In the Balkans we have the opposite issue. Many Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, and even some Montenegrins all claim to speak different languages and we have all separately attempted to manufacture additional differences, such as Croats making up new words (some of them say "Zrakomlat" which means "air-beater" instead of "Helikopter") or Montenegrin adding some new letters that nobody actually uses. It might make a good video but then again perhaps the comments section would be too much of a nightmare to justify making it.
It would've make sense to call them different languages if they were at least based on different unintelligible dialects. But they're not. They're literally all based on the same Štokavian lol. If Croatia close Čakavian as official Croatian, I'd believe it's a different language, as it's closer to Slovene than to Serbo-Croatian. But they didn't.
I wonder, if more states start to form in Yugoslavia will we see more brand new languages? Independent Herzegovina? Herzegovinian language. Next what? Istrian language? Dalmatian language? Metohijan language ?
As a very left wing person from former Yugoslavia I personally feel more connected to Yugoslavia(even tho I do have A LOT of issues with all Yugoslav governments) than I do to the idea of my so called republic, and as such I feel like my language is Yugoslav with my regional dialect or accent. I know this opinion isn't that popular tho.
Imagine a Chinese person living somewhere in remote area of southern China. So they are able to speak: - some dialect of their village which is not mutually intelligible with neither Mandarin or Cantonese - Standard (Guangzhou) Cantonese - Standard Mandarin ...at the same time. So this person actually knows THREE languages, but one might say 'they only speak Chinese'.
Accurate👍 I speak standard mandarin and a southern sinitic language. The two are very different and unintelligible from each other but no one calls me bilingual in China!
YES I speak mandarin, one southwest dialect while able to use a bit abt another five dialects from north and east areas. And the interesting part is as I have too many dialect I have no accent in mandarin and can actually understand most dialects except those from the most south area.(eg, hokkin) But ALL these thing I understand is considered as only knowing one language lol. So sometimes I feel my first language shouldn’t be mandarin but Chinese lol.
@@alexshi9320 What do you mean by that? Do you think English-only speakers can understand Italian-only speakers or some other permutation of that? In both scenarios, both people speak 3 languages.
@@alexshi9320 it's more like them speaking Standard Latin in school and hearing it in the news, speaking Italian in formal and semi-formal contexts, and speaking Romanian literally everywhere else
I wish you'd gotten into the additional complications posed by the writing-system making the question of mutual intelligibility in Chinese's case more complicated, because whether two speakers can understand each other doesn't necessarily correlate to whether two writers can, and a country where that's the case, without resorting to diglossia is pretty much unique to this one case.
There is no mutual intelligibility, in writing, between the different languages. Citizens of mainland China can understand each other in writing ...because they learn to read and write in Standard Mandarin, in school. So a speaker of Hakka Chinese and a speaker of Min Chinese, who don't understand each others speech, being able to understand each other by writing in Mandarin, is no different from an Italian and Egyptian both understanding each other, by using the English they both learnt in school ...but you wouldn't say that, that says anything about how close Italian and Arabic are, now would you?
@@Hositrugun It's a widely spread myth, often cited from from seemingly reliable sources, so even if your not at all gullible, it's still easy to be fooled into believing it. You can hardly be faulted, for that. And you immediately accepted that you were mistaken, when faced with contrary evidence. That is good ...and, sadly, very rare.
@@PlatinumAltaria The universal understanding of emojis, is greatly exaggerated. Sure, everyone understands 🙂and 🙁, but beyond that it gets tricky. Especially as the same emoji can look *_very_* different, like completely different things, depending on the system/site/font.
As someone whose great-grandparents emigrated to Hawai`i 110 years ago speaking Hakka, this interests me. My grandmother was bilingual (oral only for Hakka) to speak to her parents, my mother only knew a handful of words to speak to her grandparents. I speak NONE. Similarly for the Portuguese side of my mom's dad's family where my great grandparents came from Madeira to Hawai`i 150 years ago. I also speak no Portuguese.
My great-grandparents came to the US around the same time, but no one after my grandpa's generation speaks any Croatian. Probably because of the world wars, no one wanted their kids to be speaking strange European languages.
note: Makes sense since coastal peoples of China moved to Hawai'i en masse as laborers in the sugar plantations etc. Hakka and basically any topolect that isn't Cantonese and Mandarin (and to a lesser extent Hokkien when the RoC tries to flex political capital) has the issue where since there's no large scale institutions promoting, making things are quite difficult despite official documentation from both scholars in the RoC, PRC, S'pore and Malaysia. Even had you remained in China, many young Hakka and Teochews speakers learn Mandarin instead and lose the ability to talk to their grandparents as these languages diverged very very long ago starting from the Song-Tang era in the 700s. Many ABCs also learn Mandarin hoping to communicate with their parents or grandparents, not realizing that it will do nothing compared to learning their native Hokkien or Cantonese. If this is the current situation in some places, especially in rural America, I cannot conceive of how it would be for the average less well known Topolect. this is a pretty big issue which led to Singapore actually loosening Mandarin education while still promoting it, especially as young people perceive the language as being a conservative force and thus do not learn it... also there's a lot of mass media for Canto and Mandarin. (Hokkien gets some too). You can probably learn Hakka by yourself still considering wiki has characters with IPA sounds and the tones aren't that bad. Digitization has made Chinese much easier to learn. Wu Chinese kind of has a life to it but only because Shanghai people are quite erudite enough to maintain the entire Wu branch on their shoulders. (This may not last.) State power is quite not the force which defines these as languages. They are already languages much further apart than most of the Romance ones, the issue is the lack of state power and intentional alternative information efforts from the PRC combines with a lot of ignorance and apathy from the West to create the perfect breeding ground for a permanent inaction.
@@SupaKoopaTroopa64 thing with the Topolects or Sinalects is that actually the top three live on very well. I've met some Hokkien speakers here and I can't understand anything which they say, but I can sort of get the feeling of what they say the general topic or one out of every hundred words. Additionally, with non Chinese languages like Japanese, the language has lived on with powerful institutions despite all difficulties and trials. This does not happen on the same scale for any topolect aside from Mandarin, even though Japan went on to lose that war. I am certain that the issues for East Asian languages are due to ignorance, apathy, and no funding. Especially the Chinese ones.
language loss and assimilation is genuinely so heartbreaking watching it happen in real time. my parents speak hakka but because we don’t live with our grandparents they rarely speak it anymore. it sucks not knowing if i’ll ever be able to learn it.
That fuzzy line between what is a language and what is a dialect arises to me quite often. When an old swiss friend of mine starts talking in switzerlandish and I can understand 50% of what he's saying, sometimes less than that. The other half composes of words completely obscure to me. But we call it a German dialect. I'd rather say its another language.
Dialect continuum. That's what happened when a group of horseriding shepherd families migrating west to Europe and east to Kazakhstan (Indo Europeans).
Taiwanese here. In today's age, we speak mostly Mandarin. Hokkien being the second most common, and there's also Hakka and various other languages. A funny thing is that many Taiwanese, when speaking in Hokkien and don't know what a certain word is in Hokkien, they fill it up with Mandarin words. Or just throw in Hokkien words in Mandarin in casual conversations. Plus the amount of Japanese loan words (some of which are loan words itself) in Taiwanese Hokkien. We jokingly called this mix 臺灣國語 (Taiwanese National Language).
I also hear English words thrown in, especially for the older generations who got their university education in the US and don't know some technical terms in Mandarin. I hear some of the young kids are now incorporating a little Korean now too from Kdramas they are watching.
4:34 Kinda of a Philippines moment right there, not learning the standardized Tagalog ("Filipino") is seen as unpatriotic and it is displacing the use of other native languages, and now other languages are declining since parents are unwilling to pass them down and are confused as being low-grade "dialects" ("Filipino" being the "national language"). Massive threat to the linguistic diversity of the Philippines, funny how they present Filipino as "our" native language during Buwan ng Wika (Month of Language) while stepping on our actual native languages
Isn't it funny, speaking a language that your ancestors spoke for a thousands years (Ilocano for example) is seen as unpatriotic, but speaking the language brought by colonizers and which makes your identity closer to the one of the former colonizers (English) is not. Post colonial nations language policy in a nutshell.
@@danielzhang1916 not sure? Stop considering artificial borders drawn by colonizers as inherently very important. You don't need to "nation build". Each Asian tribe of the Philippine Archipelago should still speak their own language. The country of the "Philippines" did never exist before the Spanish colonizers. Make the country run like a multi-ethnic, plurinational and multilingual federation. Make each region develop and support their own language and also culture in that language, and not some made-up, artificial "Filipino culture" created by broadcasting all TV in Tagalog and making everyone buy Tagalog books.
we dont have that problem here in indonesia. we simply grew up with (both) local language and indonesian. we use local language in daily conversation and exposed to indonesian in TV, books, etc. we are natively bilingual. hence we never have the need to "learn" indonesia as our second language. some even grow up in 2 local languages, that makes them trilingual since childhood.
I do think this is also partially due to the disconnect between non-native English speakers and native English speakers, because in English it would seem weird to use the term 'standard French' or 'standard Spanish', in such countries, depending on the region a person is from, those terms could very well be used. From my own personal experience growing up speaking a 'dialect' of our national language, it's quite common for us to refer to the national language as 'standard' instead of just its name, even though you would never use such a term in English.
With English speakers, we're probably less likely to notice the heterogeny of other languages, but at the same time we don't say "Standard English," not because there's only 1 English, but because there is no _Standard._ There are 2 different dialects that one might argue as "Standard" which are "Received Pronunciation" in England and "General American" in USA, and that doesn't even cover every country English is spoken in.
@@angeldude101 Probably because for a lot of languages that serve as official languages of nation states, there are governmental organisations that regulate the language, in terms of spelling, pronounciation or whatever else, which really does not exist in English at all.
I guess the term Mandarin Chinese is more intuitive, though that does confuse the issue somewhat. Because in other cases we'd use the reverse. e.g. Australian English, not English Australian. So perhaps the term Chinese Mandarin would better align with the intuition of most English speakers. To make the use of "standard" a bit easier to intuit for international languages, you can imagine that if a country's name is used _instead_ of the language (where the two are not the same), the language is implied. So e.g. Standard Mexican is short for Standard Mexican Spanish. So the full name would be "Standard ", where either of the latter two can be omitted depending on whether it'd be ambiguous. For instance, there's not a non-UK dialect of Welsh (as far as I'm aware, anyway) so Standard Welsh makes sense. You don't have to say Standard U.K. Welsh. That's just redundant.
Thats because the “standard” would just be the usual name and then any others will be called by their respective name. Like Spanish is just called Spanish and other languages in sodium like Catalan would be called Catalan not un standard Spanish
nice video, love from China. 吴语、粤语、官话事实上都是在中古汉语的基础上对发音进行简化，或者说，偷懒；因此南方的方言在声母上、前后鼻音上有所简化，而北方官话则舍去了入声调。有一点作者没有提到的是，最开始民国政府推行过一段时间的“老国音”，一套融合官话与吴语的语言标准，来作为官方语言；但由于这种“人造”的语言大家学起来都有困难，最后仍然被官话的一种（也就是后来的普通话）取缔。Hope you could make more videos about comparing different languages!
thank you for this video. my great grandpa only spoke hakka and my grandma only remembers a little. as my great uncle has gotten older, he's forgotten his english and now only speaks hakka. i would love to learn hakka to help keep this language alive longer but there's almost no resources, at least not many that i can find. it bothers me as well that people call mandarin "chinese" because it blocks out the fact that china used to be much more diverse in its languages and still is
I went to Taiwan once, they have a tv channel strictly in Hakka so it's easier to still learn the language there. Also in trains/buses there's 4 languages in the annoucement: English, Mandarin, Hakka and Hokkien which is quite interesting.
@logger1176 Hello sir, here’s a Hakka language speaker from Taiwan. If you want to find some resources for learning Hakka, please let me know. I’m willing to help you in many ways. Just to make the language spread out more.
In the narrow context, Chinese usually refers to one language, the standard Mandarin. But in its wider context, Chinese refers to the Sinitic language family. For example, Cantonese is considered another type of Chinese language/dialect, alongside Mandarin. And I think the confusion of the term "dialect" stems from the rough translation of the Chinese word, 方言 (regional speech). Unlike the English meaning of "dialect", the word 方言 includes all forms of non-standard regional languages, including dialects, languages under the same family, and even languages unrelated to the family in the geographical sense (Eg. Mongolian is one of the regional speech of China). But people tend to translate the term as dialect for simplicity sake, but this confuses western linguists due to misunderstanding. And this led to some debate saying that Cantonese is not a dialect but a language. I agree it is wrong to say Cantonese is a Mandarin dialect, but I think it is not completely wrong to say Cantonese is a Chinese dialect, since I would perceive this statement as "Cantonese is a variety of the Sinitic language family". (But it seems that the statement "Dialect of a Language family" is nonsense apparently in English context. I was only intentionally misusing the term as an example) Hence, one way to solve this confusion or debate when discussing about Chinese languages, is to not use the term "dialect" at all. "Topolect" would be more suitable to translate the term 方言.
No, you can't call Cantonese a dialect of Chinese. You can call it a dialect, but not of Chinese, but of of *_Yue._* (Yue being one of many Chinese languages, with Cantonese being the prestige dialect of Yue) A subvariety of the Sinitic language family, yes, but not a dialect of Chinese.
@@ZarlanTheGreen I don't see the problem. Because in this context, I interpret the term Chinese as referring to the entire language family. So it being a "dialect" (aka sub-branch) of Chinese/Sinitic language family is not wrong. Cantonese is one of the Yue dialect, while Yue is one of the "Chinese" dialect (I'm NOT referring to Mandarin when I said Chinese in this case)
@@simonlow0210 There are no dialects, of language families. That is pure incoherent nonsense. "Dialect" doesn't refer to any linguistic sub-variety. Dialects are regional sub-varieties of one single *_LANGUAGE._* Not language family. Never language family. *_Language!_* Dialects are mutually intelligible, as they are all part of the same language. If they're not mutually intelligible, then they are not the same language ...and Yue and Mandarin are not mutually intelligible, at all.
This formula of "Chinese = Sinitic" is somewhat complicated by the existence of Dungan, which isn't just a Sinitic variety, but even part of the Mandarin branch of the family, while also functioning entirely outside the framework of both spoken and written standard languages of modern China (unlike, say, Cantonese, which technically does have a written form entirely separate from Mandarin, but still functions within a sociolinguistic framework which prioritizes writing in Mandarin-based written Chinese). This is somewhat similar to how Maltese, a close relative of Tunisian Arabic, functions as a separate language due to its speakers not identifying as Arabs and not using standard Arabic.
@@ZarlanTheGreen Well, if you want to go technical, then "language" would be the more appropriate term. But!!! For the general public who are not linguists, it is very common for many people to simplify the translation of the term 方言 (regional language) as "dialects". Thus this is where the confusion starts to happen. Because now, while Chinese people are misunderstanding the word "dialect" based on the Chinese meaning. On the other hand, Westerners understood the word differently. As you can see, both parties are at different wavelengths
As a Chinese who major in Chinese lit in uni, I can say Chinese really isn't a "language" but a series of writing systems. And that's where East and West divided: Chinese is a culture circling around its writing, but European or Western cultures love their phonocentrism. We don't understand different dialects and that's okay. Because we don't talk, or at least we didn't talk to each others before modernization kicked in. We wrote, and that's why a "Chinese" system can exist.
honestly that's how it used to be for us in the middle ages. like for many western european countries people would write in latin. in the Balkans (with exception of modern Greece and Albania) it was Old Church Slavonic (yes that includes Romania), Koine Greek was used far after it died as well, i think stuff probably changed between the Renaissance and the Early Modern Period which largely coincides with the rise and development of modern colonialism, capitalism and the modern state.
As I understand the story, imperial standardized ideographs (along with standardized imperial weights & measures, and a standard imperial wagon axle length) were decreed for uniform taxation. Every literate person in the empire could read his tax bill, measure out his payment (grain?), and transport his payment across every bridge between home and the capital city. Request for comments!
As a person who's very passionate about the italian regional languages and the regional dialects of italian I do call the standard dialect "Standard italian". Jokingly it's also sometimes called "doppiese", meaning "dubber-ese"
It makes sense to call Italian Italian, rather than Standard Florentine. The Tuscan vernacular itself sounds nothing like the cultivated national dialect of the modern Italian state. It may have come from Florence, but it is no longer Florentine. Similarly, Standard German has long since diverged from its Saxon-Thuringian base to such a degree that it is simple the suprarregional variety of German. That being said, urbanization, industrialization, and large internal migration make either dialect leveling or the loss of smaller, regional language variaties quasi inevitable, which is quite a shame.
Here in Brazil I semi-jokingly call our main dialect the "Globo accent" after the media company Globo which kinda made it up by mixing the variates spoken in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the two biggest population centres.
Once upon a time Italy was called "Ausonia" (this is found in Virgil's poetry). So I think I feel OK calling Tuscan, Neapolitan, and Rome dialect "Ausonian."
@@Winspur1982 those are entirely distinct as dialects of italian and naples/the south has a regional language too Plus, Ausonia has come to mean southern Italy, while not extremely common, so calling anything from Rome northward ausonian would be extremely confusing
I'm Italian and I feel like it's fine to call Italian "Italian" just because it genuinely is the mother tongue of almost all Italians and most Italians speak it at least as well as their local language. So it is one unifying language. Also the standard was created from a 14th-to-16th century variety, so "Standard Tuscan" doesn't really work, Tuscan has diverged from the standard now (although it's the one regional variety, together with the one of Rome, which some consider not to be a separate language from Italian). What I take issue with is when people call "Italian" things that aren't the Italian language 😐 People say that the concept of dialect is different in Italy than in English, which is traditionally true but it shouldn't be because speakers are confused enough with the sociolinguistic situation, they should at least be informed that they are bilingual. It's important that Italians are taught about what linguists say and not what it's always been said. So "Italian" is both the standard language of Italy and the varieties that emerged from it after it was spread throughout the state. Everything else should be called a language in its own right, in light of where linguists believe to be the boundaries of those different languages. Not everyone thinks we should label things scientifically for people who are not scientists (or linguists in this instance), but I feel like it's necessary in this case, because linguistic diversity in Italy is actually in danger. Estimates say that Sicilian will die in 2/3 generations (disappearing from a lot of areas much earlier). Much of the North has lost its languages altogether.
The thing is “Standard Chinese” is also genuinely the mother tongue of almost all Chinese, and most speak it as well as their local language. It’s why it’s brought up in comparison with Chinese - if that is true for both, why shouldn’t “Standard Chinese” be just “Chinese” ? I think some of it is also influenced by politics as well.
@@luckyblockyoshi that’s not true at all, I am Chinese from Yunan now live in Canada and everyone there speaks first an ethnic language or their own “dialect”. We will speak in mandarin when in public or to other people who do not speak the same language as us. Almost everyone here does not speak mandarin as a first language. It’s taught in schools.
@@Timothee_Chalamet_CMBYN Well yeah, that's because you're in Canada. Most of the Chinese there would've been born there, so they only learned whatever dialect they speak at home, or Mandarin if that is the one they speak. It's not different from other languages. Many Italian-Americans who were born in America can't speak Italian, but maybe their dialect at home, just like with Chinese. By "Chinese" earlier I was referring to those born in China, sorry for the confusion.
@@luckyblockyoshi Mandarin or _Standard Chinese_ isn't the mother tongue of almost all Chinese, there are at least 400 to 500 million people who find it hard to understand Mandarin or _Standard Chinese_ As someone who had Chinese ancestry blood just like Nico above, I could assure you that these _Standard Chinese_ thingy is actually a recent linguistic phenomenon, and most Chinese people basically are tend to speak in their own group/ethnic/tribe languages (which also called _dialects_ by some) in their daily life rather than these Mandarin or _Standard Chinese_ one, it's only formally used in national documents and any national-related stuffs
@@Ix-.-xI Okay, you have a point there that Chinese isn't the mother tongue of almost all Chinese. I didn't check the exact figure beforehand. I still think it's not a bad comparison, though, since that number is rapidly decreasing, especially with recent government policies (decreased almost 30% from 2000 to 2020, so probably only around 200-300 million can't speak it now since that 400-500 million figure is from 2013; that's more than 80% of China's population that can speak Mandarin) and most of those who can’t speak Mandarin are old people. And the part that OP makes "most Italians speak it at least as well as their local language. So it is one unifying language." is still similar to Chinese. _Standard Italian_ is also quite a recent phenomenon, though older than _Standard Chinese_. And linguistic diversity is in danger in both China and Italy I am also Chinese, and I speak a dialect of Southern Min. I am aware that most Chinese people will speak in their own languages in their daily life, I do so myself. But most media is in Mandarin, and most children learn Chinese at school. I don't have the figures to support this, but I will bet that almost all of the younger generation in China can speak Mandarin now. If you were to vacation to another region in China, wouldn't you first try to communicate in Mandarin? I don't think it's a bad comparison to Italian, it's like an earlier stage of its spread.
Reminds me of the time someone I know from Hong Kong was arguing with an actual Italian about whether Italian as a language exists, With the Italian saying it does, While the Hong Konger (Is that a word? Idk what people from Hong Kong are called.) was saying it doesn't. To this day some friends and I joke about how Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Portuguese, Occitan, Romansh, And any other Romance languages, Aren't actually languages, Because they're actually just dialects of Vulgar Latin.
It is recommended that you learn about ancient Chinese and middle ancient Chinese, so that you can understand why there are so many dialects in China. In fact, even in the north, the dialect of Shanxi is obviously different from other northern dialects due to geographical isolation. The vast majority of the differences between the various dialects of Chinese and Mandarin are due to the fact that those dialects retain some of the characteristics of Middle Chinese.
My take is that they're all Chinese. Mandarin is Chinese, Hakka is Chinese, Cantonese is Chinese. They're all Chinese languages spoken by Chinese people.
I've always thought of Chinese (Sinitic language family) as akin to "Romance" while each Chinese language would be akin to a specific romance language. So the equivalent to Cantonese would be Italian. It works in my head, because there are many dialects of Cantonese which form a continuum which gradually becomes less intelligible the further you get from Guangzhou (Canton). But due to the fact that the Canton dialect is considered the prestige dialect, most of the speakers of the other dialect try to emulate the prestige dialect when talking to outsiders. Likewise, I assume that Italian is based on the Florentine dialect, but a Sicilian would try (but fail) to speak like a Florentine when a Milano visits. I'm basing this on not much apart from the fact that I speak a dialect of Cantonese spoken near the Vietnamese border, and can mostly understand standard Cantonese but can't speak it. I also speak Mandarin to a basic conversational level as well, but that was learned separately.
@@kklein Cantonese is sinicized barbarian tone. China has been engaging settler colonialism and genocide against indigenous peoples since the birth of Christ. Deal with it.
Mainlander Cantonese with HK family (who's since moved abroad) here: Part of the reason why the terminology is as confusing as it is is that calling all of the various tongues spoken by Han anything other than "dialects" in China is hugely politically loaded. Calling them "languages" implies a secessionist mindset from the unitary Chinese nation and is a surefire way to get invited for tea (Translation: State Security wants to talk to you) As much as I cherish my native Cantonese tongue and am immensely proud of speaking it, I honestly have no problem with the "dialect" nomenclature. Still, I do have a problem with people seeing the Chinese language as solely Mandarin. In the end, both I and my Mainlander/HK Cantonese friends and relatives have come up with a reconciliatory way to explain this: "You write Chinese (although Modern Standard Written Chinese is based on a Classical Chinese-influenced form of Mandarin, writing in the vernacular of each respective dialect is 85-90% legible to a non-speaker), but you don't speak it. You speak Mandarin, Cantonese, and so on."
@@skazka3789 All Han Chinese languages are considered Chinese, so that would be implying that the Han aren't one people Ethnic languages aren't having an easy time either
@@MarkLinJA Well the Han do share cultural heritage and history despite the differences in North/South. I don't see the problem? In China, Cantonese would be considered 方言 which is poorly translated into English as dialect, when it more accurately means "regional speech" as another commentator mentioned. While Mandarin is Standard Chinese they are all varieties of 中文. Also ethnic languages are well protected contrary to what Western media portrays. In Shenyang there are many Korean schools. In Inner Mongolia they still use the traditional Mongolian script to write Mongolian, whereas in Mongolia itself they abandoned that for the Russian Cyrillic.
Then by definition it's not a dialect. There's a reason why Cantonese people have strong local identities compared to everyone else. Everyone calls it 粵語 but only in state sponsored texts is it referred to as the awkward 粵方言.
@@BBarNavi Who refers to it as "粵方言" in place of "粵語"? Can you show me these state sponsored texts? Lol they don't exist because this is a bizarre strawman. 粵方言 is used only in reference to dialects of Cantonese. Cantonese is often referred to as a 方言 of Chinese, but "粵方言" to refer to Cantonese is incoherent. Everyone calls it "粤语" that includes "state sponsored texts" because that is how our language works. For Example from literally Baike: 粤语是一种声调语言，属汉藏语系汉语族汉语方言。 tl: Cantonese (粤语) is a tonal language, belonging to the Sino-Tibetan group of Chinese dialects. 粤方言分区，粤方言分为广府、邕浔、高阳、四邑、勾漏、吴化、钦廉七片。 tl: The Cantonese dialects (粤方言) are divided into seven subdivisions: Guangfu, Yongxun, Gaoyang, Siyi, Gouyu, Wuhua and Qinlian. This idea that the Chinese government is both willing and able to change the language on a whim like 1984 and has banned the use of elementary words or locations from use is idiotic to the point of Sinophobia. Please enlighten me as to how this would actually work without resorting to thinking of Chinese as some subservient drone/slave race.
The border between languages, is as clear and obvious, as that between species. With species the border is being naturally able to produce fertile offspring, and with languages, the border is mutual intelligibility ...and sometimes, the border is fuzzy. In both cases. And in the exact same ways. For example, with languages you have dialect spectrum. In biology, that's called ring species.
@@LowestofheDead Yes. Like how in US censuses Hispanics used to be considered "whites" but now they're not. And I remember reading that East Asians were considered "whites" when Europeans first came into contact with them.
@@Louis-kw6yk Indeed, what countries decide, counts as dialect or language, is often determined by sociopolitical issues. Like how China insists that the many Chinese languages are just dialects of Mandarin, and how India and Pakistan insist that Urdu and Hindi are different languages. (despite being the same) ...but linguistically speaking, those (frankly political) claims by countries are irrelevant.
@@LowestofheDead it's called anthropocentrism ;-) jokes aside, it was terry pratchett who came with speciesism, a race/species specific centrism in his discworld stories.
Interesting parallel to how Spanish is referred to Castillian within Spain, due to the presence subgroups with a strong cultural/language identity. It would be a real shame to let the non-Mandarin dialects and traditions to die out.
@@Aolsais more and more young people now are not proficient in their hometown dialect. They might speak it enough to get by at home but since they use mandarin everywhere else they don’t remember or never learn a lot of their dialects. Some even never learn their ancestral dialect, only mandarin or cantonese. Dialects do die out, many of them are dying already.
I think that's a thing for a lot of languages. I can atleast say that about German. I've grown up only speaking standard German and some "dialects" like Bavarian and swiss German are basically unintelligible unless they are written down, that somehow makes it easier to understand. These dialects basically feel like Dutch, it's very hard to understand but if it's written down you can figure it out
Hi. I'm a native Cantonese speaker and Chinese American. I actually can't speak Mandarin (I took 1 year of classes but ended up having to move schools to where the classes weren't as good so I ended up taking Spanish instead), but here's my experience with the two dialects. Cantonese is really quite a different linguistic tradition with its own set of slang and at the same time not intelligible to a Mandarin speaker. I understand they share a writing system, but there are even words in each dialect that do not have equivalents in the other. The speakers even have subtly different cultures. It's not unrecognizable to the other, but they are clearly distinct. I find it such a shame that the Chinese government wants to erase the rich linguistic and cultural traditions of Cantonese, especially when Cantonese was once a coequal dialect with Mandarin. It's just that the politics of Cantonese have become largely rooted in a people with different politics than Mandarin speakers. Cantonese speakers in the south of China have long been exposed to the culture of the outside world through port cities such as Guangzhou and Hong Kong. The simple fact is, people are easier to control when they are under a unified culture and erasing heterogeneity has been a key part of the the agenda of CCP. Hong Kong dialects of Cantonese embrace English loanwords and phrases and its culture has permeated through its food and media (Hong Kong dramas). The plurality of overseas Chinese immigrants spoke Cantonese for the longest time and its traditions have left a lasting impact on Chinatowns throughout the entire world. Cantonese isn't just a language that some people, but represents a type of Chinese language that is adapting to the changing and globalizing world. I liken Cantonese and Mandarin to a younger and older sibling. Mandarin has expectations foisted upon it and has the responsibility of being the "standard Chinese" and upholding the cultural integrity of all of China. Cantonese is a younger sibling without much expectation and experiments with their expression while being largely forgotten about. There isn't a single homogenous Chinese culture and people shouldn't be ashamed of saying "Yeah I'm Cantonese!" anymore than someone should be ashamed of their Midwestern traditions. Nor should someone's US East Coast traditions be seen as somehow more "standard" than someone's Midwestern traditions.
Speaking of writing system, Urdu and Hindi don’t share the same writing system, but are largely mutually intelligible. There’s plenty of dispute on whether they are one and the same, and I’d say they are. To make it easy, they’re varieties of one language called Hindustani. Like how it was said in the video, I’d make the comparison that Hindustani is also a spectrum, where you’re speaking either more Hindi or more Urdu, lingering towards one or the other, but can also transition between the two.
@@tideghost there's actually no dispute in the linguistical world that Urdu and Hindi are one of the same language, it's only a political conflict, it's actually quite similar to another case of language division because of politics, Serbian and Croatian, the same langauge, but written in different alphabets, politics in the world of the languages is quite funny, making one language multiple and making multiple languages one.
@blehbluh8629 I’ve studied the political history of Chinese dialects pretty extensively in college, and IMO the agenda is very explicit (both historically and today in places like Hong Kong). Mandarin standardization was inherited by the Communist government from their Republican predecessors, in fact they took it even further than the Republicans.
@BlehBluh The creation of the standard is irrelevant to the how the existence of one now fuels an agenda by a government with radically different priorities than the original intent. Any nation-state would of course need a unified system of language for schooling, record-keeping, and infrastructure; however, it doesn't really matter what that language was so long as one existed in terms of the necessity for the formation of the modern Chinese nation-state. Cantonese could have been selected and it would not change the modern goals of the party in creating cultural homogeneity. Yes, the selection of Mandarin vs. Cantonese was a highly contentious subject; however, the existence of a standard Chinese is what created the idea of a uniform cultural identity. The reason queerness is suppressed in China is precisely to preserve cultural homogeneity and it is the same reason why the Uighur culture is being systematically destroyed in a genocide.
I am a native spanish. If we speak slowly, I understand portuguese and italian people who don't speak spanish. If I have to read an informal text from some regions of south america (I'm european), I can have trouble understanding some aspects if I can't ask the meaning of some words to the writer
I am not a native Spanish speaker, but yeah understanding portuguese is +/- ok, italian has weird words, but it's ok to understand as well, but french, damn that's some real deal khaha, oh yeah some latin as well of course as all these come from Vulgar Latin, oh also Romanian, just no xD
@@thinksie oh no i speak french but learning it was as hard as learning english. French has some similar worlds but no way of understanding speaking spanish with a person speaking french
@@aitordafi yeah exactly, French and English pronunciation rules are comparably complicated. The grammar is kinda similar too, using more auxiliary verbs too... Eh French is just French... I am learning Portuguese. Heh I kinda speak it, but still gotta get more flow to it. I often mix up pronunciations because I switched to European Portuguese after a while of learning Brazilian variations
yeah, so basically if the "Chinese" language is to be called "Standard Mandarin" for the sake of preciseness, maybe you should also do this: French × Standard Île-de-Français ✓ German × Standard Misnian ✓ Italian × Standard Tuscan ✓ Spanish × Standard Castillian ✓ Russian × Standard Moscovian ✓ Japanese × Standard Adzuma* ✓(?) English × Standard Insular Saxon ✓ *archaic and poetic name of the Eastern part, in which Tokyo is located, of Honshu, the main island of Japan.
@@Archangel_sNest I'm using "Insular Saxon" as a relational of "Insular Saxony", which refers to the Saxon part of England, which includes Wessex, Essex, Sussex, Middlesex etc.
As a person who speaks Cantonese, I'd even say that standard Chinese is not only standard Mandarin, for us , that only covers the spoken part. When talking about standard Chinese we often also mean the written standard Chinese too. Canto has a vastly different grammar and vocabulary, and a lot of people in Hong Kong actually, in casual settings, like texting, would just text each other by writing Canto, but in non-casual writing we use standard written Chinese. Here's the funny thing though, written Chinese is standardised to cater standard Mandarin, which meant that a lot of the words that we use in Canto, we don't actually know how to write them, we use words that sound the same haha, and we often add a lot of actual english words too.
@@hea1655 What do you think about the employees of convenience shops being forced to say 你好? I'm not a Hong Kong resident but I remember just awkwardly replying "Halo" when I went to CircleK and now they all say "Hello你好"
@@aut1stickid hrm I haven't really heard them say 你好 to me, usually they say sth along the lines of what can i help u with, or welcome, but in the context of customer service, 你好 is not as weird compared to everyday casual conversation? I do think that customer service in Hong Kong is usually in a interesting position with both casual and formal language, I've seen customer service messages typed in mixed standard Chinese and Cantonese. somehow that works and did not impede my understanding of what's going on, so Hello你好 might be just that. They might feel hello is too casual but 你好 is too formal to use, so they settled for both hahah
Norwegian is also a prominent example. There is no "Norwegian". There are two OFFICIAL written languages, Norsk Bokmål [NB] and Norsk Nynorsk [NN]. And then there are the spoken languages, the so-called dialects. And when you learn Norwegian, in most cases you learn bokmål. But you don't speak bokmål, but oslodialekten. Often a dialect is very close to a written language. What makes the "Norwegian" language really difficult is that you have to adjust to many different dialects when listening to it, some of which are more difficult to understand than others. That's why I now say: I'm learning bergensdialekten. (Dialect spoken in Bergen)
It's probably more accurate to call Danish-Norwegian-Swedish as a dialect continuum, and therefore more analogous to spoken Mandarin. People may technically speak different languages in the borders but perfectly able to understand one another. Likewise, people who technically speak the same language may have no idea what the heck each other are saying.
In Thailand we use the same method with China. As we have mainly 4 languages spoken in each area with a ton of different dialects, we put it together and make the different languages become dialects, and then make the dialects become accents. Language is a very diverse thing and hard to distinguish the color and spectrum, it doesn't depend solely on nature but also politics.
Mandarin Chinese is the ‘Lingua Franca’ of China from Qing Dynasty to present. You can trace Ming Dynasty Lingua Franca (Ming Mandarin Chinese) from a recorded Korean-Chinese pronunciation dictionary. Tibetan and Hainanese root word (check it out yourself, use the numbers 1-10 for simple comparison) are like the Scottish to English, because they become isolated during to 2000 years separation, it just happened Tibetan adopted the Indo scripts during the 5th century
So What is it called in its respective language? The west has termed it “mandarin” but I was told it is called “common/ ordinary speech”? Is that so? How is a language called that? Does it not have a name like French or Japanese or Korean? Also which ethnic group does the language belong to ? Like Japanese is to Japanese, Korean is to Koreans. This mandarin belongs to which ethnic group?
@@Timothee_Chalamet_CMBYN your not native from this area, so you know nothing about this country histories and languages development. I bet you’re just feed in yourself textbook about something about the Chinese which in term originates from one English source, like how this peoples come up with all this erroneous information, most likely from CIA fact books and website
The separation of Tibetan and Sino languages began in the Stone Age, much longer than 2000 years. Most Tibetan languages is a ergative-absolutive language and has inflectional and agglutinative grammar, such as vowel replacement and affixes. Although the proto Chinese had similar features (such as affix and vowel substitution), it developed very differently to the present day, the difference between Mandarin and Lhasa Tibetan is way much greater than the difference between Latin and Sanskrit.
@@Timothee_Chalamet_CMBYN Although "普通" literally translates as "common/ordinary" this is actually a misunderstanding, "普通" is actually short for "普遍通行"(widespread-communication). Mandarin is the language of the Han ethnic group, and it needs to be clarified that the term "Chinese" is a collective of various ethnic groups formed under the political system dominated by the Han ethnic group. In the Chinese context, as long as you are an ethnic group that has lived in Chinese territory for a long time in history, you are called "Chinese"(even Mongolians, Russians, Koreans). Which is just like the term "American" is formed based on the country, not because you're Jewish or British or Sioux.
@@nanman_chief I disagree with your theory, your argument are based in western scholars writing, you are just regurgitating what they have researched and written? Do you have any Tibetan English dictionary? Have you studied them all? I have (Sarat Chandra Das), have you considered how they adopted and modify the Sanskrit writing system? and how about prior to this writing system what writing system they used? Are you familiar with the ancient Chinese writing system? I have 甲文，金文，說文dictionaries, do you have these books? I bet you still think the Arabic numbers are derived from India. Well hate to break this to you it’s from Chinese
I guess I can say that mandarin isn't a “language” either，if you consider it a group of language. I speak both standarin and central plain mandarin，therefore I can say I have two mother tongues
@@paxphonetica5800 oh wow then all the mandarin languages would for sure be considered languages rather than dialects in other parts of the world really puts into perspective how silly and inaccurate it is to call sinitic languages “dialects”
Not sure if I'm alone, I usually think of 'Chinese' as a writing system used to write many different languages, mainly Mandarin. But admittedly this creates more problems. If you go to your phone's language setting, you will find traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese, but they are inherently the same language, written with different subsets of Chinese, the writing system. This also makes the sentence 'I speak Chinese' problematic, since you can't speak a writing system 🙄
Agreed, that's also my interpretation and what I think is the most accurate. 'Chinese' is not a language, it's a script like the Latin alphabet. The widespread misconception is due to clumping all the languages that use Chinese script together and mistakenly naming that Chinese. It's like saying because English and Romanian use the same letters, they're the same language - it's just wrong. Trad/Simp script aside, the other Sinitic languages also suffer from being rarely written down, which leaves dominant Mandarin as the primary written form of the Chinese script.
@@sktzn6829 Nah, simplified Chinese as name said is simplified traditional Chinese, the character looks similar, and Chinese people have no problem reading it. It is more like British English and American English with a bit more difference. Would you call British English and American English different languages?
@@sktzn6829 Eh, the comparison between english and romanian does not substantiate as well because the use of an alphabet is inherently missing in character-based sinitic societies. Still feel like its the same language, just said differently.
@@Killerbee4712 It only appears that way because to non-native speakers, everything is just characters. Cantonese, for example, makes use of Chinese characters very differently. Some characters are archaic forms that are no longer used in Mandarin (着 (v), 睇, 企, etc), some are completely repurposed from Mandarin and have Canto-exclusive definitions (仔, 梗, 晒, 仲, etc), while other characters are Canto-exclusive creations that you won't find in Mandarin at all (瞓, 冇, 乜，咁，嘅，嚟, etc.). It's really no different from Romanian using Latin letters to create different words, or implementing their own variations of Latin alphabet letters.
Even Mandarin itself is not a single unified language or maybe a dialect. There 8 subgroups of Mandarin: 1. Beijing Mandarin 2. Northeastern Mandarin 3.Jiaoliao Mandarin 4. Jilu Mandarin 5. Central Plains Mandarin 6. Lower Yangtze Mandarin 7. Lanyin Mandarin 8. Southwestern Mandarin Different varieties of Mandarin may not mutually intelligible, for example, a person who speak Dalianese (Jiaoliao Mandarin) cannot understand Lower Yangtze Mandarin and Lanyin Mandarin. Mandarin is known for the “retroflex consonant” but this feature doesn’t not apply all varieties of Mandarin. For example, Dalianese doesn’t have the retroflex sh ch zh and r, instead they are s, ts, z and y. For example chī ròu (to eat meat) in Standard Mandarin, but cī yòu in Dalianese; rén (man, person, people) in ST Mandarin, but yín in Dalianese
A person from south-west of Norway speaks very differently from a person in the north. In some cases, we might struggle with even understanding. But that doesn't mean we are not both speaking norwegian. Defining all dialects as "languages" doesn't simplify anything, it makes it more confusing.
Its also very interesting that in Chinese, or more precisely, in almost all Sinic languages, “中文”，which actually means the writing system we use, resembles Sinic languages; while “汉语”, which ACTUALLY means Sinic languages, is rarely used😂
From a geopolitical aspect, it make sense to call the language used by the ruling government after the nation/country. It strengthens the influence of the government's region as the capital and the "center" of the nation. Also, calling the non-official languages within the nation state "dialects" would make more sense for the government. It is to assert national and political sovereignty over those regions instead of academic problem of mutual intelligibility. Note that the government's official language does not necessarily mean the majority of the nation speak it. Just as long as the government has strong influence over the region, it can call a language only a small group speak the official language and other majorly spoken languages a dialect. A good case study is Taiwan. When Republic of China (government controlled by the party KMT) fled to Taiwan where the majority of people speak Tai-gi (a Taiwanese language mixing Hokkien, indigenous Taiwanese languages, Hakka, and even Japanese). Within 3 generations, fluent Tai-gi speakers dwindle now it is projected Tai-gi will die in 50 years. Assuming faster for other languages such as Hakka, and indigenous Taiwanese. ROC do so by only allow mainland Chinese to be in government agencies and education; enforcing a "no dialect" movement in school similar to "Welsh Not" in Wales; call Tai-gi "Taiwanese Hokkien" to make the connection that Taiwan and China is related and belong as one.
Chinese = The variety of language that most people in China CAN speak Italian = The variety of language that most people in Italia CAN speak Danish = The variety of language that most people in Dania CAN speak Irish = The variety of language that most people in Ireland used to be able to speak Folk definition of ‘language’ has more to do with border and nationality than with mutual intelligibility. It’s zoom-out rather than zoom-in.
Hard disagree, what is Irish in you mind, the Gaelic language or English? What about countries with multiple official languages like Switzerland, would you label German, French, Italian and Romansch (I think) all Swiss? And if not, were would you draw the line?
@@user-em4xh9pn5m For countries yes, not for languages. If you want to have a civil discussion about this please either read my comment again or answer in good faith
There are more native Cantonese speakers than native Italian speakers so....if theres only 1 language per country then theres only like 200+ languages in the world which is not true
outside of linguists, which most people are not, language/dialect is simply defined by government and politics. The problem goes on a spectrum from China/Portuguese/German (low intelligibility between varieties but most natives consider them one language) to Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (nearly identical varieties but most natives consider them multiple languages)
In a strict linguistic sense, I believe Chinese is best thought of as a language family, composed of several distinct languages. (Traditional characters with Pīnyīn ahead. I'm American born and raised w/ family in Taiwan). Much like how Greek has different words for "love", Chinese has several words that get translated as "language." 文(wén) refers to a writing system, as well as the body of classic literature that was written using such a system. Since there is a standardized writing system used throughout China (even if that standard has evolved over time), Chinese is often called a single "language." On the other hand, 語(yǔ) and 話(huà) refer to the spoken word. As your video points out, there are many varieties of Chinese that are not mutually intelligible. Mandarin and Cantonese are as different as French and "Standard Italian," both derived from Latin but indisputably different languages today. 語(yǔ) is closer to the linguistic definition of a "language" (the English word comes from the Latin "lingua," which means tongue) which can be further broken down into several variant 話(huà), best translated as "dialect". Chinese also speak about foreign languages in the same way. For example, if a Chinese university student were to major in French, they would typically say 我學法文 "I study French (writing)." However, if they were to simply tell someone that they can speak French, they would say 我會講法語 "I can speak French (speech)." 我會講法文 would be incorrect, because you can't "speak" a 文. So why is 語(yǔ) almost always translated as "dialect" instead of "language?" I believe the main reason is purely POLITICAL. Chinese leaders have a very long history of preoccupation with territorial integrity and political unity (not without reason). To be able say that the country is unified by a single "language" is a powerful political tool. Even though the 文(wén) these days is diverging in certain claimed territories (traditional vs simplified characters).
While what you said makes sense, people often do say 講中文，說中文, etc. In Taiwan, they also call the language 國語, in Singapore 華語, and in China 普通話. In some instances, they also use the term 漢語, etc. So, speaking of the exact same spoken language, terms with 文，語，話 can all be used.
@@artugert My grandmother would definitely correct me if I ever said 講中文 😅 I wonder if it's a generational thing and if western influence has played any role in weakening the vision between 文 and 語.
Danish/Norwegian/Swedish endeavour could be compared (maybe?) to what happens between Portuguese/Galician/Spanish where Danish and Portuguese can understand both while Spanish understands only Galician and Galician understands both (although closer to Spanish.) Both cases seem to be parts of a dialect continuum. Spain has some languages in itself (let alone Basque) while Portugal has no dialects. Well, Galicia belongs to Spain... More on Chinese comparisons there's German, with several dialects but only one deemed as oficial, based on the dialect spoken in Hannover, either named as High German or Standard German. I like to emphasize Standard German and Mandarin but I never say Castilian -- only Spanish. That's how crazy things are inside my head.
I think a difference is that Napolitano and Milanese are still included when, in English, we say "Italian." We mean the full continuum, not just the more "prestige" Tuscan variant (thanks Dante). However, when we say "Chinese," it usually does exclude the minority tongues.
That's incorrect though, if you said italian languages that would be correct, but if you say "italian", here in italy, people will think you're taking about standard italian
I don't really think that's true. I think most English speakers also don't realise the linguistic diversity of Italy, or even know what the difference in languages sounds like. So how is the situation any different?
I am a native Cantonese speaker. I want to raise my kids to be able to speak the language too. However, I do understand the decline in popularity is simply a result of the globalisation of the world we live in. While it is sad to have a language that forms a part of your identity slowly die out, it simply the course of history. It may not happen in my life time, but it will happen eventually. One day a new global language will be made, and new languages will be born out of that language as a base.
Wrong. It's not due to globalisation, it's due to language policy. If Guandong and Hong Kong were independent and didn't even have Mandarin as official, then Cantonese wouldn't ever decline. By this logic, everyone should abandon their native language and just use English. But people don't. At least people who have an independent nation state, or a very strong regional government. But those who don't, for example the Native Americans, have their langauges go extinct. But it's absolutely not by choice.
Plus, if the world would all speak one language, like you've said, naturally, new langauges would be born out of it. But that's not what happens, at all. English speakers in Africa, USA, Australia and the UK still speak English. It hasn't diverged into different langauges. As for Russian speakers, they don't even have dialects, no matter where you are, in Kiev, Riga, Almaty or Moscow, people would all speak the language in a similar way. Because it was taught in a specific standardised way. If it actually was a natural process, it would've become very different by now.
Ironic, I was just at a family gathering today and told my family about the difference of Mandarin vs Chinese. I'm learning Mandarin on my own and so they got a bit confused so I explained all the dialects of China. It's crazy I just saw this after getting home.
Duolingo only has "Chinese" if you want to learn from English, so I installed another app to learn Cantonese (the Chinese language I actually wanted to learn), I am amazed with how different they are, even in the written form. People often act as if "written Chinese" is the same across the various languages in the family but that's a big lie.
That could be because your language learning app uses traditional characters(used mainly in Taiwan and Hong Kong) and not simplified (used mainly in mainland China) Duolingo uses simplified characters as do most learning apps. Written Chinese is fairly common between dialects (I’m pretty sure) there may be some differences but that isn’t any bigger then regional spellings in English. Feel free to Correct me if I’m wrong though,
Formal written Chinese is mostly understandable. I can read Cantonese Newspapers titles and parts of it without knowing Cantonese. The vernacular(casual speech) written words are designed to reflect actual speech, and so the intelligibility is less. Plus there are tons of self made characters in vernacular Cantonese which is just used to show the sound, so Mandarin speakers can't understand those. Those characters won't appear in Formal writing (書面語）.
Formal written Chinese is the same across different Chinese dialects. Or are you talking about traditional characters and simplified ones? As name said, simplified characters are just the simplified form of traditional characters., and people can read both of them with no problem.
It's not what you think! The written language is truely the same, the difference if caused by the differences between simplified and triditional characters, we learn both in primary school, but mainly simplidied one, cuz only a few samples would be enough to have a complete mastery of it, like 马→馬 张→張, and we don't use traditional one usually cuz it's hard to be written as you see, an extreme example is 忧郁的乌龟(melancholy turtle)→憂鬱的烏龜. The other difference is contonese added a lot anomatopoeia between words, like 你做啥→你做乜嘢，乜 and 嘢 are both onomatopoeia expressing doubt
@@Aolsais乜 and 嘢 are not onomatopoeia. They are words unique to Cantonese and some other dialects. 乜 used with 嘢is analogous to 什么 while 嘢 is analogous to 东西. 什么 and 东西 are not used in Cantonese. There are lots of words specific to Cantonese like this. Example, 是不是他们in Mandarin would be 係唔係佢哋 in Cantonese. Even outside of written vernacular speech (if you write using Mandarin Chinese) there are other differences in vocabulary. Simple examples 葡萄 is 提子, 乳酪 is 芝士, etc. And of course, there is all sorts of Cantonese slang that speakers of many other dialects obviously won’t get.
Actually the current constitution of the CPC mandates education occur in local languages and all efforts be made to preserve indigenous language. For example Tibet recently achieved a 99% youth literacy rate in Tibetan, something that would have been impossible in the days of religious government. The other side of the coin of people not knowing how rich Chinese languages are is that they also don't keep up with how rapidly the CPC has become progressive on preserving minority ethnic group culture.
You see, I'd love busu if I wasn't so socially anxious. Which you may think is odd if I'm trying to learn another language, something that is, to its core, a social thing. Idk, man. Chinese just sounds so cool and maybe one day, I'll be able to use it for any reason, especially career opportunities that involve language
I would like to see a similar video made about de Spanish language and the differences between dialects, accents and actually different languages inside Spain and Spanish-speaking countries
That sponsor actually sounds really cool! I was born a Canadian and I enjoy learning French, however in school they do not do a good job of teaching it (as in, we never really learn how to actually speak it, moreso write it). As well, because my family came from Germany, I would love to learn German. And especially, I would love to help other people learn English. It sounds like such a cool idea!
Same with French, French is actually just the Parisian / Francilien langue d'oïl, each other region has its own indigenous language, even Maine Champagne and Picardie which are close to Paris. As for Brittany and Basque country it's pretty obvious already.
@@jackyex yes, but it could be revived if the minority ethnicities and nationalities will rethink their identity and do actual actions to protect their language and culture. Like what's happened in Scotland, Wales, Catalonia, Basque Country, etc.
In the theme of mutual intelligibility, I think it would make a great video to talk about how Brazilian Portuguese speakers can so easily understand Spanish speakers, but not the other way around.I know the can understand us, but not as easily.
It’s even a bigger problem for other languages that don’t have the word “mandarin” (普通话) and only the basic “chinese language” (汉语). I don’t know what to say when people ask what language do i study, if i answer “mandarin” they’re gonna look at me like “?????? whaddya mean you study a fruit”, if i answer chinese, everything inside of me dies. Plz send help
@@Winspur1982 well my point was that in my native language there's no "han" or "mandarin". If say anything but "Chinese" people will just straight up not understand you
"The northern Chinese language"? It's inaccurate, but if they haven't heard of Mandarin then they won't care. Or if it makes you feel better, remember that all these terms (language/dialect/etc) are just labels and it's the real actions and relationships that matter.
Mandarin was a term coined by the Portuguese when trading with China in the age of discovery. It's a Portuguese portmanteau that means "language used to command" to designate the artificial language used in official Chinese empire communications and thar was only used by officials (people that command others). It was later adopted by the British and other countries.
For the sake of completeness, I'll note that a lot of academic writing just uses "variety" or "speech variety" as a cover term if "language" is contested or inappropriate. It simplifies many things and avoids having to become involved in endless debates. Also, remember: an army is just a dialect with a navy and a language. Think about it.
K…as a native Mandarin speaker born in Beijing & currently living in Hong Kong, I’m having a hard time understanding why RUclips recommended this video to me 😬 Feeling targeted 😂 But yeah I can confirm that Cantonese, Hokkien, and the Wu languages aren’t really dialects, they really are frickin different languages from Mandarin. I mean I can’t understand sh*t in those languages at all. Even though I’ve lived in Hong Kong for 5 years I still can’t communicate in Cantonese. It’s just impossible. Lol. Generally I only perceive the dialects spoken in northern China (like Henan, Shanxi, Shandong and stuff) as “real dialects” of Mandarin. They could be grouped as the same language. But once we get to the South… It’s just completely different.
I try to correct people on this when I can. “Which Chinese?” Because there's a little too much ignorance on the outside and a little too much propaganda on this inside that the minority languages deserve to be aired. These are the same discussions I have in Thai where folks say ภาษาจีน (Chinese language) and I have to ask which one, which the response is usually a confused expression (but maybe it's my accent). When I talk about the minority languages in Thai and how the government pushed Central Thai in schools around the country to promote a united identity to quell descent with countrymen, they give me a nod (because they know there's a long and current history of propaganda). Asymmetric intelligibility is real. The sad part though is seeing young folks with no interest in learning their dialects because it makes you look ‘poor’ and doesn’t lead to opportunity-which of course reminds me of striving to develop a General American accent when I was young to not identify with the trailer rabble (hooray early onset classism I wasn’t aware of).
Just don't. You know what they mean; I see this as just the English terminology. Think of "Budapest", the "s" should be pronounced "sh", but "Budapest" is so widespread, just imagine it as a norm. "Tomato" has two definitions: a scientific and culinary (Google it for more info), there is no standard. So does "berry"; strawberries aren't scientifically berries, but bananas are - however this term "Berry" in the incorrect usage is so widespread, it's become a norm, known as "scientific vs colloquial definitions". "Chinese" referring to Mandarin is so widespread, it's a second/unofficial/unprofessional/colloquial norm, think of it as a new word in a new language or English. Same with Spanish. "Spanish" is the group of languages, including Castillian, Catalan, Gallician, etc. However because Castillian is the most widespread and the most famous, usually when one says "Spanish", usually we mean Castillian. Same with "Chinese" and "Mandarin" or so.
@@gotoastal I agree, I used to be the biggest grammar Nazi ever. I also used to be extremely picky on various wordings (eg: of linguistic or historic topics), however I realised that if there is an established norm, even if it's technically incorrect, there's no reason to try go against it, if I am understood that way, but being accurate will prevent me from being understood.
It's all political. When I tell people I speak "Spanish," I am sure to specify Castilian Spanish so as not to diminish Catalan, Galician, Aragonese, etc. The most widely shared spoken language of northern India and northern Pakistan is even tricky: I usually say "Hindi-Urdu" as the largest differences are in the writing script--I read both--and whether you want to draw from Sanskrit or Persian. (Saying "Hindustani" seems to imply India preference, which is another reason I choose to say "Hindi-Urdu" instead.)
I have come to the opinion that it's impossible to expect an average person to use the proper terminology because it demands an unreasonable degree of cultural or linguistic understanding. The phrasing that gives me cringe the most is "is this written in Mandarin or Cantonese?" I see that question as the consequence of the speaker being told that the terminology matters without being provided the proper context for pick the terminology (which is fair). I might have a problem with someone saying 中文 when they should be using 普通话, but expecting the same degree of subtlety in general English discourse is not practical.
A little point about the mutual intelligibility of Chinese dialects: I grew up learning Mandarin as a second language but my every now and then I would hear a conversation between my parents or older relatives in Cantonese and find that I could understand them despite only being able to recall so few words I can count them with my fingers. I think it's similar to how you can mostly read simplified and traditional chinese even if you only learned one script. The grammar and vocabulary are almost identical, so with some context I can guess and make a near 1-to-1 translation from Cantonese from Mandarin. But I think me being able to guess the words also has something to do with hearing some (though not a lot) of Cantonese since young, because I can't understand a single word of Hokkien or other dialects
I can speak both and they are definitely not comparable to simplified/traditional. The grammar and vocabulary share similarities but are quite different, I find it hard to believe that a Mandarin speaker who doesn't know Cantonese at all would be able to understand it. I think you are right that you just remember from hearing Cantonese since you were young.
I really expected you to say "Standard Mandarin or Standarin" Anyway, the keyword is "spoken", right? As the languages can be mutually intelligible when written down. (or so I've heard)
Nope, another misconception. That's moreso a result of the non-Mando languages being almost entirely spoken-only, with little effort to officially document them in written form. Cantonese speakers in HK/Guangzhou have been inventing pronunciation-based Canto-only Chinese characters (or repurposing them) for a long time (e.g. 哋, 啲, 咁, 系, 梗, etc). Meanwhile some Min speakers have created a Latin alphabet-based phonetic writing system (Pe̍h-ōe-jī) as they don't have Min-only characters yet their pronunciation for Chinese characters is so vastly different (e.g. 饮茶 in Mando is yin-cha, but in Min is lim-teh).
@@sktzn6829 may be nitpicking a bit, but using 饮茶 would be a poor example here. “im-te” is actually the pronunciation of 饮茶, those characters specifically. It would be like “象” in mandarin (xiang) vs cantonese (zoeng) which are also very different but correspond to the same character. Min dialect speakers also use some of their own repurposed characters, just that none of them are standardized like in Cantonese.
@@sktzn6829 actually lim is 啉 in Hokkien, we do have our own Min characters but they are just less known because of the lack of formal education ssytems
This is fascinating to me as a Chinese person (Cantonese) who grew up hyper-aware of this. Cantonese, even, is an umbrella term for a variety of other non-Mandarin, Sinitic languages
generally we do use cantonese to refer specifically to the Guangzhou Chinese language, which would make it one single language, but sometimes it is used to mean "Yue languages" which would, in my opinion anyway, make it an umbrella term as you described it
Two things: 1. fyi this video does not appear in my subscriptions feed on my laptop (it does on mobile) 2. about the argument that starts at 4:06, it's not clear to me whether you're saying that people think that Chinese is the *only* (native) language spoken by most people in China, or that they think it's a language that is spoken by most people in China. In the latter case, I'd say that the same argument can't really be applied to Italian and {the country that borders San Marino} nowadays, so maybe it's "slightly more okay" to call Italian Italian. I have to say that I've seen Italian called "toscano" in a comic (originally in Italian) from idk 65ish years ago, which (and this is a complete guess) might have been a reference (for comedic effect) to the fact (I'm guessing this is a fact) that when the """dialects""" were more prevalent than Italian (so, like, not too long before the publication of the comic) they often called Italian Tuscan. Sorry if the second thing was hard to read, I'll admit I didn't try my hardest to keep it easy to read, sorry about that
I feel like another great example is Serbo-Croation. That area from Montenegro to Slovenia all exists on a language continuum (I think that's the right word), but the emphasis on language versus dialect seems to stem from a want of nation-state.
One day in 7th grade social studies the teacher was talking about civilizations and he asked ironically "¿quienes hablan mandarín?" ("who speaks Mandarin?"), and one classmate said "los mandarinenses" ("the Mandarins" said wrong). The teacher told him to repeat that bc he hadn't quite heard him, and then said if he had responded "las mandarinas" ("the tangerines") he would've given him a 0 in an assignment.
As a Taiwanese who is tired of explaining that I speak Chinese but am not Chinese, this video is very helpful. I really don't understand why I can't express the fact that my language is different in English.
You can simply say Chinese is a group of languages and I speak one of them. And even being ethnic Chinese and speaking a Chinese language does not mean you have the same habits, customs, language, cuisine as another Chinese group. In essence, Chinese is a broad ethnolinguistic term, like Slavic or Turkic.
But you are ethnically Han Chinese just like the ROC Chinese at my church when I immigrated to the U.S. in the early 1990s. 2 families at my Chinese church fled with the KMT from my city and later moved to the U.S. including my pastor who only lived in Taipei from 1949 to 1953 and firmly identified as Chinese. The majority of the elderly in my church in the 1990s identified as Chinese despite being ROC Chinese and not PRC.
@@zeitgeistx5239 more of the people who fled to Taiwan after WW2 moved to US later. That's why 90% of Taiwan is ethnic Taiwanese who know nothing about fleeing from China, as their families had lived in Taiwan for centuries. Now barely over 10% of Taiwan are decendants of those who fled. Ethnicity is a delicate issue, one can try to make artificial political ties and end up sounding racist unintentionally. Don't forget that the native (Hoklo, Hakka, and Aboriginal) Taiwanese were treated extremely poorly (understatement) by the KMT, so their memory is of that; its no wonder they prefer not to be called Chinese.
(1:00) You didn't have a clear marker for where the sponsored segment started, and you made it appear as if it was part of the episode itself. Note that this might be illegal where you are from, and if you continue this, you might be in legal trouble.
In Hong Kong, people sometimes also call cantonese "chinese", because we can all understand what it means by the context. And some may argue that cantonese is the language that should be called chinese as some claims it has a longer history than mandarin.
Well boys, we did it. Italian is no more. From now on, we need to refer to what is commonly seen as the national standard language of Italy, as "Tuscan".
There are 2 small number mistakes As of now the population in the mainland of China is higher than 1.4b, and while it will probably decline in the future, its definitely not 1.3b Also, most of the loss of other language influence is not due to government programs, it's mostly due to younger generations just not learning their parents native language, as there is no suppression of language diversity in China, anymore
@@PlatinumAltaria What needs to be considered though is that not all Chinese languages have a standardized way of writing or speech, since even before the modern Standardized Mandarin became a thing people from different regions communicated through varieties of Northern Chinese languages that are classified as Mandarin nowadays, and when writing people either wrote based on said Northern language or in Classical Chinese in formal scenarios which is how Chinese was written few thousand years ago. So even though both Chinese governments not teaching regional languages are at fault for their decline, most of the Chinese languages did not even get a chance to develop its own standard to be actually taught in school.
@@PlatinumAltaria you will find local language in many schools as an optative course Just because in the US, France, Germany all education is in English French and German doesn't make them "aggressively push their language" Same in China, people just don't learn it because it's not useful and all education is in Chinese standard mandarin
Here’s a Hakka language speaker from Taiwan, looking for Hakka people overseas. I really want to communicate with the people who are related to Hakka, just to preserve the language and culture that we Hakka people have. If you know any one who is Hakka or related to Hakka, please let me know.😊
The subjects like Maths, English and Physics also don't have clear lines between them. Languages are basically a classification tool that uses an algorithm to determine categories to assign speech into, so that the information with a category in intelligible with itself. Technically this can lead to weird things like a first speaker, where (x = the amount of time explaining words) is just below the threshold value/equation result and adding new speakers interfering with the categorisation of unrelated languages. But it still works.
The lines separating languages, are as clear as those that separate species. In one case, it's mutual intelligibility, in the other it is being able to get fertile offspring. naturally, the lines are far from absolute, and there are plenty of cases of where its fuzzy ...and in pretty much the same ways.
What are you talking about? How is the division of English from Math and Physics not clear? Physics is crearly separated from math as well even though math is used in physics. The point about dialects is true though.
@@justanormalyoutubeuser3868 What about things like cosmic constants? Are they Maths or Physics? Are they from some hidden geometry or just a value? Is it the same for each constant? We don't know. Maybe a Mathematician will figure out the exact value of one from geometry. Maybe a Physicist will figure out the exact value of one from the integration of a complex physics equation. Then what do you call them, What if a programmer figures out a mathematical algorithm for making a story with an AI? Would that be maths or English? What if the algorithm does not care about the language, it is in, with a separate system making the story beats have meaning? What if it does care what language it is in and it is in the programming? They are easy to separate by our mental algorithm, as the information that makes the other information easy to understand is grouped together. Though they don't really have much meaning by themselves.
@@UniDocs_Mahapushpa_Cyavana Physical constants are physics, there can be no mathematical derivation of them as the universe is not a mathematical system. Something like π is math because it depends on mathematical construction, the circle constant is 4 in the taxi-cab metric for example. A constant like c on the other hand is pysical, it does not depend on mathematical construction. In the same way algorithms are math, their application to a different subject doesn't make them something else. Would you say poetry is geology because you can carve a poem into rock?
This has the same energy as the idea of "Illiteracy" in the Medieval age. Where people who can't read and write in Latin was classified as Illiterate, despite their ability to do them in their Native Language. What really defines a language does blur in a lot of times. Looking at the Italian Example, and your analogy with Danish and Swedish... There's an Italian "dialect" that have different phonetic structure than Italian. Venetian / Lengoa Veneta Despite being called a "Dialect", many of its phonetics are detached from Italian and I hear that people call it "As if Italian went into a blender with other Romance Language and Old English".
I think we should just call it Chinese. It seems like there is this weird need to call out China specifically for doing something that literally most European countries already have done/are doing, which is making a standardized version of a dialect the national language. I don't see anything inherently wrong with that just as long as you also make teaching local dialects also important which I don't really think have been on the highest priority of either China or European countries.
So you think it is fine to deny, denigrate, suppress, and oppress all non-Mandarin sinitic peoples, cultures, and languages, in China? Colonialism and supremacism is fine, in your book? ...and no, they are no dialects. They are separate langauges. Cantonese, e.g., isn't a dialect of Mandarin, any more than German is a dialect of English. (actually, German and English are a lot more similar)
@@ZarlanTheGreen Amazing how you got all that from my comment where I specifically said I don't see anything inherently wrong with a national language as long as you teach local dialects. Also I was talking about dialects, not different languages. I know there is a bit of a fuzzy line but languages should be prioritized to preserve over dialects imo. Also while we should try to preserve as many kinds of varied dialects as possible I also don't think that every language and dialect should be ethnically divided into their own separate states either which is why I'm fine with a national language. There should be a middle ground between evey group of people gets their own separate ethno state and large nations can have one or a small number of national languages to create unity.
@@calebr7199 You said it's fine to call it Chinese. By that statement, you agree to the things I said you agree to. Also, you referred a group of completely separate languages, as dialects, which further proves that you obviously agree with it.
@@ZarlanTheGreen You clearly have a problem with languages being suppressed and colonialism therefore I say you must also agree that every single dialect and language must be it's own country, therefore you also agree that China, the US, France, Germany the UK should be broken up into smaller countries based on differences in language. I'm kidding but isn't it fun to just make up what the person you're arguing against believes. That's called a straw man by the way. I'm done responding to your comments troll.
@@calebr7199 You're comparing apples to oranges. Nothing of what I said, leads to any of that, in any way. Referring to Mandarin as "Chinese", and referring to the other Chinese languages as dialects, however, inherently and unavoidably is a denial and suppression of the other Chinese languages, in and if itself. You can't say that you're not for X, when you are actively doing X.
Neither is Spanish. "Spanish" is the group of languages, including Castillian, Catalan, Gallician, etc. However because Castillian is the most widespread and the most famous, usually when one says "Spanish", usually we mean Castillian. Same with "Chinese" and "Mandarin" or so.
People do think of Spanish, Catalan, Galician, and Basque as separate languages so this is pointless. So calling Spanish "Castilian" is semantic. Is Andalusian a separate language?
The Italians don't call theirs Florentine, but Spanish is quite uncontroversially (I think) alternately called Castellano (Castilian, the language of the Castile region/former kingdom), so there are at least other examples of this.
Hakka speaker here. In fact many Chinese dialect sharing same word with others, just different pronouncing. Over the past 2000 years, people have migrated from the north to the south in waves due to wars. In the northern region which is mainly flat, transportation was convenient and communication was frequent, so people's pronunciation was easy to maintain consistency. In the southern region which is mainly hilly mountains, transportation was blocked. As long as they were separated by mountains and rivers, the people on the two sides might not have communicated for hundreds of years, which easily led to the formation of dialect islands. On the Chinese internet, southern netizens often jokingly say that southern dialects have retained the pronunciation of ancient Chinese.
The difference between Italian and Chinese, is that Italianization started 100 years earlier, and Italian jingoism has subsided enough to allow non-Italian varieties of Romance languages in Italy, to exist as they are, while recognizing their differences and uniqueness. A Neapolitan speaker, is recognized as speaking a distinct language or dialect, and if they need to be, they are bilingual with Italian. The problem with "Chinese" is that as some people often say, "calling something a Chinese language, is like referring to the Romance languages, as a single language", however it is deeper than that, because in reality, Mandarin sits somewhere at the same level as Romance language, or possibly even a level between Romance and Indo-European. I have heard native Mandarin speakers say that Mandarin spoken by people more than a few hundred miles apart is mutually unintelligible, I suspect in a way that is more different than the American struggling to understand a thick Scottish brogue, more like hearing or reading Scots or Frisian, and thinking they should understand it, but it is completely alien.
Chinese Mandarin is a lingua franca for all Chinese Citizen to speak so that they could understand each others since all Han Chinese are using similar Chinese Script with some variant characters. Min Chinese is language speak in Fujian but within the Fujian region different district that speak different version of Min Chinese dialect. Similarly goes to Chinese Hakka Language or Chinese Mandarin Language where different district speak different dialect. Northern China Chinese speak Mandarin with a thick accent like the Scottish but the Southern China Chinese speak Mandarin without the thick accent and clear intonation. The main reason is the Southern China Chinese adopted Mandarin Language (secondary language) but they still keep their own mother tongue (main language)
In the Balkans we have the opposite issue. Many Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, and even some Montenegrins all claim to speak different languages and we have all separately attempted to manufacture additional differences, such as Croats making up new words (some of them say "Zrakomlat" which means "air-beater" instead of "Helikopter") or Montenegrin adding some new letters that nobody actually uses. It might make a good video but then again perhaps the comments section would be too much of a nightmare to justify making it.
It would've make sense to call them different languages if they were at least based on different unintelligible dialects. But they're not. They're literally all based on the same Štokavian lol. If Croatia close Čakavian as official Croatian, I'd believe it's a different language, as it's closer to Slovene than to Serbo-Croatian. But they didn't.
I wonder, if more states start to form in Yugoslavia will we see more brand new languages? Independent Herzegovina? Herzegovinian language. Next what? Istrian language? Dalmatian language? Metohijan language ?
Croatia I love you more and more every day. Airbeater is exactly what I think when I hear a helicopter.
just forbid comments in that video and that's it
As a very left wing person from former Yugoslavia I personally feel more connected to Yugoslavia(even tho I do have A LOT of issues with all Yugoslav governments) than I do to the idea of my so called republic, and as such I feel like my language is Yugoslav with my regional dialect or accent. I know this opinion isn't that popular tho.
Imagine a Chinese person living somewhere in remote area of southern China. So they are able to speak:
- some dialect of their village which is not mutually intelligible with neither Mandarin or Cantonese
- Standard (Guangzhou) Cantonese
- Standard Mandarin
...at the same time. So this person actually knows THREE languages, but one might say 'they only speak Chinese'.
Accurate👍 I speak standard mandarin and a southern sinitic language. The two are very different and unintelligible from each other but no one calls me bilingual in China!
YES I speak mandarin, one southwest dialect while able to use a bit abt another five dialects from north and east areas. And the interesting part is as I have too many dialect I have no accent in mandarin and can actually understand most dialects except those from the most south area.(eg, hokkin) But ALL these thing I understand is considered as only knowing one language lol. So sometimes I feel my first language shouldn’t be mandarin but Chinese lol.
similar to europeans claiming to speak three languages but in reality its just english, spanish and Italian lmfao
@@alexshi9320 What do you mean by that? Do you think English-only speakers can understand Italian-only speakers or some other permutation of that? In both scenarios, both people speak 3 languages.
@@alexshi9320 it's more like them speaking Standard Latin in school and hearing it in the news, speaking Italian in formal and semi-formal contexts, and speaking Romanian literally everywhere else
I wish you'd gotten into the additional complications posed by the writing-system making the question of mutual intelligibility in Chinese's case more complicated, because whether two speakers can understand each other doesn't necessarily correlate to whether two writers can, and a country where that's the case, without resorting to diglossia is pretty much unique to this one case.
There is no mutual intelligibility, in writing, between the different languages. Citizens of mainland China can understand each other in writing ...because they learn to read and write in Standard Mandarin, in school. So a speaker of Hakka Chinese and a speaker of Min Chinese, who don't understand each others speech, being able to understand each other by writing in Mandarin, is no different from an Italian and Egyptian both understanding each other, by using the English they both learnt in school ...but you wouldn't say that, that says anything about how close Italian and Arabic are, now would you?
@@ZarlanTheGreen Apologies. I stand corrected.
That's just a feature of any non-phonological writing system. Everyone understand emoji to some degree, but we aren't speaking the same language.
@@Hositrugun It's a widely spread myth, often cited from from seemingly reliable sources, so even if your not at all gullible, it's still easy to be fooled into believing it. You can hardly be faulted, for that. And you immediately accepted that you were mistaken, when faced with contrary evidence. That is good ...and, sadly, very rare.
@@PlatinumAltaria The universal understanding of emojis, is greatly exaggerated. Sure, everyone understands 🙂and 🙁, but beyond that it gets tricky. Especially as the same emoji can look *_very_* different, like completely different things, depending on the system/site/font.
i think we should discover a new language and name it chinese
Better still, invent a new one, and call it Chinese.
or make one
@@theidioticbgilson1466 Ah yes, conlangs, a classic
@@theidioticbgilson1466 If you made one, your name might be mentioned somewhere! Like imagine if Conlang Crit--
@@chuksk8592 you think that makes you cute. what it makes you is a fraud
As someone whose great-grandparents emigrated to Hawai`i 110 years ago speaking Hakka, this interests me.
My grandmother was bilingual (oral only for Hakka) to speak to her parents, my mother only knew a handful of words to speak to her grandparents. I speak NONE.
Similarly for the Portuguese side of my mom's dad's family where my great grandparents came from Madeira to Hawai`i 150 years ago. I also speak no Portuguese.
My great-grandparents came to the US around the same time, but no one after my grandpa's generation speaks any Croatian. Probably because of the world wars, no one wanted their kids to be speaking strange European languages.
note: Makes sense since coastal peoples of China moved to Hawai'i en masse as laborers in the sugar plantations etc.
Hakka and basically any topolect that isn't Cantonese and Mandarin (and to a lesser extent Hokkien when the RoC tries to flex political capital) has the issue where since there's no large scale institutions promoting, making things are quite difficult despite official documentation from both scholars in the RoC, PRC, S'pore and Malaysia.
Even had you remained in China, many young Hakka and Teochews speakers learn Mandarin instead and lose the ability to talk to their grandparents as these languages diverged very very long ago starting from the Song-Tang era in the 700s. Many ABCs also learn Mandarin hoping to communicate with their parents or grandparents, not realizing that it will do nothing compared to learning their native Hokkien or Cantonese. If this is the current situation in some places, especially in rural America, I cannot conceive of how it would be for the average less well known Topolect.
this is a pretty big issue which led to Singapore actually loosening Mandarin education while still promoting it, especially as young people perceive the language as being a conservative force and thus do not learn it...
also there's a lot of mass media for Canto and Mandarin. (Hokkien gets some too). You can probably learn Hakka by yourself still considering wiki has characters with IPA sounds and the tones aren't that bad. Digitization has made Chinese much easier to learn.
Wu Chinese kind of has a life to it but only because Shanghai people are quite erudite enough to maintain the entire Wu branch on their shoulders. (This may not last.)
State power is quite not the force which defines these as languages. They are already languages much further apart than most of the Romance ones, the issue is the lack of state power and intentional alternative information efforts from the PRC combines with a lot of ignorance and apathy from the West to create the perfect breeding ground for a permanent inaction.
@@SupaKoopaTroopa64 thing with the Topolects or Sinalects is that actually the top three live on very well. I've met some Hokkien speakers here and I can't understand anything which they say, but I can sort of get the feeling of what they say the general topic or one out of every hundred words.
Additionally, with non Chinese languages like Japanese, the language has lived on with powerful institutions despite all difficulties and trials. This does not happen on the same scale for any topolect aside from Mandarin, even though Japan went on to lose that war.
I am certain that the issues for East Asian languages are due to ignorance, apathy, and no funding. Especially the Chinese ones.
language loss and assimilation is genuinely so heartbreaking watching it happen in real time. my parents speak hakka but because we don’t live with our grandparents they rarely speak it anymore. it sucks not knowing if i’ll ever be able to learn it.
@@izzi437 I just want to know WHERE I can learn it in person. The online resources I've found are pitiful.
Just wanted point out that Min is actually a group of languages that are not mutually intelligible. (Speaking as a native Pu-Xian Min speaker myself)
Yes, Southern Min, Northern Min, Eastern Min, Central Min, and Puxian Min, five languages.
That's really cool that you speak Puxian
That fuzzy line between what is a language and what is a dialect arises to me quite often. When an old swiss friend of mine starts talking in switzerlandish and I can understand 50% of what he's saying, sometimes less than that. The other half composes of words completely obscure to me. But we call it a German dialect. I'd rather say its another language.
it's a dialect continuum
Dialect continuum. That's what happened when a group of horseriding shepherd families migrating west to Europe and east to Kazakhstan (Indo Europeans).
"Switzerlandish" is not a thing. It's called Swiss German.
@@wack8697 It's actually Schwiizerdütsch. Seriously, though. I was saying that it was called Swiss German in English.😂
@@wack8697 So, Swiss German, like Raven said. Stop being so obtuse.
"A language I would call Standard Mandarin, or -"
STANDARIN!
"Standard Chinese..."
Singaporean Mandarin would be called Sindarin then.
@@suomeaboo it kinda is
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singdarin lol
@@Banom7athat’s interesting
.
Mandarin Cheese
Taiwanese here. In today's age, we speak mostly Mandarin. Hokkien being the second most common, and there's also Hakka and various other languages.
A funny thing is that many Taiwanese, when speaking in Hokkien and don't know what a certain word is in Hokkien, they fill it up with Mandarin words. Or just throw in Hokkien words in Mandarin in casual conversations. Plus the amount of Japanese loan words (some of which are loan words itself) in Taiwanese Hokkien. We jokingly called this mix 臺灣國語 (Taiwanese National Language).
Its also the same for us malaysian/singaporean chinese, we also mix in hokkien/cantonese/hakka/malay into our mandarin.
@@idk_wtf_is_going_on9614所以你们两个华人为什么用英语交流🌚
@@瞎侯惇 不知，我也可以用华语啊
I also hear English words thrown in, especially for the older generations who got their university education in the US and don't know some technical terms in Mandarin. I hear some of the young kids are now incorporating a little Korean now too from Kdramas they are watching.
4:34 Kinda of a Philippines moment right there, not learning the standardized Tagalog ("Filipino") is seen as unpatriotic and it is displacing the use of other native languages, and now other languages are declining since parents are unwilling to pass them down and are confused as being low-grade "dialects" ("Filipino" being the "national language"). Massive threat to the linguistic diversity of the Philippines, funny how they present Filipino as "our" native language during Buwan ng Wika (Month of Language) while stepping on our actual native languages
Isn't it funny, speaking a language that your ancestors spoke for a thousands years (Ilocano for example) is seen as unpatriotic, but speaking the language brought by colonizers and which makes your identity closer to the one of the former colonizers (English) is not. Post colonial nations language policy in a nutshell.
The downside of a national language is that regional ones start fading away, especially in today's major language world, not sure how to preserve them
@@danielzhang1916 not sure? Stop considering artificial borders drawn by colonizers as inherently very important. You don't need to "nation build". Each Asian tribe of the Philippine Archipelago should still speak their own language. The country of the "Philippines" did never exist before the Spanish colonizers. Make the country run like a multi-ethnic, plurinational and multilingual federation. Make each region develop and support their own language and also culture in that language, and not some made-up, artificial "Filipino culture" created by broadcasting all TV in Tagalog and making everyone buy Tagalog books.
we dont have that problem here in indonesia. we simply grew up with (both) local language and indonesian. we use local language in daily conversation and exposed to indonesian in TV, books, etc. we are natively bilingual. hence we never have the need to "learn" indonesia as our second language. some even grow up in 2 local languages, that makes them trilingual since childhood.
I do think this is also partially due to the disconnect between non-native English speakers and native English speakers, because in English it would seem weird to use the term 'standard French' or 'standard Spanish', in such countries, depending on the region a person is from, those terms could very well be used. From my own personal experience growing up speaking a 'dialect' of our national language, it's quite common for us to refer to the national language as 'standard' instead of just its name, even though you would never use such a term in English.
With English speakers, we're probably less likely to notice the heterogeny of other languages, but at the same time we don't say "Standard English," not because there's only 1 English, but because there is no _Standard._ There are 2 different dialects that one might argue as "Standard" which are "Received Pronunciation" in England and "General American" in USA, and that doesn't even cover every country English is spoken in.
@@angeldude101 Probably because for a lot of languages that serve as official languages of nation states, there are governmental organisations that regulate the language, in terms of spelling, pronounciation or whatever else, which really does not exist in English at all.
I guess the term Mandarin Chinese is more intuitive, though that does confuse the issue somewhat. Because in other cases we'd use the reverse. e.g. Australian English, not English Australian. So perhaps the term Chinese Mandarin would better align with the intuition of most English speakers.
To make the use of "standard" a bit easier to intuit for international languages, you can imagine that if a country's name is used _instead_ of the language (where the two are not the same), the language is implied. So e.g. Standard Mexican is short for Standard Mexican Spanish. So the full name would be "Standard ", where either of the latter two can be omitted depending on whether it'd be ambiguous. For instance, there's not a non-UK dialect of Welsh (as far as I'm aware, anyway) so Standard Welsh makes sense. You don't have to say Standard U.K. Welsh. That's just redundant.
Thats because the “standard” would just be the usual name and then any others will be called by their respective name. Like Spanish is just called Spanish and other languages in sodium like Catalan would be called Catalan not un standard Spanish
nice video, love from China. 吴语、粤语、官话事实上都是在中古汉语的基础上对发音进行简化，或者说，偷懒；因此南方的方言在声母上、前后鼻音上有所简化，而北方官话则舍去了入声调。有一点作者没有提到的是，最开始民国政府推行过一段时间的“老国音”，一套融合官话与吴语的语言标准，来作为官方语言；但由于这种“人造”的语言大家学起来都有困难，最后仍然被官话的一种（也就是后来的普通话）取缔。Hope you could make more videos about comparing different languages!
身為台灣人 我想知道你們有辦法聽出那些傳統語言分別是什麼嗎？或是常見的究竟有多少種呢？台灣頂多只有國語台語客家語，並且聽得出廣東話 僅此而已
@@aquariusjacky14343 分不清楚,只能听出自己会的语言.具体多少种,应该接近200种语言吧.
thank you for this video. my great grandpa only spoke hakka and my grandma only remembers a little. as my great uncle has gotten older, he's forgotten his english and now only speaks hakka. i would love to learn hakka to help keep this language alive longer but there's almost no resources, at least not many that i can find. it bothers me as well that people call mandarin "chinese" because it blocks out the fact that china used to be much more diverse in its languages and still is
I went to Taiwan once, they have a tv channel strictly in Hakka so it's easier to still learn the language there. Also in trains/buses there's 4 languages in the annoucement: English, Mandarin, Hakka and Hokkien which is quite interesting.
Mandarin is Standard Chinese but just gets shortened to Chinese, it's understandable.
@logger1176 Hello sir, here’s a Hakka language speaker from Taiwan. If you want to find some resources for learning Hakka, please let me know. I’m willing to help you in many ways. Just to make the language spread out more.
In the narrow context, Chinese usually refers to one language, the standard Mandarin.
But in its wider context, Chinese refers to the Sinitic language family. For example, Cantonese is considered another type of Chinese language/dialect, alongside Mandarin.
And I think the confusion of the term "dialect" stems from the rough translation of the Chinese word, 方言 (regional speech). Unlike the English meaning of "dialect", the word 方言 includes all forms of non-standard regional languages, including dialects, languages under the same family, and even languages unrelated to the family in the geographical sense (Eg. Mongolian is one of the regional speech of China). But people tend to translate the term as dialect for simplicity sake, but this confuses western linguists due to misunderstanding.
And this led to some debate saying that Cantonese is not a dialect but a language. I agree it is wrong to say Cantonese is a Mandarin dialect, but I think it is not completely wrong to say Cantonese is a Chinese dialect, since I would perceive this statement as "Cantonese is a variety of the Sinitic language family". (But it seems that the statement "Dialect of a Language family" is nonsense apparently in English context. I was only intentionally misusing the term as an example)
Hence, one way to solve this confusion or debate when discussing about Chinese languages, is to not use the term "dialect" at all. "Topolect" would be more suitable to translate the term 方言.
No, you can't call Cantonese a dialect of Chinese. You can call it a dialect, but not of Chinese, but of of *_Yue._* (Yue being one of many Chinese languages, with Cantonese being the prestige dialect of Yue) A subvariety of the Sinitic language family, yes, but not a dialect of Chinese.
@@ZarlanTheGreen I don't see the problem. Because in this context, I interpret the term Chinese as referring to the entire language family. So it being a "dialect" (aka sub-branch) of Chinese/Sinitic language family is not wrong. Cantonese is one of the Yue dialect, while Yue is one of the "Chinese" dialect (I'm NOT referring to Mandarin when I said Chinese in this case)
@@simonlow0210 There are no dialects, of language families. That is pure incoherent nonsense. "Dialect" doesn't refer to any linguistic sub-variety.
Dialects are regional sub-varieties of one single *_LANGUAGE._*
Not language family.
Never language family.
*_Language!_*
Dialects are mutually intelligible, as they are all part of the same language. If they're not mutually intelligible, then they are not the same language
...and Yue and Mandarin are not mutually intelligible, at all.
This formula of "Chinese = Sinitic" is somewhat complicated by the existence of Dungan, which isn't just a Sinitic variety, but even part of the Mandarin branch of the family, while also functioning entirely outside the framework of both spoken and written standard languages of modern China (unlike, say, Cantonese, which technically does have a written form entirely separate from Mandarin, but still functions within a sociolinguistic framework which prioritizes writing in Mandarin-based written Chinese). This is somewhat similar to how Maltese, a close relative of Tunisian Arabic, functions as a separate language due to its speakers not identifying as Arabs and not using standard Arabic.
@@ZarlanTheGreen Well, if you want to go technical, then "language" would be the more appropriate term.
But!!! For the general public who are not linguists, it is very common for many people to simplify the translation of the term 方言 (regional language) as "dialects". Thus this is where the confusion starts to happen.
Because now, while Chinese people are misunderstanding the word "dialect" based on the Chinese meaning. On the other hand, Westerners understood the word differently. As you can see, both parties are at different wavelengths
As a Chinese who major in Chinese lit in uni, I can say Chinese really isn't a "language" but a series of writing systems.
And that's where East and West divided: Chinese is a culture circling around its writing, but European or Western cultures love their phonocentrism.
We don't understand different dialects and that's okay. Because we don't talk, or at least we didn't talk to each others before modernization kicked in. We wrote, and that's why a "Chinese" system can exist.
honestly that's how it used to be for us in the middle ages. like for many western european countries people would write in latin. in the Balkans (with exception of modern Greece and Albania) it was Old Church Slavonic (yes that includes Romania), Koine Greek was used far after it died as well, i think stuff probably changed between the Renaissance and the Early Modern Period which largely coincides with the rise and development of modern colonialism, capitalism and the modern state.
As I understand the story, imperial standardized ideographs (along with standardized imperial weights & measures, and a standard imperial wagon axle length) were decreed for uniform taxation. Every literate person in the empire could read his tax bill, measure out his payment (grain?), and transport his payment across every bridge between home and the capital city. Request for comments!
As a person who's very passionate about the italian regional languages and the regional dialects of italian I do call the standard dialect "Standard italian". Jokingly it's also sometimes called "doppiese", meaning "dubber-ese"
It makes sense to call Italian Italian, rather than Standard Florentine. The Tuscan vernacular itself sounds nothing like the cultivated national dialect of the modern Italian state. It may have come from Florence, but it is no longer Florentine.
Similarly, Standard German has long since diverged from its Saxon-Thuringian base to such a degree that it is simple the suprarregional variety of German.
That being said, urbanization, industrialization, and large internal migration make either dialect leveling or the loss of smaller, regional language variaties quasi inevitable, which is quite a shame.
Here in Brazil I semi-jokingly call our main dialect the "Globo accent" after the media company Globo which kinda made it up by mixing the variates spoken in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the two biggest population centres.
Once upon a time Italy was called "Ausonia" (this is found in Virgil's poetry). So I think I feel OK calling Tuscan, Neapolitan, and Rome dialect "Ausonian."
@@pawel198812 not happened and not irreversible yet
@@Winspur1982 those are entirely distinct as dialects of italian and naples/the south has a regional language too
Plus, Ausonia has come to mean southern Italy, while not extremely common, so calling anything from Rome northward ausonian would be extremely confusing
Where's the line between language and dialect you ask? There isn't one, we all just speak a dialect of Haida.
I'm Italian and I feel like it's fine to call Italian "Italian" just because it genuinely is the mother tongue of almost all Italians and most Italians speak it at least as well as their local language. So it is one unifying language. Also the standard was created from a 14th-to-16th century variety, so "Standard Tuscan" doesn't really work, Tuscan has diverged from the standard now (although it's the one regional variety, together with the one of Rome, which some consider not to be a separate language from Italian). What I take issue with is when people call "Italian" things that aren't the Italian language 😐
People say that the concept of dialect is different in Italy than in English, which is traditionally true but it shouldn't be because speakers are confused enough with the sociolinguistic situation, they should at least be informed that they are bilingual.
It's important that Italians are taught about what linguists say and not what it's always been said. So "Italian" is both the standard language of Italy and the varieties that emerged from it after it was spread throughout the state. Everything else should be called a language in its own right, in light of where linguists believe to be the boundaries of those different languages.
Not everyone thinks we should label things scientifically for people who are not scientists (or linguists in this instance), but I feel like it's necessary in this case, because linguistic diversity in Italy is actually in danger. Estimates say that Sicilian will die in 2/3 generations (disappearing from a lot of areas much earlier). Much of the North has lost its languages altogether.
The thing is “Standard Chinese” is also genuinely the mother tongue of almost all Chinese, and most speak it as well as their local language. It’s why it’s brought up in comparison with Chinese - if that is true for both, why shouldn’t “Standard Chinese” be just “Chinese” ? I think some of it is also influenced by politics as well.
@@luckyblockyoshi that’s not true at all, I am Chinese from Yunan now live in Canada and everyone there speaks first an ethnic language or their own “dialect”. We will speak in mandarin when in public or to other people who do not speak the same language as us. Almost everyone here does not speak mandarin as a first language. It’s taught in schools.
@@Timothee_Chalamet_CMBYN Well yeah, that's because you're in Canada. Most of the Chinese there would've been born there, so they only learned whatever dialect they speak at home, or Mandarin if that is the one they speak. It's not different from other languages. Many Italian-Americans who were born in America can't speak Italian, but maybe their dialect at home, just like with Chinese. By "Chinese" earlier I was referring to those born in China, sorry for the confusion.
@@luckyblockyoshi Mandarin or _Standard Chinese_ isn't the mother tongue of almost all Chinese, there are at least 400 to 500 million people who find it hard to understand Mandarin or _Standard Chinese_
As someone who had Chinese ancestry blood just like Nico above, I could assure you that these _Standard Chinese_ thingy is actually a recent linguistic phenomenon, and most Chinese people basically are tend to speak in their own group/ethnic/tribe languages (which also called _dialects_ by some) in their daily life rather than these Mandarin or _Standard Chinese_ one, it's only formally used in national documents and any national-related stuffs
@@Ix-.-xI Okay, you have a point there that Chinese isn't the mother tongue of almost all Chinese. I didn't check the exact figure beforehand. I still think it's not a bad comparison, though, since that number is rapidly decreasing, especially with recent government policies (decreased almost 30% from 2000 to 2020, so probably only around 200-300 million can't speak it now since that 400-500 million figure is from 2013; that's more than 80% of China's population that can speak Mandarin) and most of those who can’t speak Mandarin are old people. And the part that OP makes "most Italians speak it at least as well as their local language. So it is one unifying language." is still similar to Chinese. _Standard Italian_ is also quite a recent phenomenon, though older than _Standard Chinese_. And linguistic diversity is in danger in both China and Italy I am also Chinese, and I speak a dialect of Southern Min. I am aware that most Chinese people will speak in their own languages in their daily life, I do so myself. But most media is in Mandarin, and most children learn Chinese at school. I don't have the figures to support this, but I will bet that almost all of the younger generation in China can speak Mandarin now. If you were to vacation to another region in China, wouldn't you first try to communicate in Mandarin? I don't think it's a bad comparison to Italian, it's like an earlier stage of its spread.
Reminds me of the time someone I know from Hong Kong was arguing with an actual Italian about whether Italian as a language exists, With the Italian saying it does, While the Hong Konger (Is that a word? Idk what people from Hong Kong are called.) was saying it doesn't. To this day some friends and I joke about how Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Portuguese, Occitan, Romansh, And any other Romance languages, Aren't actually languages, Because they're actually just dialects of Vulgar Latin.
Hong Konger is appropriate. Just like new yorker
And German, English, Dutch and so on are all dialects of ancient Germanic !
It is recommended that you learn about ancient Chinese and middle ancient Chinese, so that you can understand why there are so many dialects in China. In fact, even in the north, the dialect of Shanxi is obviously different from other northern dialects due to geographical isolation. The vast majority of the differences between the various dialects of Chinese and Mandarin are due to the fact that those dialects retain some of the characteristics of Middle Chinese.
My take is that they're all Chinese. Mandarin is Chinese, Hakka is Chinese, Cantonese is Chinese. They're all Chinese languages spoken by Chinese people.
I've always thought of Chinese (Sinitic language family) as akin to "Romance" while each Chinese language would be akin to a specific romance language. So the equivalent to Cantonese would be Italian.
It works in my head, because there are many dialects of Cantonese which form a continuum which gradually becomes less intelligible the further you get from Guangzhou (Canton). But due to the fact that the Canton dialect is considered the prestige dialect, most of the speakers of the other dialect try to emulate the prestige dialect when talking to outsiders. Likewise, I assume that Italian is based on the Florentine dialect, but a Sicilian would try (but fail) to speak like a Florentine when a Milano visits.
I'm basing this on not much apart from the fact that I speak a dialect of Cantonese spoken near the Vietnamese border, and can mostly understand standard Cantonese but can't speak it. I also speak Mandarin to a basic conversational level as well, but that was learned separately.
I think the Chinese question is analogous to that of Italian not linguistically, but because of the political structure over them both
@@kklein Cantonese is sinicized barbarian tone. China has been engaging settler colonialism and genocide against indigenous peoples since the birth of Christ. Deal with it.
语言文 三者在汉语中是三个山头
其中文是主峰。印欧语系的人想不到的。
类似汉语是三维，印欧语系只是二维。
@@Jason-wf8yg 当翻译成我的母语时，你的第一句话难以理解。 您能澄清一些您认为印欧语系人士永远不会想到的事情吗？ 为什么“汉语”是三维的，而“原始印欧语”几千年发展起来的各种语言却是二维的？ 语言如何占据两个以上的空间维度，除非你指的是它们如何随时间变化？ 请解释一下你的意思。
Mainlander Cantonese with HK family (who's since moved abroad) here:
Part of the reason why the terminology is as confusing as it is is that calling all of the various tongues spoken by Han anything other than "dialects" in China is hugely politically loaded. Calling them "languages" implies a secessionist mindset from the unitary Chinese nation and is a surefire way to get invited for tea (Translation: State Security wants to talk to you)
As much as I cherish my native Cantonese tongue and am immensely proud of speaking it, I honestly have no problem with the "dialect" nomenclature. Still, I do have a problem with people seeing the Chinese language as solely Mandarin. In the end, both I and my Mainlander/HK Cantonese friends and relatives have come up with a reconciliatory way to explain this: "You write Chinese (although Modern Standard Written Chinese is based on a Classical Chinese-influenced form of Mandarin, writing in the vernacular of each respective dialect is 85-90% legible to a non-speaker), but you don't speak it. You speak Mandarin, Cantonese, and so on."
Zhuang and Miao and Mongolian etc. all have "official language" status in China with no secessionist implication.
@@skazka3789 All Han Chinese languages are considered Chinese, so that would be implying that the Han aren't one people
Ethnic languages aren't having an easy time either
@@MarkLinJA Well the Han do share cultural heritage and history despite the differences in North/South. I don't see the problem? In China, Cantonese would be considered 方言 which is poorly translated into English as dialect, when it more accurately means "regional speech" as another commentator mentioned. While Mandarin is Standard Chinese they are all varieties of 中文. Also ethnic languages are well protected contrary to what Western media portrays. In Shenyang there are many Korean schools. In Inner Mongolia they still use the traditional Mongolian script to write Mongolian, whereas in Mongolia itself they abandoned that for the Russian Cyrillic.
Then by definition it's not a dialect.
There's a reason why Cantonese people have strong local identities compared to everyone else. Everyone calls it 粵語 but only in state sponsored texts is it referred to as the awkward 粵方言.
@@BBarNavi Who refers to it as "粵方言" in place of "粵語"? Can you show me these state sponsored texts? Lol they don't exist because this is a bizarre strawman. 粵方言 is used only in reference to dialects of Cantonese. Cantonese is often referred to as a 方言 of Chinese, but "粵方言" to refer to Cantonese is incoherent. Everyone calls it "粤语" that includes "state sponsored texts" because that is how our language works.
For Example from literally Baike:
粤语是一种声调语言，属汉藏语系汉语族汉语方言。
tl: Cantonese (粤语) is a tonal language, belonging to the Sino-Tibetan group of Chinese dialects.
粤方言分区，粤方言分为广府、邕浔、高阳、四邑、勾漏、吴化、钦廉七片。
tl: The Cantonese dialects (粤方言) are divided into seven subdivisions: Guangfu, Yongxun, Gaoyang, Siyi, Gouyu, Wuhua and Qinlian.
This idea that the Chinese government is both willing and able to change the language on a whim like 1984 and has banned the use of elementary words or locations from use is idiotic to the point of Sinophobia. Please enlighten me as to how this would actually work without resorting to thinking of Chinese as some subservient drone/slave race.
The border between languages, is as clear and obvious, as that between species. With species the border is being naturally able to produce fertile offspring, and with languages, the border is mutual intelligibility ...and sometimes, the border is fuzzy. In both cases. And in the exact same ways. For example, with languages you have dialect spectrum. In biology, that's called ring species.
that's an interesting inside, and i agree with you, nationalism also plays a role in what is called a language and what is a dialect
@@Louis-kw6yk Does that mean there's an equivalent of nationalism for the human species..?
@@LowestofheDead Yes. Like how in US censuses Hispanics used to be considered "whites" but now they're not. And I remember reading that East Asians were considered "whites" when Europeans first came into contact with them.
@@Louis-kw6yk Indeed, what countries decide, counts as dialect or language, is often determined by sociopolitical issues. Like how China insists that the many Chinese languages are just dialects of Mandarin, and how India and Pakistan insist that Urdu and Hindi are different languages. (despite being the same)
...but linguistically speaking, those (frankly political) claims by countries are irrelevant.
@@LowestofheDead it's called anthropocentrism ;-) jokes aside, it was terry pratchett who came with speciesism, a race/species specific centrism in his discworld stories.
Interesting parallel to how Spanish is referred to Castillian within Spain, due to the presence subgroups with a strong cultural/language identity. It would be a real shame to let the non-Mandarin dialects and traditions to die out.
I mean if you called it spanish you'd just give the catalan people one more reason to not consider themselves spaniards :P
they will not though, most chinese can speak two or three dialect including mandering, we use dialect in hometown and mandering in big cities.
@@Aolsais more and more young people now are not proficient in their hometown dialect. They might speak it enough to get by at home but since they use mandarin everywhere else they don’t remember or never learn a lot of their dialects. Some even never learn their ancestral dialect, only mandarin or cantonese. Dialects do die out, many of them are dying already.
I think that's a thing for a lot of languages. I can atleast say that about German. I've grown up only speaking standard German and some "dialects" like Bavarian and swiss German are basically unintelligible unless they are written down, that somehow makes it easier to understand. These dialects basically feel like Dutch, it's very hard to understand but if it's written down you can figure it out
Dutch is a weird comparison, because the dialects in Northern Germany are closer related to Dutch than all the Southern dialects
Hi. I'm a native Cantonese speaker and Chinese American. I actually can't speak Mandarin (I took 1 year of classes but ended up having to move schools to where the classes weren't as good so I ended up taking Spanish instead), but here's my experience with the two dialects.
Cantonese is really quite a different linguistic tradition with its own set of slang and at the same time not intelligible to a Mandarin speaker. I understand they share a writing system, but there are even words in each dialect that do not have equivalents in the other. The speakers even have subtly different cultures. It's not unrecognizable to the other, but they are clearly distinct. I find it such a shame that the Chinese government wants to erase the rich linguistic and cultural traditions of Cantonese, especially when Cantonese was once a coequal dialect with Mandarin. It's just that the politics of Cantonese have become largely rooted in a people with different politics than Mandarin speakers. Cantonese speakers in the south of China have long been exposed to the culture of the outside world through port cities such as Guangzhou and Hong Kong. The simple fact is, people are easier to control when they are under a unified culture and erasing heterogeneity has been a key part of the the agenda of CCP.
Hong Kong dialects of Cantonese embrace English loanwords and phrases and its culture has permeated through its food and media (Hong Kong dramas). The plurality of overseas Chinese immigrants spoke Cantonese for the longest time and its traditions have left a lasting impact on Chinatowns throughout the entire world. Cantonese isn't just a language that some people, but represents a type of Chinese language that is adapting to the changing and globalizing world.
I liken Cantonese and Mandarin to a younger and older sibling. Mandarin has expectations foisted upon it and has the responsibility of being the "standard Chinese" and upholding the cultural integrity of all of China. Cantonese is a younger sibling without much expectation and experiments with their expression while being largely forgotten about.
There isn't a single homogenous Chinese culture and people shouldn't be ashamed of saying "Yeah I'm Cantonese!" anymore than someone should be ashamed of their Midwestern traditions. Nor should someone's US East Coast traditions be seen as somehow more "standard" than someone's Midwestern traditions.
Ironically, Cantonese is older than Mandarin. It retains Middle Chinese features that were lost in Mandarin.
Speaking of writing system, Urdu and Hindi don’t share the same writing system, but are largely mutually intelligible. There’s plenty of dispute on whether they are one and the same, and I’d say they are. To make it easy, they’re varieties of one language called Hindustani. Like how it was said in the video, I’d make the comparison that Hindustani is also a spectrum, where you’re speaking either more Hindi or more Urdu, lingering towards one or the other, but can also transition between the two.
@@tideghost there's actually no dispute in the linguistical world that Urdu and Hindi are one of the same language, it's only a political conflict, it's actually quite similar to another case of language division because of politics, Serbian and Croatian, the same langauge, but written in different alphabets, politics in the world of the languages is quite funny, making one language multiple and making multiple languages one.
@blehbluh8629 I’ve studied the political history of Chinese dialects pretty extensively in college, and IMO the agenda is very explicit (both historically and today in places like Hong Kong). Mandarin standardization was inherited by the Communist government from their Republican predecessors, in fact they took it even further than the Republicans.
@BlehBluh The creation of the standard is irrelevant to the how the existence of one now fuels an agenda by a government with radically different priorities than the original intent. Any nation-state would of course need a unified system of language for schooling, record-keeping, and infrastructure; however, it doesn't really matter what that language was so long as one existed in terms of the necessity for the formation of the modern Chinese nation-state. Cantonese could have been selected and it would not change the modern goals of the party in creating cultural homogeneity.
Yes, the selection of Mandarin vs. Cantonese was a highly contentious subject; however, the existence of a standard Chinese is what created the idea of a uniform cultural identity.
The reason queerness is suppressed in China is precisely to preserve cultural homogeneity and it is the same reason why the Uighur culture is being systematically destroyed in a genocide.
I am a native spanish. If we speak slowly, I understand portuguese and italian people who don't speak spanish. If I have to read an informal text from some regions of south america (I'm european), I can have trouble understanding some aspects if I can't ask the meaning of some words to the writer
I am not a native Spanish speaker, but yeah understanding portuguese is +/- ok, italian has weird words, but it's ok to understand as well, but french, damn that's some real deal khaha, oh yeah some latin as well of course as all these come from Vulgar Latin, oh also Romanian, just no xD
@@thinksie oh no i speak french but learning it was as hard as learning english. French has some similar worlds but no way of understanding speaking spanish with a person speaking french
@@aitordafi yeah exactly, French and English pronunciation rules are comparably complicated. The grammar is kinda similar too, using more auxiliary verbs too... Eh French is just French...
I am learning Portuguese.
Heh I kinda speak it, but still gotta get more flow to it. I often mix up pronunciations because I switched to European Portuguese after a while of learning Brazilian variations
yeah, so basically if the "Chinese" language is to be called "Standard Mandarin" for the sake of preciseness, maybe you should also do this:
French × Standard Île-de-Français ✓
German × Standard Misnian ✓
Italian × Standard Tuscan ✓
Spanish × Standard Castillian ✓
Russian × Standard Moscovian ✓
Japanese × Standard Adzuma* ✓(?)
English × Standard Insular Saxon ✓
*archaic and poetic name of the Eastern part, in which Tokyo is located, of Honshu, the main island of Japan.
English should be Standard Insular Ingvaeonic
no, it is like Spanish × Standard Romance ✓
@@Archangel_sNest I'm using "Insular Saxon" as a relational of "Insular Saxony", which refers to the Saxon part of England, which includes Wessex, Essex, Sussex, Middlesex etc.
@@ignatiusqi9736 But English comes from the Saxon language, but from the tongue of the Angles and Jutes too
Thus, Insular Ingvaeonic
Alternatively we could go for Standard Insular Anglo-Norman
As it has been famously stated:
"A language is a dialect with an army and a navy."
(I don't remember who said this)
It's a Yiddish proverb, so no one knows who said it originally, but Max Weinreich is said to have popularized the phrase.
Ah so that's why swiss german is often considered a dialect, can't have a navy if you are landlocked
As a person who speaks Cantonese, I'd even say that standard Chinese is not only standard Mandarin, for us , that only covers the spoken part. When talking about standard Chinese we often also mean the written standard Chinese too. Canto has a vastly different grammar and vocabulary, and a lot of people in Hong Kong actually, in casual settings, like texting, would just text each other by writing Canto, but in non-casual writing we use standard written Chinese. Here's the funny thing though, written Chinese is standardised to cater standard Mandarin, which meant that a lot of the words that we use in Canto, we don't actually know how to write them, we use words that sound the same haha, and we often add a lot of actual english words too.
Yes, I always feel awkward when someone asks how to say hello in cantonese
@@nuklearboysymbiote yeah that! It'd be super weird if someone said 你好 in canto
@@hea1655 What do you think about the employees of convenience shops being forced to say 你好? I'm not a Hong Kong resident but I remember just awkwardly replying "Halo" when I went to CircleK and now they all say "Hello你好"
@@aut1stickid hrm I haven't really heard them say 你好 to me, usually they say sth along the lines of what can i help u with, or welcome, but in the context of customer service, 你好 is not as weird compared to everyday casual conversation? I do think that customer service in Hong Kong is usually in a interesting position with both casual and formal language, I've seen customer service messages typed in mixed standard Chinese and Cantonese. somehow that works and did not impede my understanding of what's going on, so Hello你好 might be just that. They might feel hello is too casual but 你好 is too formal to use, so they settled for both hahah
@@hea1655 yeah I also think it’s like that. 你好 is a valid phrase in Cantonese, it just sounds formal as hell.
Norwegian is also a prominent example. There is no "Norwegian".
There are two OFFICIAL written languages, Norsk Bokmål [NB] and Norsk Nynorsk [NN].
And then there are the spoken languages, the so-called dialects. And when you learn Norwegian, in most cases you learn bokmål. But you don't speak bokmål, but oslodialekten. Often a dialect is very close to a written language. What makes the "Norwegian" language really difficult is that you have to adjust to many different dialects when listening to it, some of which are more difficult to understand than others.
That's why I now say: I'm learning bergensdialekten. (Dialect spoken in Bergen)
It's probably more accurate to call Danish-Norwegian-Swedish as a dialect continuum, and therefore more analogous to spoken Mandarin.
People may technically speak different languages in the borders but perfectly able to understand one another. Likewise, people who technically speak the same language may have no idea what the heck each other are saying.
Looking forward to your comments on classical Chinese 文言,
Classical Chinese is almost every Chinese high school student's nightmare.
In Thailand we use the same method with China. As we have mainly 4 languages spoken in each area with a ton of different dialects, we put it together and make the different languages become dialects, and then make the dialects become accents. Language is a very diverse thing and hard to distinguish the color and spectrum, it doesn't depend solely on nature but also politics.
Mandarin Chinese is the ‘Lingua Franca’ of China from Qing Dynasty to present. You can trace Ming Dynasty Lingua Franca (Ming Mandarin Chinese) from a recorded Korean-Chinese pronunciation dictionary. Tibetan and Hainanese root word (check it out yourself, use the numbers 1-10 for simple comparison) are like the Scottish to English, because they become isolated during to 2000 years separation, it just happened Tibetan adopted the Indo scripts during the 5th century
So What is it called in its respective language? The west has termed it “mandarin” but I was told it is called “common/ ordinary speech”? Is that so? How is a language called that? Does it not have a name like French or Japanese or Korean? Also which ethnic group does the language belong to ? Like Japanese is to Japanese, Korean is to Koreans. This mandarin belongs to which ethnic group?
@@Timothee_Chalamet_CMBYN your not native from this area, so you know nothing about this country histories and languages development. I bet you’re just feed in yourself textbook about something about the Chinese which in term originates from one English source, like how this peoples come up with all this erroneous information, most likely from CIA fact books and website
The separation of Tibetan and Sino languages began in the Stone Age, much longer than 2000 years. Most Tibetan languages is a ergative-absolutive language and has inflectional and agglutinative grammar, such as vowel replacement and affixes. Although the proto Chinese had similar features (such as affix and vowel substitution), it developed very differently to the present day, the difference between Mandarin and Lhasa Tibetan is way much greater than the difference between Latin and Sanskrit.
@@Timothee_Chalamet_CMBYN Although "普通" literally translates as "common/ordinary" this is actually a misunderstanding, "普通" is actually short for "普遍通行"(widespread-communication). Mandarin is the language of the Han ethnic group, and it needs to be clarified that the term "Chinese" is a collective of various ethnic groups formed under the political system dominated by the Han ethnic group. In the Chinese context, as long as you are an ethnic group that has lived in Chinese territory for a long time in history, you are called "Chinese"(even Mongolians, Russians, Koreans). Which is just like the term "American" is formed based on the country, not because you're Jewish or British or Sioux.
@@nanman_chief I disagree with your theory, your argument are based in western scholars writing, you are just regurgitating what they have researched and written? Do you have any Tibetan English dictionary? Have you studied them all? I have (Sarat Chandra Das), have you considered how they adopted and modify the Sanskrit writing system? and how about prior to this writing system what writing system they used? Are you familiar with the ancient Chinese writing system? I have 甲文，金文，說文dictionaries, do you have these books? I bet you still think the Arabic numbers are derived from India. Well hate to break this to you it’s from Chinese
Damit Klein! I was halfway through a script about "Language vs Dialect" using Chinese and Italian as an example...
Well, I'd still like to see that video, since I doubt it would be exactly identical to this one.
@@karenluo795 Oh I will, just the fact that I was taking a break from research and writing when he posted the video was amusing.
I guess I can say that mandarin isn't a “language” either，if you consider it a group of language. I speak both standarin and central plain mandarin，therefore I can say I have two mother tongues
how intelligible is central plains with bejingwa?
@@habibcicero3833 70% intelligible
@@paxphonetica5800 oh wow then all the mandarin languages would for sure be considered languages rather than dialects in other parts of the world
really puts into perspective how silly and inaccurate it is to call sinitic languages “dialects”
@@habibcicero3833 Yes
Not sure if I'm alone, I usually think of 'Chinese' as a writing system used to write many different languages, mainly Mandarin.
But admittedly this creates more problems. If you go to your phone's language setting, you will find traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese, but they are inherently the same language, written with different subsets of Chinese, the writing system. This also makes the sentence 'I speak Chinese' problematic, since you can't speak a writing system 🙄
Agreed, that's also my interpretation and what I think is the most accurate. 'Chinese' is not a language, it's a script like the Latin alphabet. The widespread misconception is due to clumping all the languages that use Chinese script together and mistakenly naming that Chinese. It's like saying because English and Romanian use the same letters, they're the same language - it's just wrong. Trad/Simp script aside, the other Sinitic languages also suffer from being rarely written down, which leaves dominant Mandarin as the primary written form of the Chinese script.
@@sktzn6829 Nah, simplified Chinese as name said is simplified traditional Chinese, the character looks similar, and Chinese people have no problem reading it. It is more like British English and American English with a bit more difference. Would you call British English and American English different languages?
@@sktzn6829 Eh, the comparison between english and romanian does not substantiate as well because the use of an alphabet is inherently missing in character-based sinitic societies. Still feel like its the same language, just said differently.
@@emilygu2840 I... didn't say anything about traditional or simplified? and yeah I know there's no difficulty reading one from the other, I'm Chinese
@@Killerbee4712 It only appears that way because to non-native speakers, everything is just characters. Cantonese, for example, makes use of Chinese characters very differently.
Some characters are archaic forms that are no longer used in Mandarin (着 (v), 睇, 企, etc), some are completely repurposed from Mandarin and have Canto-exclusive definitions (仔, 梗, 晒, 仲, etc), while other characters are Canto-exclusive creations that you won't find in Mandarin at all (瞓, 冇, 乜，咁，嘅，嚟, etc.).
It's really no different from Romanian using Latin letters to create different words, or implementing their own variations of Latin alphabet letters.
the "Standard Tuscan" thing is a very good point
I think we need a new world to describe these kind of Language-Dialect blurs and what to call them individually
They are called dialect continuums or clusters
it's too hard and now there r still lots of ambiguities and controversaries in academic world.
Even Mandarin itself is not a single unified language or maybe a dialect. There 8 subgroups of
Mandarin:
1. Beijing Mandarin
2. Northeastern Mandarin
3.Jiaoliao Mandarin
4. Jilu Mandarin
5. Central Plains Mandarin
6. Lower Yangtze Mandarin
7. Lanyin Mandarin
8. Southwestern Mandarin
Different varieties of Mandarin may not mutually intelligible, for example, a person who speak Dalianese (Jiaoliao Mandarin) cannot understand Lower Yangtze Mandarin and Lanyin Mandarin.
Mandarin is known for the “retroflex consonant” but this feature doesn’t not apply all varieties of Mandarin. For example, Dalianese doesn’t have the retroflex sh ch zh and r, instead they are s, ts, z and y. For example chī ròu (to eat meat) in Standard Mandarin, but cī yòu in Dalianese; rén (man, person, people) in ST Mandarin, but yín in Dalianese
A person from south-west of Norway speaks very differently from a person in the north. In some cases, we might struggle with even understanding. But that doesn't mean we are not both speaking norwegian.
Defining all dialects as "languages" doesn't simplify anything, it makes it more confusing.
didn't really go into much detail tbh
Sinitic
-> Guan (Mandarin as a branch)
-> Northern(?) Mandarin
-> Beijing Mandarin (basis of Standard Chinese)
-> Yue
-> Yuehai
-> Cantonese
-> Siyi
-> Taishanese
-> Wu
-> Su-Hu-Jia
-> Shanghainese
-> Suzhou
-> Min
-> Southern Min
-> Taiwanese (properly called Taiwanese Hokkien)
-> Fujian Hokkien
-> Teochew
-> Eastern Min
-> Fuzhounese
-> Northern Min
-> Gan
-> Hakka
-> idk grouping
-> Meixian Hakka
Its also very interesting that in Chinese, or more precisely, in almost all Sinic languages, “中文”，which actually means the writing system we use, resembles Sinic languages; while “汉语”, which ACTUALLY means Sinic languages, is rarely used😂
From a geopolitical aspect, it make sense to call the language used by the ruling government after the nation/country. It strengthens the influence of the government's region as the capital and the "center" of the nation. Also, calling the non-official languages within the nation state "dialects" would make more sense for the government. It is to assert national and political sovereignty over those regions instead of academic problem of mutual intelligibility. Note that the government's official language does not necessarily mean the majority of the nation speak it. Just as long as the government has strong influence over the region, it can call a language only a small group speak the official language and other majorly spoken languages a dialect.
A good case study is Taiwan. When Republic of China (government controlled by the party KMT) fled to Taiwan where the majority of people speak Tai-gi (a Taiwanese language mixing Hokkien, indigenous Taiwanese languages, Hakka, and even Japanese). Within 3 generations, fluent Tai-gi speakers dwindle now it is projected Tai-gi will die in 50 years. Assuming faster for other languages such as Hakka, and indigenous Taiwanese. ROC do so by only allow mainland Chinese to be in government agencies and education; enforcing a "no dialect" movement in school similar to "Welsh Not" in Wales; call Tai-gi "Taiwanese Hokkien" to make the connection that Taiwan and China is related and belong as one.
Chinese = The variety of language that most people in China CAN speak
Italian = The variety of language that most people in Italia CAN speak
Danish = The variety of language that most people in Dania CAN speak
Irish = The variety of language that most people in Ireland used to be able to speak
Folk definition of ‘language’ has more to do with border and nationality than with mutual intelligibility. It’s zoom-out rather than zoom-in.
Hard disagree, what is Irish in you mind, the Gaelic language or English? What about countries with multiple official languages like Switzerland, would you label German, French, Italian and Romansch (I think) all Swiss? And if not, were would you draw the line?
@@Mister0Eel Borders are literally where people draw the line.
@@user-em4xh9pn5m For countries yes, not for languages.
If you want to have a civil discussion about this please either read my comment again or answer in good faith
"Dania"
Since a lot of people in Denmark can speak English, so "Danish" refers to dialects such as Danish and English, both of which are Germanic.
There are more native Cantonese speakers than native Italian speakers so....if theres only 1 language per country then theres only like 200+ languages in the world which is not true
outside of linguists, which most people are not, language/dialect is simply defined by government and politics. The problem goes on a spectrum from China/Portuguese/German (low intelligibility between varieties but most natives consider them one language) to Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (nearly identical varieties but most natives consider them multiple languages)
In a strict linguistic sense, I believe Chinese is best thought of as a language family, composed of several distinct languages.
(Traditional characters with Pīnyīn ahead. I'm American born and raised w/ family in Taiwan).
Much like how Greek has different words for "love", Chinese has several words that get translated as "language." 文(wén) refers to a writing system, as well as the body of classic literature that was written using such a system. Since there is a standardized writing system used throughout China (even if that standard has evolved over time), Chinese is often called a single "language."
On the other hand, 語(yǔ) and 話(huà) refer to the spoken word. As your video points out, there are many varieties of Chinese that are not mutually intelligible. Mandarin and Cantonese are as different as French and "Standard Italian," both derived from Latin but indisputably different languages today. 語(yǔ) is closer to the linguistic definition of a "language" (the English word comes from the Latin "lingua," which means tongue) which can be further broken down into several variant 話(huà), best translated as "dialect".
Chinese also speak about foreign languages in the same way. For example, if a Chinese university student were to major in French, they would typically say 我學法文 "I study French (writing)." However, if they were to simply tell someone that they can speak French, they would say 我會講法語 "I can speak French (speech)." 我會講法文 would be incorrect, because you can't "speak" a 文.
So why is 語(yǔ) almost always translated as "dialect" instead of "language?"
I believe the main reason is purely POLITICAL. Chinese leaders have a very long history of preoccupation with territorial integrity and political unity (not without reason). To be able say that the country is unified by a single "language" is a powerful political tool. Even though the 文(wén) these days is diverging in certain claimed territories (traditional vs simplified characters).
While what you said makes sense, people often do say 講中文，說中文, etc. In Taiwan, they also call the language 國語, in Singapore 華語, and in China 普通話. In some instances, they also use the term 漢語, etc. So, speaking of the exact same spoken language, terms with 文，語，話 can all be used.
@@artugert My grandmother would definitely correct me if I ever said 講中文 😅
I wonder if it's a generational thing and if western influence has played any role in weakening the vision between 文 and 語.
Danish/Norwegian/Swedish endeavour could be compared (maybe?) to what happens between Portuguese/Galician/Spanish where Danish and Portuguese can understand both while Spanish understands only Galician and Galician understands both (although closer to Spanish.) Both cases seem to be parts of a dialect continuum. Spain has some languages in itself (let alone Basque) while Portugal has no dialects. Well, Galicia belongs to Spain...
More on Chinese comparisons there's German, with several dialects but only one deemed as oficial, based on the dialect spoken in Hannover, either named as High German or Standard German. I like to emphasize Standard German and Mandarin but I never say Castilian -- only Spanish.
That's how crazy things are inside my head.
I think a difference is that Napolitano and Milanese are still included when, in English, we say "Italian." We mean the full continuum, not just the more "prestige" Tuscan variant (thanks Dante). However, when we say "Chinese," it usually does exclude the minority tongues.
That's incorrect though, if you said italian languages that would be correct, but if you say "italian", here in italy, people will think you're taking about standard italian
@@nyko921 it's not incorrect, since I specified "in English."
We're both right.
I don't really think that's true. I think most English speakers also don't realise the linguistic diversity of Italy, or even know what the difference in languages sounds like. So how is the situation any different?
Except Cantonese, when I hear ppl say Chinese it is usually then questioned if it’s mandarin or Cantonese.
I am a native Cantonese speaker. I want to raise my kids to be able to speak the language too. However, I do understand the decline in popularity is simply a result of the globalisation of the world we live in. While it is sad to have a language that forms a part of your identity slowly die out, it simply the course of history. It may not happen in my life time, but it will happen eventually. One day a new global language will be made, and new languages will be born out of that language as a base.
What makes you think that will happen?
yep the ccp is killing our language, along all the other chinese languages
i guess itll be up to us to keep it going
Wrong. It's not due to globalisation, it's due to language policy. If Guandong and Hong Kong were independent and didn't even have Mandarin as official, then Cantonese wouldn't ever decline. By this logic, everyone should abandon their native language and just use English. But people don't. At least people who have an independent nation state, or a very strong regional government. But those who don't, for example the Native Americans, have their langauges go extinct. But it's absolutely not by choice.
Plus, if the world would all speak one language, like you've said, naturally, new langauges would be born out of it. But that's not what happens, at all. English speakers in Africa, USA, Australia and the UK still speak English. It hasn't diverged into different langauges. As for Russian speakers, they don't even have dialects, no matter where you are, in Kiev, Riga, Almaty or Moscow, people would all speak the language in a similar way. Because it was taught in a specific standardised way. If it actually was a natural process, it would've become very different by now.
Ironic, I was just at a family gathering today and told my family about the difference of Mandarin vs Chinese. I'm learning Mandarin on my own and so they got a bit confused so I explained all the dialects of China. It's crazy I just saw this after getting home.
Duolingo only has "Chinese" if you want to learn from English, so I installed another app to learn Cantonese (the Chinese language I actually wanted to learn), I am amazed with how different they are, even in the written form. People often act as if "written Chinese" is the same across the various languages in the family but that's a big lie.
That could be because your language learning app uses traditional characters(used mainly in Taiwan and Hong Kong) and not simplified (used mainly in mainland China) Duolingo uses simplified characters as do most learning apps. Written Chinese is fairly common between dialects (I’m pretty sure) there may be some differences but that isn’t any bigger then regional spellings in English. Feel free to Correct me if I’m wrong though,
Formal written Chinese is mostly understandable. I can read Cantonese Newspapers titles and parts of it without knowing Cantonese. The vernacular(casual speech) written words are designed to reflect actual speech, and so the intelligibility is less. Plus there are tons of self made characters in vernacular Cantonese which is just used to show the sound, so Mandarin speakers can't understand those. Those characters won't appear in Formal writing (書面語）.
Formal written Chinese is the same across different Chinese dialects. Or are you talking about traditional characters and simplified ones? As name said, simplified characters are just the simplified form of traditional characters., and people can read both of them with no problem.
It's not what you think! The written language is truely the same, the difference if caused by the differences between simplified and triditional characters, we learn both in primary school, but mainly simplidied one, cuz only a few samples would be enough to have a complete mastery of it, like 马→馬 张→張, and we don't use traditional one usually cuz it's hard to be written as you see, an extreme example is 忧郁的乌龟(melancholy turtle)→憂鬱的烏龜. The other difference is contonese added a lot anomatopoeia between words, like 你做啥→你做乜嘢，乜 and 嘢 are both onomatopoeia expressing doubt
@@Aolsais乜 and 嘢 are not onomatopoeia. They are words unique to Cantonese and some other dialects. 乜 used with 嘢is analogous to 什么 while 嘢 is analogous to 东西. 什么 and 东西 are not used in Cantonese.
There are lots of words specific to Cantonese like this. Example, 是不是他们in Mandarin would be 係唔係佢哋 in Cantonese. Even outside of written vernacular speech (if you write using Mandarin Chinese) there are other differences in vocabulary. Simple examples 葡萄 is 提子, 乳酪 is 芝士, etc. And of course, there is all sorts of Cantonese slang that speakers of many other dialects obviously won’t get.
Actually the current constitution of the CPC mandates education occur in local languages and all efforts be made to preserve indigenous language. For example Tibet recently achieved a 99% youth literacy rate in Tibetan, something that would have been impossible in the days of religious government.
The other side of the coin of people not knowing how rich Chinese languages are is that they also don't keep up with how rapidly the CPC has become progressive on preserving minority ethnic group culture.
Did I mishear, or did you say you aspire to spend your free time speaking Danish? 👀
oh hell yeah
You see, I'd love busu if I wasn't so socially anxious. Which you may think is odd if I'm trying to learn another language, something that is, to its core, a social thing.
Idk, man. Chinese just sounds so cool and maybe one day, I'll be able to use it for any reason, especially career opportunities that involve language
I would like to see a similar video made about de Spanish language and the differences between dialects, accents and actually different languages inside Spain and Spanish-speaking countries
Spanish is one language all different Spanish dialects are mutually intelligible
@@Comrade_Zaz I don't think Catalan is mutally intelligible to Spanish though?
That sponsor actually sounds really cool! I was born a Canadian and I enjoy learning French, however in school they do not do a good job of teaching it (as in, we never really learn how to actually speak it, moreso write it). As well, because my family came from Germany, I would love to learn German. And especially, I would love to help other people learn English. It sounds like such a cool idea!
Same with French, French is actually just the Parisian / Francilien langue d'oïl, each other region has its own indigenous language, even Maine Champagne and Picardie which are close to Paris. As for Brittany and Basque country it's pretty obvious already.
Sadly standard French already killed most of the langues d'oc.
@@jackyex yes, but it could be revived if the minority ethnicities and nationalities will rethink their identity and do actual actions to protect their language and culture. Like what's happened in Scotland, Wales, Catalonia, Basque Country, etc.
Omg thank you so much I love all these differences between Mandarin and other Chinese languages! Aaaaaa
In the theme of mutual intelligibility, I think it would make a great video to talk about how Brazilian Portuguese speakers can so easily understand Spanish speakers, but not the other way around.I know the can understand us, but not as easily.
This is not controversial topic. This is actually a scholarly consensus in recent works.
It’s even a bigger problem for other languages that don’t have the word “mandarin” (普通话) and only the basic “chinese language” (汉语). I don’t know what to say when people ask what language do i study, if i answer “mandarin” they’re gonna look at me like “?????? whaddya mean you study a fruit”, if i answer chinese, everything inside of me dies. Plz send help
Do you object to saying "Han language"? That makes it clearer to me anyway.
@@Winspur1982 well my point was that in my native language there's no "han" or "mandarin". If say anything but "Chinese" people will just straight up not understand you
@@wgcdrelliot8989 That's too bad for them. Reminds me of very old people who don't like the modern usage of "gay," and insist on using "homosexual."
"The northern Chinese language"? It's inaccurate, but if they haven't heard of Mandarin then they won't care.
Or if it makes you feel better, remember that all these terms (language/dialect/etc) are just labels and it's the real actions and relationships that matter.
"华话" in Malaysia and Singapore because it's neither our national language nor it's commoner language lol
Why do people say "Daynish"? It's not like people say "Spaynish". If you say "Spanish" try saying "Danish" the same way.
Wait until you hear about " Arabic "
Mandarin was a term coined by the Portuguese when trading with China in the age of discovery. It's a Portuguese portmanteau that means "language used to command" to designate the artificial language used in official Chinese empire communications and thar was only used by officials (people that command others). It was later adopted by the British and other countries.
For the sake of completeness, I'll note that a lot of academic writing just uses "variety" or "speech variety" as a cover term if "language" is contested or inappropriate. It simplifies many things and avoids having to become involved in endless debates.
Also, remember: an army is just a dialect with a navy and a language. Think about it.
*"A language is just a dialect with an army and a fleet" - Max Weber ; otherwise it means nothing ! :)
K…as a native Mandarin speaker born in Beijing & currently living in Hong Kong, I’m having a hard time understanding why RUclips recommended this video to me 😬 Feeling targeted 😂
But yeah I can confirm that Cantonese, Hokkien, and the Wu languages aren’t really dialects, they really are frickin different languages from Mandarin. I mean I can’t understand sh*t in those languages at all. Even though I’ve lived in Hong Kong for 5 years I still can’t communicate in Cantonese. It’s just impossible. Lol.
Generally I only perceive the dialects spoken in northern China (like Henan, Shanxi, Shandong and stuff) as “real dialects” of Mandarin. They could be grouped as the same language. But once we get to the South… It’s just completely different.
I try to correct people on this when I can. “Which Chinese?” Because there's a little too much ignorance on the outside and a little too much propaganda on this inside that the minority languages deserve to be aired.
These are the same discussions I have in Thai where folks say ภาษาจีน (Chinese language) and I have to ask which one, which the response is usually a confused expression (but maybe it's my accent). When I talk about the minority languages in Thai and how the government pushed Central Thai in schools around the country to promote a united identity to quell descent with countrymen, they give me a nod (because they know there's a long and current history of propaganda). Asymmetric intelligibility is real. The sad part though is seeing young folks with no interest in learning their dialects because it makes you look ‘poor’ and doesn’t lead to opportunity-which of course reminds me of striving to develop a General American accent when I was young to not identify with the trailer rabble (hooray early onset classism I wasn’t aware of).
Just don't. You know what they mean; I see this as just the English terminology. Think of "Budapest", the "s" should be pronounced "sh", but "Budapest" is so widespread, just imagine it as a norm. "Tomato" has two definitions: a scientific and culinary (Google it for more info), there is no standard. So does "berry"; strawberries aren't scientifically berries, but bananas are - however this term "Berry" in the incorrect usage is so widespread, it's become a norm, known as "scientific vs colloquial definitions". "Chinese" referring to Mandarin is so widespread, it's a second/unofficial/unprofessional/colloquial norm, think of it as a new word in a new language or English.
Same with Spanish. "Spanish" is the group of languages, including Castillian, Catalan, Gallician, etc. However because Castillian is the most widespread and the most famous, usually when one says "Spanish", usually we mean Castillian. Same with "Chinese" and "Mandarin" or so.
@@cerebrummaximus3762 oh, I don't disagree and it obviously has it's times to be pedantic and not. But it *is* difficult to not be a pedant.
@@gotoastal I agree, I used to be the biggest grammar Nazi ever. I also used to be extremely picky on various wordings (eg: of linguistic or historic topics), however I realised that if there is an established norm, even if it's technically incorrect, there's no reason to try go against it, if I am understood that way, but being accurate will prevent me from being understood.
It's all political. When I tell people I speak "Spanish," I am sure to specify Castilian Spanish so as not to diminish Catalan, Galician, Aragonese, etc. The most widely shared spoken language of northern India and northern Pakistan is even tricky: I usually say "Hindi-Urdu" as the largest differences are in the writing script--I read both--and whether you want to draw from Sanskrit or Persian. (Saying "Hindustani" seems to imply India preference, which is another reason I choose to say "Hindi-Urdu" instead.)
I have come to the opinion that it's impossible to expect an average person to use the proper terminology because it demands an unreasonable degree of cultural or linguistic understanding. The phrasing that gives me cringe the most is "is this written in Mandarin or Cantonese?" I see that question as the consequence of the speaker being told that the terminology matters without being provided the proper context for pick the terminology (which is fair). I might have a problem with someone saying 中文 when they should be using 普通话, but expecting the same degree of subtlety in general English discourse is not practical.
A little point about the mutual intelligibility of Chinese dialects:
I grew up learning Mandarin as a second language but my every now and then I would hear a conversation between my parents or older relatives in Cantonese and find that I could understand them despite only being able to recall so few words I can count them with my fingers.
I think it's similar to how you can mostly read simplified and traditional chinese even if you only learned one script. The grammar and vocabulary are almost identical, so with some context I can guess and make a near 1-to-1 translation from Cantonese from Mandarin. But I think me being able to guess the words also has something to do with hearing some (though not a lot) of Cantonese since young, because I can't understand a single word of Hokkien or other dialects
I can speak both and they are definitely not comparable to simplified/traditional. The grammar and vocabulary share similarities but are quite different, I find it hard to believe that a Mandarin speaker who doesn't know Cantonese at all would be able to understand it. I think you are right that you just remember from hearing Cantonese since you were young.
I really expected you to say "Standard Mandarin or Standarin"
Anyway, the keyword is "spoken", right? As the languages can be mutually intelligible when written down. (or so I've heard)
Nope, another misconception. That's moreso a result of the non-Mando languages being almost entirely spoken-only, with little effort to officially document them in written form.
Cantonese speakers in HK/Guangzhou have been inventing pronunciation-based Canto-only Chinese characters (or repurposing them) for a long time (e.g. 哋, 啲, 咁, 系, 梗, etc).
Meanwhile some Min speakers have created a Latin alphabet-based phonetic writing system (Pe̍h-ōe-jī) as they don't have Min-only characters yet their pronunciation for Chinese characters is so vastly different (e.g. 饮茶 in Mando is yin-cha, but in Min is lim-teh).
@@sktzn6829 may be nitpicking a bit, but using 饮茶 would be a poor example here. “im-te” is actually the pronunciation of 饮茶, those characters specifically. It would be like “象” in mandarin (xiang) vs cantonese (zoeng) which are also very different but correspond to the same character.
Min dialect speakers also use some of their own repurposed characters, just that none of them are standardized like in Cantonese.
@@sktzn6829 actually lim is 啉 in Hokkien, we do have our own Min characters but they are just less known because of the lack of formal education ssytems
This is fascinating to me as a Chinese person (Cantonese) who grew up hyper-aware of this. Cantonese, even, is an umbrella term for a variety of other non-Mandarin, Sinitic languages
generally we do use cantonese to refer specifically to the Guangzhou Chinese language, which would make it one single language, but sometimes it is used to mean "Yue languages" which would, in my opinion anyway, make it an umbrella term as you described it
It's more like a group of languages
Two things:
1. fyi this video does not appear in my subscriptions feed on my laptop (it does on mobile)
2. about the argument that starts at 4:06, it's not clear to me whether you're saying that people think that Chinese is the *only* (native) language spoken by most people in China, or that they think it's a language that is spoken by most people in China. In the latter case, I'd say that the same argument can't really be applied to Italian and {the country that borders San Marino} nowadays, so maybe it's "slightly more okay" to call Italian Italian. I have to say that I've seen Italian called "toscano" in a comic (originally in Italian) from idk 65ish years ago, which (and this is a complete guess) might have been a reference (for comedic effect) to the fact (I'm guessing this is a fact) that when the """dialects""" were more prevalent than Italian (so, like, not too long before the publication of the comic) they often called Italian Tuscan.
Sorry if the second thing was hard to read, I'll admit I didn't try my hardest to keep it easy to read, sorry about that
I burst out laughing because my life also includes failing to learning languages and eating stupid amounts of cheese
I feel like another great example is Serbo-Croation. That area from Montenegro to Slovenia all exists on a language continuum (I think that's the right word), but the emphasis on language versus dialect seems to stem from a want of nation-state.
One day in 7th grade social studies the teacher was talking about civilizations and he asked ironically "¿quienes hablan mandarín?" ("who speaks Mandarin?"), and one classmate said "los mandarinenses" ("the Mandarins" said wrong). The teacher told him to repeat that bc he hadn't quite heard him, and then said if he had responded "las mandarinas" ("the tangerines") he would've given him a 0 in an assignment.
was WAITING FOR THIS ONE
As a Taiwanese who is tired of explaining that I speak Chinese but am not Chinese, this video is very helpful. I really don't understand why I can't express the fact that my language is different in English.
You can simply say Chinese is a group of languages and I speak one of them. And even being ethnic Chinese and speaking a Chinese language does not mean you have the same habits, customs, language, cuisine as another Chinese group. In essence, Chinese is a broad ethnolinguistic term, like Slavic or Turkic.
How is this video helpful in explaining the shift in identity in Taiwan?
because the PRC and the KMT corrupted the term to mean something political instead of cultural
But you are ethnically Han Chinese just like the ROC Chinese at my church when I immigrated to the U.S. in the early 1990s. 2 families at my Chinese church fled with the KMT from my city and later moved to the U.S. including my pastor who only lived in Taipei from 1949 to 1953 and firmly identified as Chinese. The majority of the elderly in my church in the 1990s identified as Chinese despite being ROC Chinese and not PRC.
@@zeitgeistx5239 more of the people who fled to Taiwan after WW2 moved to US later. That's why 90% of Taiwan is ethnic Taiwanese who know nothing about fleeing from China, as their families had lived in Taiwan for centuries. Now barely over 10% of Taiwan are decendants of those who fled. Ethnicity is a delicate issue, one can try to make artificial political ties and end up sounding racist unintentionally. Don't forget that the native (Hoklo, Hakka, and Aboriginal) Taiwanese were treated extremely poorly (understatement) by the KMT, so their memory is of that; its no wonder they prefer not to be called Chinese.
(1:00) You didn't have a clear marker for where the sponsored segment started, and you made it appear as if it was part of the episode itself. Note that this might be illegal where you are from, and if you continue this, you might be in legal trouble.
In Hong Kong, people sometimes also call cantonese "chinese", because we can all understand what it means by the context.
And some may argue that cantonese is the language that should be called chinese as some claims it has a longer history than mandarin.
on that same logic shouldn’t Hokkien be called Chinese then?
Fun fact: There is no Language called Tibetan.
Well boys, we did it. Italian is no more.
From now on, we need to refer to what is commonly seen as the national standard language of Italy, as "Tuscan".
There are 2 small number mistakes
As of now the population in the mainland of China is higher than 1.4b, and while it will probably decline in the future, its definitely not 1.3b
Also, most of the loss of other language influence is not due to government programs, it's mostly due to younger generations just not learning their parents native language, as there is no suppression of language diversity in China, anymore
If you don't allow schools to teach a language, you are suppressing that language.
@@PlatinumAltaria What needs to be considered though is that not all Chinese languages have a standardized way of writing or speech, since even before the modern Standardized Mandarin became a thing people from different regions communicated through varieties of Northern Chinese languages that are classified as Mandarin nowadays, and when writing people either wrote based on said Northern language or in Classical Chinese in formal scenarios which is how Chinese was written few thousand years ago. So even though both Chinese governments not teaching regional languages are at fault for their decline, most of the Chinese languages did not even get a chance to develop its own standard to be actually taught in school.
@@PlatinumAltaria you will find local language in many schools as an optative course
Just because in the US, France, Germany all education is in English French and German doesn't make them "aggressively push their language"
Same in China, people just don't learn it because it's not useful and all education is in Chinese standard mandarin
Here’s a Hakka language speaker from Taiwan, looking for Hakka people overseas. I really want to communicate with the people who are related to Hakka, just to preserve the language and culture that we Hakka people have. If you know any one who is Hakka or related to Hakka, please let me know.😊
The subjects like Maths, English and Physics also don't have clear lines between them.
Languages are basically a classification tool that uses an algorithm to determine categories to assign speech into, so that the information with a category in intelligible with itself.
Technically this can lead to weird things like a first speaker, where (x = the amount of time explaining words) is just below the threshold value/equation result and adding new speakers interfering with the categorisation of unrelated languages.
But it still works.
The lines separating languages, are as clear as those that separate species. In one case, it's mutual intelligibility, in the other it is being able to get fertile offspring. naturally, the lines are far from absolute, and there are plenty of cases of where its fuzzy ...and in pretty much the same ways.
@@ZarlanTheGreenThat is why you need an algorithm.
What are you talking about? How is the division of English from Math and Physics not clear? Physics is crearly separated from math as well even though math is used in physics.
The point about dialects is true though.
@@justanormalyoutubeuser3868 What about things like cosmic constants? Are they Maths or Physics?
Are they from some hidden geometry or just a value? Is it the same for each constant? We don't know. Maybe a Mathematician will figure out the exact value of one from geometry. Maybe a Physicist will figure out the exact value of one from the integration of a complex physics equation. Then what do you call them,
What if a programmer figures out a mathematical algorithm for making a story with an AI? Would that be maths or English? What if the algorithm does not care about the language, it is in, with a separate system making the story beats have meaning? What if it does care what language it is in and it is in the programming?
They are easy to separate by our mental algorithm, as the information that makes the other information easy to understand is grouped together. Though they don't really have much meaning by themselves.
@@UniDocs_Mahapushpa_Cyavana Physical constants are physics, there can be no mathematical derivation of them as the universe is not a mathematical system. Something like π is math because it depends on mathematical construction, the circle constant is 4 in the taxi-cab metric for example. A constant like c on the other hand is pysical, it does not depend on mathematical construction. In the same way algorithms are math, their application to a different subject doesn't make them something else.
Would you say poetry is geology because you can carve a poem into rock?
legit my favourite channel rn
thanks :)
This has the same energy as the idea of "Illiteracy" in the Medieval age. Where people who can't read and write in Latin was classified as Illiterate, despite their ability to do them in their Native Language.
What really defines a language does blur in a lot of times. Looking at the Italian Example, and your analogy with Danish and Swedish... There's an Italian "dialect" that have different phonetic structure than Italian. Venetian / Lengoa Veneta
Despite being called a "Dialect", many of its phonetics are detached from Italian and I hear that people call it "As if Italian went into a blender with other Romance Language and Old English".
I think we should just call it Chinese. It seems like there is this weird need to call out China specifically for doing something that literally most European countries already have done/are doing, which is making a standardized version of a dialect the national language. I don't see anything inherently wrong with that just as long as you also make teaching local dialects also important which I don't really think have been on the highest priority of either China or European countries.
So you think it is fine to deny, denigrate, suppress, and oppress all non-Mandarin sinitic peoples, cultures, and languages, in China? Colonialism and supremacism is fine, in your book? ...and no, they are no dialects. They are separate langauges. Cantonese, e.g., isn't a dialect of Mandarin, any more than German is a dialect of English. (actually, German and English are a lot more similar)
@@ZarlanTheGreen
Amazing how you got all that from my comment where I specifically said I don't see anything inherently wrong with a national language as long as you teach local dialects.
Also I was talking about dialects, not different languages. I know there is a bit of a fuzzy line but languages should be prioritized to preserve over dialects imo. Also while we should try to preserve as many kinds of varied dialects as possible I also don't think that every language and dialect should be ethnically divided into their own separate states either which is why I'm fine with a national language. There should be a middle ground between evey group of people gets their own separate ethno state and large nations can have one or a small number of national languages to create unity.
@@calebr7199 You said it's fine to call it Chinese. By that statement, you agree to the things I said you agree to. Also, you referred a group of completely separate languages, as dialects, which further proves that you obviously agree with it.
@@ZarlanTheGreen
You clearly have a problem with languages being suppressed and colonialism therefore I say you must also agree that every single dialect and language must be it's own country, therefore you also agree that China, the US, France, Germany the UK should be broken up into smaller countries based on differences in language.
I'm kidding but isn't it fun to just make up what the person you're arguing against believes. That's called a straw man by the way. I'm done responding to your comments troll.
@@calebr7199 You're comparing apples to oranges. Nothing of what I said, leads to any of that, in any way. Referring to Mandarin as "Chinese", and referring to the other Chinese languages as dialects, however, inherently and unavoidably is a denial and suppression of the other Chinese languages, in and if itself. You can't say that you're not for X, when you are actively doing X.
实际上中国人从出生后学会说的第一种语言不是普通话，而是本地的方言，学习普通话要等到进入小学后才会学习，也正是因为如此中国是有普通话证书的。所以普通话确实是一种的官方语言，因为只有官方在推广它。而普通话只能用在方言无法沟通的的情况下，这也就是为什么中国在改革开放之前推广不开普通话，因为人口不流动
Neither is Spanish. "Spanish" is the group of languages, including Castillian, Catalan, Gallician, etc. However because Castillian is the most widespread and the most famous, usually when one says "Spanish", usually we mean Castillian. Same with "Chinese" and "Mandarin" or so.
People do think of Spanish, Catalan, Galician, and Basque as separate languages so this is pointless. So calling Spanish "Castilian" is semantic.
Is Andalusian a separate language?
Chilean Spanish: ...
或许语言应该以地区来分，用可以沟通和不能沟通来表示不同语言之间的关系
The Italians don't call theirs Florentine, but Spanish is quite uncontroversially (I think) alternately called Castellano (Castilian, the language of the Castile region/former kingdom), so there are at least other examples of this.
Hakka speaker here.
In fact many Chinese dialect sharing same word with others, just different pronouncing.
Over the past 2000 years, people have migrated from the north to the south in waves due to wars.
In the northern region which is mainly flat, transportation was convenient and communication was frequent, so people's pronunciation was easy to maintain consistency.
In the southern region which is mainly hilly mountains, transportation was blocked. As long as they were separated by mountains and rivers, the people on the two sides might not have communicated for hundreds of years, which easily led to the formation of dialect islands.
On the Chinese internet, southern netizens often jokingly say that southern dialects have retained the pronunciation of ancient Chinese.
The difference between Italian and Chinese, is that Italianization started 100 years earlier, and Italian jingoism has subsided enough to allow non-Italian varieties of Romance languages in Italy, to exist as they are, while recognizing their differences and uniqueness. A Neapolitan speaker, is recognized as speaking a distinct language or dialect, and if they need to be, they are bilingual with Italian. The problem with "Chinese" is that as some people often say, "calling something a Chinese language, is like referring to the Romance languages, as a single language", however it is deeper than that, because in reality, Mandarin sits somewhere at the same level as Romance language, or possibly even a level between Romance and Indo-European. I have heard native Mandarin speakers say that Mandarin spoken by people more than a few hundred miles apart is mutually unintelligible, I suspect in a way that is more different than the American struggling to understand a thick Scottish brogue, more like hearing or reading Scots or Frisian, and thinking they should understand it, but it is completely alien.
I love your video,help me a lot in understanding chinese even I am a chinese myself
Love it when you talk about Chinese as always 🔥
You can try tandem for language partners
"Bonjour!"
**"ah shit wrong one"**
Chinese Mandarin is a lingua franca for all Chinese Citizen to speak so that they could understand each others since all Han Chinese are using similar Chinese Script with some variant characters.
Min Chinese is language speak in Fujian but within the Fujian region different district that speak different version of Min Chinese dialect.
Similarly goes to Chinese Hakka Language or Chinese Mandarin Language where different district speak different dialect.
Northern China Chinese speak Mandarin with a thick accent like the Scottish but the Southern China Chinese speak Mandarin without the thick accent and clear intonation.
The main reason is the Southern China Chinese adopted Mandarin Language (secondary language) but they still keep their own mother tongue (main language)