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Comment by speeder | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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

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).

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

>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.

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.

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