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Comment by afreak | Hacker News Reader

> Of the 70% of the population who can speak Mandarin, many do not do it well enough, a ministry spokeswoman told Xinhua news agency on Thursday.

Keep in mind that there are many dialects of Mandarin and what this ministry is referring to is the fact that people do not speak the Beijing dialect well, which is the national standard.

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"Keep in mind that there are many dialects of Mandarin and what this ministry is referring to is the fact that people do not speak the Beijing dialect well, which is the national standard."

Strictly speaking, 1) there are many dialects of Chinese, not Mandarin. 2) the language many Beijing people speak is not a dialect. It is an accent. Cantonese is a dialect. Wu Chinese is a dialect. Beijing Chinese is an accent. It is definitely not the national standard, although it is the closest to the national standard, compared to other accents.

Generally, linguists would disagree with that - Cantonese is not mutually intelligible with Mandarin, so it's not a dialect, it's a different language, as are Wu, Hakka, etc... There are fairly profound differences between these languages in their spoken form. It is true that they all share a single written language, and a common language ancestry, but Cantonese (the spoken language) is at least as different from Mandarin (the spoken language) as Spanish and Portuguese, or Dutch and German.

I am not a linguist, per se, but my understanding is that there is no formal definition (or even agreement) on what constitutes a separate language versus a separate dialect. Rather, a number of factors are taken into consideration (including political factors), and the distinction is almost always debatable.

While it is desperate for citations, it looks like the Wikipedia article supports that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect#Dialect_or_language

There is also an episode of one of my favorite podcasts (Slate's Lexicon Valley) that focuses on this issue, particularly in regards to what has sometimes been called "Ebonics": http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2012/0...

The common analogy is that Chinese "dialects" are really different languages in the same Chinese language family (they have a common ancestor), the same way that Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Corsican, Catalan, etc. are different languages in the Romance language family (their common ancestor is Latin).

Where it gets confusing is when nationalism gets involved. Mandarin and Wu are different "dialects" of the same "language" because they're from the same country. Italian and Spanish are different "languages" because they're from different countries. It's a political distinction.

Linguists tend toward using mutual intelligibility as the difference between a language and a dialect, but it's fuzzy. Beijing and Shanghai dialect are almost totally mutually unintelligible, but if you walked from Beijing down to Shanghai, each village, town, or city you pass will speak a dialect that's still mutually intelligible with the immediately neighboring village/town/city's.

But really, the words "dialect" and "language" mean essentially the same thing in English.

So, its a "ring language" (by analogy to a "ring species" [1] in biology.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species

The equivalent term in linguistics is "dialect continuum" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_continuum

Agree. It is not sufficient to use mutual intelligibility to distinguish language from dialect.

Ok, then the linguists I read tend to be splitters rather than lumpers. =) This is particularly drama-prone in re: the Chinese languages/dialects due to the tendency for Beijing to attempt to cast all speakers of Chinese languages as in fact speakers of a single language, as part of their attempts to create a single unified Han identity.

But in the end, I really believe that if it weren't for the common written language, no one would ever think of Cantonese as being just a dialect of the same language as Mandarin - the differences between the two spoken languages are so massive.

It involves more than linguistic characteristics to distinguish language from dialect. One can argue for both cases.

I personally prefer to think of Chinese as a language family. It would be a much larger, and very interesting, topic. For the discussion on this thread, I use "dialect" other than "separate languages", since Cantonese, We Chinese, etc. are described as dialects in most materials I read.

What is the reality of Wu on the ground in Shanghai? Do you hear both Mandarin and Wu often, or mostly just one? Which one? I assume everybody can actually speak and understand Mandarin?

Both Mandarin and Wu (or to be specific, many variations of Wu Chinese) are often heard in Shanghai. Mandarin is used as the common language for people who come from all over China.

I see 400 million potential customers that I didn't have before. :-)

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h4-chinese-lite/id689851382?...

I'll have audio in 2-3 months. Now I just need that cheaper iPhone for emerging markets.

And to compete with the Chinese state, which has always made an enormous effort to get its subjects to speak a common language. But iPhone!

He said that 70% do not speak Mandarin, and most of these do not speak "well".

I guess only the "speak well enough" is related to dialects.

The other 30% I think he is referring to people that speak cantonese, and all other interesting languages that exists there, including the mongolian languages (almost everything in China west of the great wall, was originally part of mongolia, like Tibet for example... and thus they have not much to do with China actually, specially Han people).

I hope someday people will figure a way to keep mongolians peaceful without erasing their culture or resorting to extreme tyranny.

Tibet is not Mongolian - they've now got connections in terms of their religious background, but Tibetan is part of the Sino-Tibetan language family, while Mongolian is, unsurprisingly, in the Mongol language family (or if you accept the Altaic hypothesis, it's also part of the larger Altaic family with Turkic and Tungusic languages).

And what's more, take a look at the current state of Mongolia some time - it's a functioning democracy with pretty decent respect for civil liberties and no tendency to invade their neighbors. Yes, there's a long history of semi-nomadic tribes coming out of Central Asia and invading the civilized cultures along the edges of the Eurasian steppes, but that pattern wasn't unique to the Mongols (various Indo-European, Turkic, Tungusic (i.e., Manchu), Magyar and other peoples have played that role over the millennia), and that's been a thing of the past since horse archers became ineffective in war (i.e., once firearms were widespread).

I knew China had different languages but wow there are quite a lot of them

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_China#Spoken_langu...

And some of them sound rather radically different from Mandarin. My wife speaks something called Hangzhou dialect (spoken just a few hours away from Shanghai) and when other Chinese hear it they sometimes think she is visiting from another country. On one occasion some people thought she was speaking English (it sounds nothing like English).

An example of the differences... in Mandarin to say "It is." you would say "Shi de." but in Hangzhou dialect you would say something that sounds like "Zede ye." The adverb "very" is "hen" in Mandarin but sounds like "molaolao" (though colloquially people often just say "mo") in Hangzhou dialect.

The differences between the various dialects are fascinating sometimes radical and they must have developed for many centuries in near isolation from one another to get where they are today.

I'm no expert, but I always wondered if it was a result of the language being tonal. In England, you have dialects that can sound so different that it could be another language to the untrained ear. However as English isn't tonal, there's a larger margin for error (so to speak) - accents can exist without transforming the word. Whereas with a tonal language, an accent could change the language more dramatically.

Though what's also interesting is some of the different languages and dialects in China also have different sentence structures (eg verb placements).

>However as English isn't tonal, there's a larger margin for error

True. The tones are critical in a way that can be very difficult for non-native speakers to grasp. Here are the four tones used with the words mā (mother), má (hemp), mǎ (horse) and mà (to curse) with an extra for ma indicating a question http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRkCf6Djprs.

And in that video she pronounces them far clearer than would be used in actual conversation.

The multisyllabic nature of English and relatively complex sentence structure probably aids comprehension with different accents too.

The history of the language is quite an interesting one, in my opinion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Chinese_phonology

Han people take part of about 91% percent... This 70% may refer to the "standard" mandarin, more like comparing to accents of the same language.

I guess my comment confused people...

Cantonese for example is a Han language.

There are lots of non-mandarin but Han languages, and beside those.there are the languages of non-Han people.

I think you mean Beijing accent. By Chinese standards if one speaks Mandarin with an accent as heavy as Scottish accent is to English, she is deemed to speak Madarin not well enough.

But I like the Scottish accent! Understanding someone from Arberdeen is tough though.

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