Chinese v. Mandarin v. Cantonese (General discussion) Language Learning Forum

Chinese v. Mandarin v. Cantonese
Tags: Cultural Identity \| China \| Cantonese \| Dialect \| "Louche" Languages \| Mandarin
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47 messages over 6 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6

vincenthychow
Tetraglot
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Hong Kong
Joined 7110 days ago
136 posts - 145 votes

Speaks: Cantonese, English, German^B1, Japanese
Studies: French

Message 41 of 47

11 February 2011 at 1:47pm | IP Logged

Well, on the contrary, I am frustrated when I hear somebody says that Cantonese is a language but not a dialect. Or sometimes the term "Chinese Languages" is used to regard all Chinese dialects as different languages.

As a native Cantonese, I insist that Cantonese is a dialect but not a language. The language is Chinese where Mandarin is the official dialect.

I easily relate this issue to the unity of our country. Perhaps that's the reason of my view.
4 persons have voted this message useful

jsun
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Message 42 of 47

12 February 2011 at 1:11am | IP Logged

Cultural suppression doesn't help unity and only brings resentment.
Unintelligible languages should be regarded as languages and
actually scholars use "languages".

3 persons have voted this message useful

shk00design
Triglot
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Canada
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747 posts - 1123 votes

Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin
Studies: French

Message 43 of 47

25 May 2013 at 1:08am | IP Logged

While the debate continues one must not forget in the 19th century many places in China did not have many roads
and highways to the outside. Railways built with the help of European colonialists only connect between major
cities. Many regions of the country retain their distinctiveness. Chinese have always recognized people from
various regions as having their distinctive accents, food preferences, etc. In Shanghai there is still a sizeable
population who speaks the Shanghainese dialect and in Guangzhou the Cantonese dialect. In the eyes of many
Chinese being more fluent in 1 dialect over another doesn't make you more or less Chinese. You are as Chinese as
anybody else.
1 person has voted this message useful

Saim
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AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name
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Message 44 of 47

02 June 2013 at 2:34pm | IP Logged

If all speakers are Chinese, and speaking a non-Mandarin vernacular doesn't make you
Chinese, then all the "dialects" are valid forms of Chinese and should all be written and
promoted. You shouldn't try and have it both ways, and I don't think being multilingual
is damaging to a country's unity in and of itself.
2 persons have voted this message useful

Medulin
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Message 45 of 47

03 June 2013 at 2:17am | IP Logged

Formal written Mandarin and formal written Cantonese are almost the same,
not any more different than Nynorsk and Bokmaal.

On Hong Kong news, you hear Cantonese readings of Mandarin.
The grammar is 100% Mandarin.
Grammar is the core of a language, not phonology.

Written Cantonese is only used in gossip magazines of questionable quality.

(If you read written Mandarin with Japanese readings of hanzi,
should it be regarded as Mandarin or as Japanese.
It is Mandarin, but read as if it were Japanese.

Standard written language in Hong Kong and Macau is Mandarin,
but read as if it were Cantonese (hanzi's are read in a HK/MC fashion, and not in 普通話 ).

So, the situation in Hong Kong and Macau is diglossic.
H-variant (the written one) is Mandarin (in traditional script)
L-variant (the spoken one) is Cantonese.
This is similar to Standard Arabic (H) vs Gulf Arabic (L) vs Moroccan Arabic (L).

Edited by Medulin on 03 June 2013 at 2:29am
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yong321
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United States
yong321.freeshe
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Studies: Spanish

Message 46 of 47

08 June 2013 at 4:16am | IP Logged

jsun said in message 42:

> Unintelligible languages should be regarded as languages and
> actually scholars use "languages".

Your quoted text doesn't seem to support your claim. Even if it did, that rule should carefully qualify the meaning of unintelligibility. Does it refer to speaking and listening, or reading and writing? Chinese is a special language in the sense that these two dimensions are "orthogonal" so to speak. Medulin in message 45 explains it well.

If the said rule is unconditionally held correct, we may say Chinese and Cantonese are two languages when spoken, and one language when written.
1 person has voted this message useful

Victor Berrjod
Diglot
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Norway
no.vvb.no/
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Speaks: Norwegian*, English
Studies: Japanese, Korean, Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Mandarin, Cantonese

Message 47 of 47

14 June 2013 at 2:14am | IP Logged

Our introductory course book in linguistics at the University of Oslo has a whole chapter dedicated to the question of language vs dialect and related issues (Theil 2005: 464). If you can read Scandinavian, I recommend you go ahead and read it. I'll translate some relevant parts of it into English:

Quote:

(p. 468)
"The words language and dialect – in the meaning we used them in the previous paragraph – are, when it comes down to it, so problematic that we won't consider them linguistic terminology, but everyday words for linguistic phenomena. We won't try to define the meanings of these words precisely and scientifically, but rather – in paragraph 16.3 – find our way to everyday meanings and try to understand the thought process behind them, because they play an important role in the everyday understanding of linguistic phenomena and affect linguistic attitudes. And we will show why language and dialect are so problematic as linguistic terms. But first we will introduce some linguistic terms that make it a little easier to discuss language and dialect."

"Linguistic features are fundamental building blocks in human language. Linguistic features can be words, sounds, morphs, meanings, and grammatical constructions.

When two human beings don't talk in the same way, it's because they don't use the same linguistic features."

(p. 469)
"A social usage area is the situations a linguistic feature can be used in, and is limited on grounds of specific features of the speaker (1. person), one or more listeners (2. person), and other persons (3. person), as well as the relations between these persons."

(p. 472)
"On grounds of the term linguistic feature, we can then define language variety:

A language variety is a set of linguistic features that have the same social usage area and that belong to one and the same individual."

(p. 473-475)
"As we mentioned first in paragraph 10.2, it's not possible to give the words language and dialect precise definitions. (...) We act as if language and dialect have simple meanings and as if there existed clearly distinct languages and dialects in the world, and much of what we believe and mean about language is strongly affected by these ideas, which can therefore help the linguists when they want to explain the geographical and social variation."

"The word dialect comes from Classical Greek diálectos, which among other things was used to refer to the various geographical varieties of Greek in Antiquity. The most important ones – Doric, Ionic, and Attic – were not only spoken languages, but were also written. Also the later koiné, in Greek he koinè diálektos 'the common dialect', which The New Testament is written in, was called diálektos, as we see from the Greek term.

In many modern European languages – also Norwegian – dialect is used roughly as in Classic Greek, namely with this meaning:

DIALECT. MEANING 1.
A dialect is a variant of a language which is used by many of the people who live or have lived within a certain geographic area.

(...)

There are many reasons for why the word dialect – with the above meaning – doesn't work well as a linguistic term, despite its working so in daily life. First of all, the dialect is considered a variant of a language, and that presupposes that we know what a language is. (...) Secondly, a language can't – in the cases where a language can be defined in a reasonable way – be divided into a certain amount of dialects. (...) Third, the term is problematic because it invites us to overlook the social variation (...).

Not so rarely, we hear people claim that they have no dialect, or that they talk dialect-free. Then, dialect has another meaning:

DIALECT. MEANING 2.
A dialect is a variant of a language which diverges from the standard language and is spoken by many of the people who live or have lived within a certain geographic area, and especially in rural areas or in another part of the country.

(...) This second meaning of the word dialect is probably more common than the first one. In the first meaning, all dialects are considered equal, but in this second meaning, the standard language isn't called a dialect, and the standard language has a higher status than the dialects. (...)

As linguists, it's not our job to claim that a certain meaning of the word dialect is more correct than other meanings. Firstly, that would be prescriptive activity, and linguistics is, like other sciences, descriptively oriented. Secondly, such prescriptive activity would give the impression that some meanings have more scientific support in linguistics than the others, which is not the case. At the same time, it has to be said that when linguists use the word dialect, they often give it the first meaning, while the second meaning is more common outside of linguistic circles, and this has created a false impression that meaning 1 is more "scientific" than meaning 2."

(p. 475-476)
"The word language is polysemic, and we mustn't get other and irrelevant meanings mixed up in the discussion. When we say that language and thought are closely connected, or that only human beings can acquire language, we are using language in another way than if we say that there are over 2000 languages spoken in Africa, or that Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish are different languages, and it's only the latter meaning that interests us here.

Just like dialect, language is not a linguistic term, but an everyday word with a meaning that's reasonable to list as follows:

A language is a set of ways to talk which has these features:
- those who speak in these ways understand each other.
- these ways of talking are not mutually intelligible with other ways of talking.
- one of these ways of talking is a standard language.

It's possible that other elements should be included in the meaning of a language, but the ones above gives a good starting point for a discussion.

A way of talking is intended as an unprecise, non-linguistic term which from a linguistic point of view can include one or more varieties. The meaning of language is a prototypical category, so that a set of ways to talk can be considered a language even if not all of the points in the list are true."

(p. 478-479)
"We define the term dialect continuum like this:

A dialect continuum is a network of linguistic varieties where all the neighbouring varieties are mutually intelligible, but where varieties further away from each other don't have to be mutually intelligible.

(...)

In Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, we find the Continental Nordic Dialect Continuum. Not all varieties in these three countries belong to this dialect continuum, because Sami, Kven, and other varieties break the chain of mutually intelligible varieties.

(...)

Why do we still separate different languages from each other along these dialect continua in Northern and South-Eastern Europe? The reason lies in the standard language."

(p. 484-485)
"We have claimed that the meanings of dialect and language aren't linguistic terms, but would it be possible to make more precise linguistic definitions of the two words? The answer seems to be no, and we will say a little more about why.

Such definition would have to be grounded in something we have already defined, namely the variety, which belongs on the plane of the individual. Both dialect and language would then have to be defined either as a set of varieties or as generalizations over certain sets of varieties. But how many and what varieties should be included in the sets, and why? As we have already seen, we wouldn't be able to avoid non-linguistic factors such as administrative borders, which from a linguistic standpoint are completely random. And what kind of generalizations would one be able to make? (...) We quickly discover that it's difficult to talk about any Norwegian language without considering the standard languages Nynorsk and Bokmål.

It's not hard to show that we don't get any further than to the everyday meanings that we have presented earlier. They work well in everyday life, and it would be a misunderstanding to believe that the words dialect and language "really" have more precise definitions in linguistics."

Source:
Theil, Rolf (2005): Language Variation in Kristoffersen, Kristian Emil; Simonsen, Hanne Gram; Sveen, Andreas (red.) (2005): Språk: en grunnbok. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
(Some of the formatting doesn't match.)

I agree with professor Theil. It's very clear that language and dialect aren't precise terms at all. They are simply nonsensical in a linguistic perspective. So we're left with their everyday meanings, which vary from speaker to speaker. I personally like to be somewhat consistent, so I usually call two varieties "languages" if they can't understand each other, and dialects if they can. In the case of a dialect continuum (which I understand Wu Chinese (or at least large parts of it) to be, I tend to say dialects when speaking generally or about mutually intelligible varieties only, and languages when talking about two or more mutually unintelligible varieties.

If I'm not talking about parts of the dialect continuum, but the continuum as a whole, I tend to say "language" for practical reasons, and because the everyday meaning of "dialect" for me is "a variety of a language". A dialect continuum consists of what I usually call "dialects" and so "language" is kind of a natural appellation.

Ari wrote:

But if you distinguish dialect and language in terms of mutual intelligibility, you'll have to call Swedish a "dialect of Scandinavian". And nobody does that.

No, you won't, because "Swedish" doesn't make sense unless by "Swedish" you mean a specific dialect. You'll have to consider all the dialects of spoken in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark dialects of Scandinavian. Except Älvdalska probably, since that appears to not be part of the dialect continuum. If we agree on this amended requirement, then you're still right that *most* people don't, but I, for one, do consider myself a native speaker of Scandinavian. :)

Ari wrote:

And you run into serious trouble in dialect gradients, where the spoken dialect in each village is mutually intelligible with the one in the next, but becomes increasingly unintelligible the farther you go.

I agree. Dividing the dialects of a dialect continuum in a consistent, meaningful way is more or less impossible, just look at the border areas of Sweden, and the Romance dialect continuum. We tend to just default to talking about the standard languages, and just subsume anything spoken inside the same country as them under the umbrella term of the nationality adjective, like "Norwegian", "Swedish", "Chinese".

I personally consider Cantonese a language rather than a dialect, from my everyday-language criteria for a language (mutual (un)intelligibility). I have a common goldlist for Cantonese and Mandarin, though, because the nature of the writing system and the amount of cognates facilitates it, but I could also have done the same with Cantonese and Japanese or Korean, because of the shared vocabulary, but since CantoDict has Canto and Mando, that's what I ended up with.

EDIT: Then again, there are those that consider Cantonese a dialect of Yue Chinese, but I personally don't, because my Cantonese friends don't understand other varieties of Yue.

Edited by Victor Berrjod on 14 June 2013 at 2:23am

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