https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_intelligibility#Slavic
Whereas different dialects of Mandarin may not be mutually intelligible
> Many varieties of Mandarin, such as those of the Southwest (including Sichuanese) and the Lower Yangtze, are not mutually intelligible with the standard language
A lot of common, everyday words differ in Ukrainian and or arise from different roots (e.g Polish).
Now I wonder if this number, provided it is a real one, went up or down during the last 30 years. I would bet on lower but it's only a gut feeling.
It's plenty for communication, not plenty for a conversation.
(It's also a mirror for colonialism, by the way, where the occupied speak the language of the occupier, but the occupiers can't be arsed to learn the language of the occupied.)
/s
can't even talk about chips and language without being attacked by the crew
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39294267
• https://german.stackexchange.com/a/53783
It's a linguistic topic. Good luck trying to talk with Germans as an English speaker.
English and German share 60% of vocabulary.
Although as an English-speaking native who has studied German, Dutch often maddeningly looks like it should make sense, but it doesn't.
Do you mean Hakka and/or Hokkien?
Hokkien which is primarily spoken across the strait in Fujian.
Hakka is primarily spoken in Guangdong, Fujian, and Jiangxi.
Xi himself was the Party head of Fujian for most of his career and Xi's father was the Party head of Guangdong when he was rehabilitated in the Deng Xiaoping era.
This is why most manufacturing in China ended up coastal Southern China - most Chinese Taiwanese trace their heritage to there barely 2-5 generations ago at most.
The younger generation (post-1989) in Taiwan speaks and understands Mandarin.
The issue is why would Taiwanese businesses care about the China market? Aside from the fact that the China market is massive, there is a simple answer: Taiwan and China have the same business language, and that is Standard Chinese aka Mandarin.
Yes, lots of Taiwanese people also speak other Sinitic languages that are not Mandarin, and are not mutually intelligible with it. And lots of Chinese people also speak other Sinitic languages that are not Mandarin and are not mutually intelligible with it. And even some variants of Mandarin itself are not mutually intelligible. But - outside of Cantonese in HK and Macau - none of those languages are used as the primary business language anywhere in either China or Taiwan, so it's an interesting side note but doesn't change the point.
All that said, aside from the Chinese market being massive, and the common language being convenient, there is a much bigger elephant in the room that explains why Taiwanese companies might not have a fun time doing business in China: politics.
It doesn't matter how much money Taiwanese companies might want to make if the CCP can threaten to turn off the spigot any time they want to influence Taiwanese politics, which unfortunately nowadays appears to be all the time. Sure, it's leaving a lot of money on the table, but doing business with Japan or the US or other countries that aren't run as a single party dictatorship whose leadership has a stated platform of dismantling your own government might be a less risky option.
我同意。
I was just trying to dig into what OP meant by "Taiwanese" as a language.
It's always going to be Mandarin for anything commercial.
That said, you can't deny the benefit the Hakka and Hokkien diaspora provided to China's manufacturing capacity - it was diaspora Chinese from Thailand (CP Group was the first foreign private company to incorporate in China), Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and Taiwan had on PRC's catchup.
This is because the CCP does not trust southerners (people from Fujian/guangdong especially) and will send northerners in to manage/rule those provinces. China is still afraid of Fujian revolting and joining Taiwan.
If that was the case, then Hakka wouldn't be so overrepresented within the CCP.
Deng Xiaoping himself was Hakka, as were most of the the core CCP leadership until recently [0]
Hakka is the primary language spoken in TW after Mandarin btw.
If you're a fellow Bay Area native, maybe visit Fremont or Richmond District in SF sometime and actually learn about us Asian subcommunities.
> Deng Xiaoping himself was Hakka, as were most of the the core CCP leadership until recently [0]
I’m going to not believe your source given how much wrong you’ve gotten already. But even if true, Chinese identity politics are more attuned to region than ethnicity. Southerners also were trusted because the KMT was heavily southern biased while the communists were the opposite. This is why the capital is in BJ and not NJ.
> Hakka is the primary language spoken in TW after Mandarin btw.
No no no. It is definitely Hokkien, a dialect of Min, which is the base dialect for Fujian.
> If you're a fellow Bay Area native, maybe visit Fremont or Richmond District in SF sometime and actually learn about us Asian subcommunities
Is that some kind of Asian American thing? You can learn plenty about Chinese ethnicities in China, why bother doing it in the states? Southern ethnicities are also over represented in overseas Chinese communities given the propensity of people from GD or FJ to go abroad, and then cultures kind of diverge a bit (another reason the CCP doesn’t trust GD/FJ).
Guang'an, the town he was born, was and is Hakka speaking, after the Hakka-Punti wars were lost by the Hakka.
> Chinese identity politics are more attuned to region than ethnicity
I can agree with that with the post 1970 generation. Deng Xiaoping and his ilk were from before that era, during the Long March.
> It is definitely Hokkien
Yes, Hokkien is prominent in TW but so is Hakka. Around 10% Hakka speaking based on the last census.
> Is that some kind of Asian American thing
Taiwanese (and HK) American specifically. Iykyk I guess. Hence why I equally smell shit from your response.
Except for some slang words which nobody would use in business anyway, Sichuanese is largely intelligible to native Mandarin Chinese speakers if spoken slowly and repeated a couple times. People from Sichuan can also speak standard Mandarin. The written language is identical.
As for Taiwan and China it is even less an issue. The very few words that are different may be the source for some humor sometimes but that's it. It's kind of like how British people say "lift" and Americans say "elevator". If you're not brain-dead you'll figure it out pretty quickly and maybe crack a joke or two about it. When you see a sign that says "lift" you don't panic and say that it's not intelligible, you can make some sense of the word.
It's a non-issue in practical terms.
I have some confidence with dialects of my primary language(not Chinese) within ~150mi of where I am; beyond that, mutual intelligibility with local dialects isn't guaranteed. Yet, those dialects are rarely considered(including by speakers) to be separate from the standard. They're just local accents. That aren't even intelligible to city dwellers.
"Cantonese (traditional Chinese: 廣東話; simplified Chinese: 广东话; Jyutping: Gwong2 dung1 waa2; Cantonese Yale: Gwóngdùng wá) is a language within the Chinese (Sinitic) branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages"