Dialect Usage around China

[Lu]

Then I'm sorry, I thought I remembered you mentioned it at some point, but I must have misremembered. But, despite Skylee not writing a blog in it, Cantonese can be written.

[chiuyan]

Takeshi wrote

Cantonese is a purely oral language too, but it doesn't have a problem because Cantonese sounds can be used to read Standard Chinese. When Cantonese people pick up that letter they wrote to their dead parents, they won't have to switch to Mandarin to read it; they could read it out loud with Cantonese sounds, but it just won't be the way they speak because the literary language is different.

I remember when I first came to Hong Kong in 1996 it was very hard to find materials written in colloquial Cantonese. Quotes in newspapers sometimes, or jokes, or some of the entertainment editorial content, but other than that it seemed quite rare. Now it is everywhere. Many magazines are written using colloquial Cantonese, advertisements on busses and in the MTR, even government sponsored "you must be 18 to buy cigarettes signs". I have HBO on demand and I was recently watching Ironman with Cantonese subtitles.

Remember _all_ spoken Chinese dialects were purely oral until quite recently, even Mandarin. In Hong Kong, the government still used Classical Chinese style writing up until the 1970s when they switched to using the standard chinese from Beijing.

To me as a native English speaker it is quite weird to have a written language that is so different from the way you speak. Especially when I watch Cantonese TV shows with Chinese subtitles on and I miss a word or misunderstand what someone said, and the subtitles are so different

[li3wei1]

A little like having someone in the movie saying "Y'all be messin' with ma head!" and the subtitle saying "You people are intentionally confusing me!"

[chiuyan]

li3wei1 wrote

A little like having someone in the movie saying "Y'all be messin' with ma head!" and the subtitle saying "You people are intentionally confusing me!"

Not exactly. I think it would be a misstatement to say that the differences between spoken Cantonese and written Chinese are just the level of slang. A particular example I remember was one of the characters saying something like 佢畀警察拉咗 and the subtitles saying 警察逮捕了他. I didn't know how to say "arrest" in Cantonese, so I rewound the program to see what the subtitles said. Of course the meaning is the same, but the subtitles were not much help in determining what was actually said.

But we are getting a bit off topic.

In response to the original topic, where I currently live in Singapore many of the older people (50+) converse in dialect. My neighbour speaks mostly Hakka with her friends and family, and Hokkien and Cantonese are pretty common amongst the older folks. Younger Chinese Singaporeans, however, converse mostly in English or Mandarin with a fair amount of dialect and malay vocab, but most of the younger singaporeans I know cannot really converse in dialect anymore. Of the ones that can, it seems to be mostly Cantonese (probably due to HK media and the prevalence of Cantonese in Malaysia).

Where I lived in Hong Kong there were quite a few people who spoke 潮州話. Most of the people who work in the building I lived in did, though of course they could speak Cantonese too.

In Taipei, all of the MRT announcements are in Mandarin, Taiwanese, and Hakka.

In San Francisco, CA many of the bus announcements are in English, Cantonese, and Spanish

[Kobo-Daishi]

This thread reminds me of a scene from the classic Ariel Lin/Wilson Chen idol drama In Time With You.

http://sugoits.info/...you-episode-02/

At the 9:13 mark, a guy speaking only Taiwanese cuts to the front of the ticket counter at the airport.

When the ticketing agent tells him to go to the back of the line, he goes all Reese Witherspoon. Don't you know who I am? I'm famous. A national treasure.

All the while he's speaking Taiwanese while everyone speaks to him in Mandarin.

I wonder if it's like this only for this show or do people on Taiwan really speak two opposing dialects/languages/topolects/regionolects (Mandarin-Taiwanese) to each other at the same time.

Also, I see in the subs they have 拍謝(谢) for 歹勢 (pháiⁿ-sì / phái-sè).

The Taiwanese equivalent for "bu hao yi si" and "dui bu qi".

This would then be a Mandarin transliteration for the Taiwanese Minnan.

Kobo.

[OneEye]

This would then be a Mandarin transliteration for the Taiwanese Minnan.

:wall

I hate that so much. You see 歹勢 on signs in Taipei. Everyone knows what it means, even a lot of foreigners. It's one of the few things in Taiwanese that I can say without people freaking out because "you can speak Taiwanese?" There is no excuse whatsoever for using 拍謝 instead.

But I believe I've already ranted about that earlier in this thread.

I wonder if it's like this only for this show or do people on Taiwan really speak two opposing dialects/languages/topolects/regionolects (Mandarin-Taiwanese) to each other at the same time.

It does happen, but not especially often in my experience. What's more common is one or both parties speaking a mix of Mandarin and Taiwanese. It can vary anywhere from all Taiwanese with a few Mandarin words thrown in when the person's Taiwanese breaks down (usually more formal words), to all Mandarin with some Taiwanese words thrown in for flavor. That's in Taipei anyway, can't speak for the rest of the country.