In contrast the Japanese government recognizes about four indigenous races.
Granted, Han Chinese in the modern sense is a bit of a constructed identity (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6e312e/is_th...), but it’s a construction that has held up in China.
With the exception of Guangdong and Hong Kong, you aren’t going to find many TV stations or newspapers that are carrying content in non-Mandarin Chinese. Yes, when I visit older family in the countryside, they may still speak their local dialect, but that is becoming increasingly rare: https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/06/on-saving-....
Unlike in the US where African and French influences produced creole, and American pop culture has strong African and Latin influences, I don’t think minority group culture in China has anywhere near the same pull. Yes, they may trot out ethnic minority performers once a year during the CCTV New Year’s Gala, but you will not find “minority” singers charting on best seller lists, or “minority” actors in leading entertainment roles.
A 90%+ majority ethnic group is on par with what we see in Western Europe. Do Europeans see themselves as primarily multi-ethnic states? The self-description of a “melting pot” that is commonly used in the US, Canada, and even Central America don’t seem to be nearly as prevalent in Europe.
Just a quick clarification: Mandarin is a spoken form of Chinese, and therefore cannot be "printed" in a newspaper. In Guangdong, the newspapers are printed in simplified Chinese characters. In Hong Kong, the newspapers are printed in traditional Chinese characters.
Simplified vs traditional is a different issue, and all dialects can be written in either simplified or traditional. Which is more prevalent usually depends on tradition, and relations with the PRC. Singapore and the PRC use simplified, while Taiwan, HK, and Japanese Kanji use traditional.
You meant that there are only less than 100 novels written in Romanian? If yes, that's one of the most absurd claims I've read in my life.
[1]https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=2&...
It’s much more similar to the sistuation with Arabic where the various “dialects” are as distinct from each other as the Romance languages, i.e. French, Spanish, Italian etc. but the only written standard is Modern Standard Arabic. Mandarin or something close to it is at least someone’s native tongue. MSA is about as close to Maghrebi or Mashreqi Arabic as Latin is to Portuguese or Romanian.
For example, 火, the character for fire, is a (slightly) stylized brushstroke picture of a fire.
Mutually unintelligible communications that use the same pictures are distinct languages, but there are political implications to acknowledging this, so they’re “dialects”. As the saying goes, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.
If you want to learn more the Wikipedia article is a great place to start.
Mandarin and Cantonese are regional dialects, Mandarin gained prominence because emperors from about the 1600s resided in Northern China and in Beijing which used a lot of Mandarin Chinese, thus it spread due to being a prestige language used by the royal family and their courtiers. Cantonese is prominent in certain areas of Southern China in the Guangdong and Guangxi provinces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_Chinese
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese
Hong Kong and Taiwan uses Traditional Chinese, Mainland China and Singapore/Malaysian Chinese uses Simplified Chinese for their text.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese_characters
I personally find fangyan as a better descriptor than dialect:
http://dictionary.pinpinchinese.com/definitions/s/%E6%96%B9%...
No it's not, because it's fundamentally confused about what it means to write a language down.
> I personally find fangyan as a better descriptor than dialect
The literal translation of fangyan is "topolect", i.e. "the way people talk in a certain place". It only came to mean "dialect" due to some weird miscommunication when Western linguistic terminology was introduced in China. So that's the translation dictionaries give, and it's correct except when it's used to describe languages within China, where the traditional meaning of "topolect" continues to be used.
Traditional and Simplified Charcters are only barely relevant to this. The only spoken varieties of Chinese with vernacular literatures are Mandarin and Cantonese. All writing in Chinese is in one or the other. Even in Hong Kong and Macau the overwhelming majority of writing is in Mandarin. It follows Mandarin grammar and vocabulary and can be read without any special difficulty by Mandarin monoglots. Written Cantonese is basically unintelligible to them. It’s used for songs, occasionally subtitling, a very small corpus of fiction and dialogue in court transcripts and scripts. This is orthogonal to the use of Traditional or Simplified characters. You can write any of the dialects of Serbo-Croatian in Latin or Cyrillic characters. That doesn’t make any of them Russian, or German.
My question is: if this is true, why the heck is the pronunciation for standard Mandarin so different from the standard Beijing and northern accents? Seriously, especially with all the "er"s at the end of various characters. It does not sound similar to what is taught in standard Mandarin classes, and I speak as one who learned standard Mandarin for a number of years (in Canada and in China) and also lived in Beijing for a bit. I'd really like this explained to me, because the ear test tells me this is not true. But again, I've heard it said so many times that I am willing to consider it's possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_language
It appears to be a Tai Chinese creole or mixed language (like a creole but without the massive simplification in grammar).
Yi(Loloish) is definitely a different language family though that wouldn’t stop people writing in Mandarin if they really wanted to. Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese were all written as if they were Classical Chinese to greater or lesser extents until relatively recently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loloish_languages
I’ve heard Sichuanese described as Mandarin without tones. All of Sìchuān speaks different forms of Mandarin for the same reason Manchurians do, recent massive resettlement, though not as recent as in 东北.
If Sichuanese sounds similar to Mandarin due to migration, it would certainly explain a lot. Thanks for that bit of information. But I would say that the differences between Sichuanese and standard Mandarin would be more from pronunciation differences than tonal differences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuosu_language
> Nuosu is one of several often mutually unintelligible varieties known as Yi, Lolo, Moso, or Noso; the six Yi languages recognized by the Chinese government hold only 25% to 50% of their vocabulary in common. They share a common traditional writing system, though this is used for shamanism rather than daily accounting.
I bow to your superior expertise when it comes to the differences between Sichuanese and Mandarin but all of Sìchuān is definitely part of the Mandarin speaking area.
The book to buy if you’re interested in this is the Language Atlas of China.
Europe is very much a melting pot, to a degree that would surprise many Americans. We don't necessarily have as many black or brown faces, but our cities often have very large populations of recent immigrants with strikingly different cultural values. Britain has about the same number of Muslims as the United States, despite having about a fifth of the overall population.
Fox News ran stories about "no-go areas for non-Muslims" in Britain, which is completely bogus and hugely incendiary but reflects the large and concentrated population of Muslims. The cities of Blackburn, Birmingham, Bradford and Leicester all have Muslim populations of over 20%; it's not unusual to find primary (elementary) schools that are >90% Muslim. There are neighbourhoods where the majority of women wear headscarves and the majority of restaurants and supermarkets sell Halal food. Choosing not to integrate is very much an option in most of Europe, so a lot of places feel very foreign.
A quick search leads me to this Wikipedia entry that claims exactly that:
As of 2010, the combined population of officially recognised minority groups comprised 8.49% of the population of mainland China.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/8ojye4/percentage_...
Perhaps a better metric would be the ratio of the dominant ethnic group to the whole population which Japan is perhaps is the country that has the highest one.