Isn't Mandarin Chinese understood on all China, from Xinjiang to Canton?
It's a kind of second language for many, with younger generations generally being more fluent than their elders. Like the Indonesian dialect, it's somewhat forced by recent government mandate except for the North where it's from.
The frequency of overhearing people asking each other for more clarification showed me that language barriers existed, even among university students. English by contrast is much more consistent and far less ambiguous among accents and dialects across the globe.
At first when people complimented me on my English, I didn't really understand why until I realized most Chinese are not fluent in Mandarin in the way I am fluent in English. It seemed they thought the same fluency disparity would exist among US natives with English.
It blew my mind a little bit, especially realizing the administrative nightmare it must be to run a country of over 1.3 billion people with so many languages.
What your Indian friend experienced could be because of an assumption that many people in the north make about Hindi being the lingua franca around the country. The truth is that while Bollywood has made Hindi more widespread than it otherwise would be, every section of the country its non-Hindi languages, be it west, east, north east or the south, resists the imposition of Hindi by governments. People in many states, not just in the south, may not even understand Hindi or speak it even if their languages are closer to Hindi.
Among Indians, only someone from some of the northern states (where Hindi is the official language) would mistakenly think of Hindi as a "national language" or a bridge language.
It seems India’s education has done well for introducing English to the young kids.
You still have huge language barriers. I am impressed by the diversity of the world. m
Most software is still very US centric and that makes me sad at times. English became a standard because the Victorian empire was very good at colonizing and pushing their ideas down other cultures’ throats. Good for them.
But when one learns other languages, you begin to realize how broken and inconsistent English is. If English would be a programming language, it would be PHP.
The languages [1] of the 4 southern states of India are somewhat different from Hindi and other northern, central, western and eastern Indian languages (not too sure about the north-eastern states like Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, etc., though I guess even they have some Sanskrit influence, e.g. even two of those state names are Sanskrit-based - Manipur means jewel city and Meghalaya means abode of clouds - roughly).
I say "somewhat different" because, some of the the southern languages do have some Sanskrit influence and Sanskrit or Sanskrit-derived words, like the other ones do. I think the others are supposed to have much more Sanskrit influence. For example if you understand Sanskrit you can understand a lot of Hindi, and vice versa. (Studied both in school for some years.)
[1] Tamil in Tamil Nadu, Malayalam in Kerala, Telugu [2] in Andhra Pradesh (and now Telengana, which split off from Andhra some years ago), and Kannada in Karnataka are the 4 main southern languages, although there are dialects of them, and probably some other less well-known languages too (Tulu is one - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulu_language ). The amount of variety and diversity on many fronts in India is amazing.
For example, I did not know for a long time that Modi script was an alternative script earlier used to write the Marathi language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modi_script
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telugu_language - see the part about it being called "the Italian of the East" :) - I used to think that it was because it is lilting or sort of rolls off your tongue, like Italian (guessing), but saw in the article that it is because words end with vowels in both languages.
The more you try to put India in a box to simplify things, the more complex it gets. Joan Robison, a Cambridge Economist once said "whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true."
Canton (guangzhou) speaks Cantonese, Shanghai speaks Shanghainese, and so it goes, with none of these languages having much at all to do with Mandarin (The Shanghainese use of tones is closer to Scandinavian languages than other Chinese languages!). In Hong Kong, Mandarin would be your third language in school, unused in public except to communicate with visiting mainlanders.
Writing is basically isolated from the spoken language, so there the primary concern is that some areas use traditional Chinese, whereas others use simplified.
Cantonese isn't very special as Chinese dialects go; e.g. Taiwanese/Fujianese (Min Chinese) are just as proud of their dialect (more so in Taiwan where the push for mandarin is not as strong as on the mainland).
Mandarin words are also adopted in local languages to fill gaps by the younger generations, just like English words are often put to use in the west. Not as fully incorporated loan-words, but just as a Mandarin word randomly injected into a foreign language sentence (Those speaking Cantonese use English words instead).
However, the native tongue of the younger generations is not Mandarin, at least not in any of the areas I have knowledge of.
Source: Married to a native Shanghainese (who is in the 20-30 range) who spend half her life in Hong Kong, and thus spoke Cantonese, Shanghainese, Mandarin and English fluently out of necessity (more western languages have been added to the list later on).
It's also true that provinces with rich cultures far away from Beijing continue to have their local dialects thrive. This is very true of Guangdong and Sichuan/Chongqing (see Sichuan rap). Yunnan also is quite noted for having many minorities and dialects still being preserved. The same cannot be said for Shanghai, where the younger generation have been eager to adopt to just speaking Mandarin as the mainstream thing to do. I had a girlfriend from Wuhan, and she grew up listening to the dialect there but her parents never encouraged her to converse in it, so she only speaks Mandarin.
I recall a trip to Shanghai a while back where my wife mentioned that her Shanghainese was rusty, which she felt resulted in her being considered foreign. It would appear to me that people were still preferring Shanghainese, although she did mention that Mandarin words were used at random.
Are you talking about a younger generation yet, or might I have been misunderstanding something (very probable)? I'd ask her myself, but she's in Mainland doing research right now, and The Great Firewall makes communication patchy at best. :/
The former are likely to speak at least a little Shanghainese, but limited due to only using it at home and with some of their friends. The latter don't really have a need to learn Shanghainese, because Mandarin is the language used in school and for all kinds of business.
Personally, I only know one native Shanghainese speaker. Because my friends are university students from all over the country, the actual proportions are likely not as extreme, but I still think that Shanghainese speakers are a minority by now.
According to her though, everyone in her city speaks the local dialect, and they only speak Mandarin if needed.
What might be unusual in the US though is that it's a big country in both population and geographic size, and yet the amount of regional variation in the primary tongue is quite limited. I think the UK and Germany have considerably more variation, even though they're smaller countries.
It's analogous to large parts of the US outside the Northeast Corridor using various dialects of American Sign Language, which is written the exact same as American English, but only among people from their home city, and also having varying degrees of command over spoken English.
ASL is an utterly different language from English. Your sentence is equivalent to saying that because a person speaks Cantonese but writes English, Cantonese is the same as English.
"English can be represented through fingerspelling or artificial systems like Signed Exact English or Cued Speech. But these are codes for spoken or written language, not languages themselves." from http://mentalfloss.com/article/13107/7-things-you-should-kno...
It is a common misconception, because English speaking people are generally taught Signed Exact English and see it used for real time translation, but that has no grammatical crossover with ASL.
Oliver Sacks wrote a fabulous book on the subject: Seeing Voices.
I've been in the middle of Sichuan (in Tibetan counties), many of the older people don't understand mandarin while the younger people do. The same applies to rural Xinjiang.
Definitely Mandarin will get you farther in China than English, but it isn't quite universal yet.