languages. We just call them dialects and that's not going to change.

> If you find that definition unsatisfying, sure you can call them different languages. We just call them dialects and that's not going to change.

Sure, if you want to speak Chinglish, keep calling them dialects. If you want to speak English, listen to what people here are telling you.

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