Mandarin - dialect ratio in dialect provinces in China

[gato]

Don't people in Harbin or Shenyang speak closer to standard Putonghua than people in Beijing? Why is it said that Putonghua is based on Beijinghua?

[liuzhou]

Londonhua is Cockney

You're obviously not a Londoner. Cockney is very much a minority dialect. I fink NorfLondonHua is the prevalent dialect, init?

[hakkaboy]

Experts have written a lot about Estuary English, a kind of compromise between Cockney and the Queen's English which is very prevalent in London.

[liande]

This seems to be an issue that needs clarification: China is a multi-language country to a scale as Europe is. China had, other than Europe, always the written language as a lingua franca (a language that everybody could communicate in). The characters therefore must be considered as an important glue between the different parts of the country. Mandarin or rather Putonghua (transl. the general language) is an artificial language that was introduced in the late forties and is intended to eventually give China a more stable. It is closely modeled on the Peking dialect but it is not identical. It is taught at schools and radio and television speak it. Therefore the most part of the population understand and the younger people also speak Putonghua. People who left China before the late forties only speak the regional language. If you understand and speak Mandarin you will always be able to communicate anywhere in China. But you will only have the "pleasure" to overhear people talking about you when you are in Peking. More and more people speak Mandarin for pleasure even in Shanghai and there is already concern that Shanghainese may get lost..

[atitarev]

I want to confuse you Looks like even sinologists and the Chinese themselves are not quite sure what Putonghua is.

According to statistics Mandarin (Putonghua, Guoyu, Huayu) has the largest number of speakers as opposed to any other Chinese dialect, Wu, Cantonese, etc - 800,000,000 people. So, it's not just Beijing, obviously - although Mandarin has dialects and regional accents, it's spoken on the large area in North-East, centre and South-West of China. Some cities chose Manadarin as the main language because there are too many immigrants from all over China - Shenzhen (Guangdong), Hailar (Inner Mongolia), Karamay (Xinjiang). Although, they are Tianjinhua, Kunminghua, they are still Putonghua (with a regional accents and some regional words), please correct me if I am wrong.

[Ah-Bin]

I think putonghua and guoyu refer to the standard language whether you are in Taiwan or in China.

Chinese linguists use Hanyu to refer to any sort of Chinese even cantonese, Hokkien and so on. BUT Hanyu can also refer to the standard language, (putonghua) because the person using it either thinks that all other types of Chinese are dialects of putonghua OR (more likely) because they are just used to using Hanyu to mean putonghua and they haven't really though about the relationships between it and Cantonese.

The term that Chinese linguists use for "mandarin" is Guanhua 官話 meaning "official's language" and that includes Sichuanese and Shandongese and so on. I don't know whether ordinary Chinese know this word or not any more though.

In Taiwan most people just say "Guoyu" or "Zhongwen" (even for the spoken language)

Huayu seems to have the same all-encompassing meaning as Hanyu, but I think it just refers to the standard in Singapore. They use it for the names of Chinese language schools in Taiwan too.

If you are interested in this sort of thing you should read

Jerry Norman's "Chinese"

Ping Chen's "Modern Chinese"

John DeFrancis' "The Chinese Language Fact and Fantasy" - which is mostly about writing.

[liande]

Mandarin (guanhua) is a term that is certainly not used by common Chinese. Hanyu, being the language of the Han, is more general, thus including all sorts of dialects. Guoyu is a term initially used in Taiwan for the standard language, not Taiwanese, but is becoming more and more common on the mainland there being used for an equivalent to Putonghua. The same applies to Huayu, however the term seems to be even more limited to Hongkong and Taiwan. Using these terms is always a bit politically tainted, maybe just as Airen or Xiansheng or Laogong. Zhongwen is on the mainland all Chinese including the written language and characters. I do not know how it is used elsewhere. Pinyin, the romanization used on the mainland, is based on Putonghua. Keep in mind, however, that Putonghua is now a living language and is altogether influenced from all sides. The pure form of Putonghua is not spoken. Closest maybe are the news-ladies of CCTV and CRI.

[hakkaboy]

atitarev and liande: putonghua is not the same as beifanghua. This is the mix-up that comes from translating both as "Mandarin" in English. Kunminghua most definitely is not putonghua, and Sichuanese is not guanhua, although both Kunming and Sichuan dialects are subdialects of beifanghua. Most people in this thread seem to be confused about the difference between putonghua and beifanghua - because they are trying to impose the Western concept of "a language" on to China and Chinese.

[atitarev]

As for me - I am not trying to impose any concept but there are almost as many perceptions about Chinese languages/dialects, their borders and definitions as there are users on this forum, including Chinese. Another person will say, there's not much difference between Kunminghua and Beijinghua, just an accent. People have to use analogies - English in India is different from standard but it's still English, although their accent may not comprehensible for some.

[liande]

hakkaboy: Putonghua is an artificial language. It is not a dialect of anywhere in China. There is no such thing as beifanghua. All the regional languages are more or less similar to Putonghua, but more or less.. some much less, some more.. Beijinghua comes closest.

[ala]

because they are trying to impose the Western concept of "a language" on to China and Chinese.

Ridiculous. The problem has nothing to do with a Western concept of language. Chinese linguists also consider obscure little Burmese tongues to be separate languages as well, exactly on par with Western convention. If you look at the Sino-Tibetan linguistic tree in China, you will see that in the Tibetan column there are well over 50 separate languages (some much closer to each other than Chinese dialects); while on the Sinitic column there is only one: Chinese (汉语). It is also ironic that the Sinitic column makes up the vast vast majority of the population of Sino-Tibetan speakers, yet there is only one language. The issue is entirely political, hardly cultural.

The true problem is in the Chinese word fangyan 方言, which is inappropriately translated as "dialect" into English and Western languages when referring to the Sinitic family of languages. Historically fangyan 方言 merely meant "regional language/speech." Hence Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and even English were originally called fangyan 方言. When Western linguistic terminologies became known by the Chinese, due to nationalistic politics at the time, Chinese linguists decided that the Sinitic fangyan will be translated as "dialects" and non-Sinitic fangyan be translated as "languages."

There is no evil Westerner imposing anything on the Chinese. The Chinese willingly adopted the Western notion of languages, but stopped short of the definition on the Sinitic languages in the name of national unity.

[Ah-Bin]

But since a dialect is "any variation of a language" (see Peter Trudgill's Sociolinguistics) then putonghua is a dialect too, just a standard dialect. Fangyan does not equal "dialect" because it doesn't include putonghua.

[liande]

ala: that's what I am trying to say all the time. But I would take it even further: To my opinion Putonghua has been purposefully installed with national stabilization and politics in mind and certaily not by a Westerner. The "dialects" are the real languages of China but in fact, they are not dialects but languages with similarities to a similar extent as in Europe and with differences to make them impossible to understand. However that's something which is purposefully overlooked by the state translations. This is partly because if you would like to install Putonghua as the standard language, it does make sense, to declare all the other languages as "dialects". Dialects, in fact, of a originally non-existing main language.

[Altair]

Why is it said that Putonghua is based on Beijinghua?

My understanding is that the language reformers based the sounds of Putonghua on Beijinghua, but based the grammar on what was used in popular novels that made use of northern speech. I am not sure where the vocabulary choices come from.

Chinese linguists decided that the Sinitic fangyan will be translated as "dialects" and non-Sinitic fangyan be translated as "languages."

What do Chinese linguists call dialects of non-Sinitic fangyan, such as different dialects of English?

From on English speaker's point of view, I think it is technically true that Putonghua is "artificial"; however, that can also be said of other languages where the standard language represents a compromise between different varieties of natural speech. My understanding is that standard German, for instance, came from something that was created at the start of the reformation, as a language to be understood across a wide variety of German speakers. Of course, there are many people who now grow up speaking more or less in this way, but that does not change the fact that standard German was not simply adopted from the speech of a particular particular place in Germany.

[atitarev]

From what I read about Sun Yatsen (I think it was on the pinyin.info site), when they were deciding on the national language - the most common was Mandarin (not sure about the Chinese and English name for it at that time - beginning of the 20th century), all other dialects were rejected as not being the common ones, although Cantonese was considered.

Does it mean that there was this most common or wide-spread dialect (with a number of subdialects, accents, etc) even before Mandarin was made official?

If I am not mistaken, some grammar aspects and vocab were taken from Southern dialects but the accent was Beijinghua, despite the difficulty of R's and SH's, ZH, etc.

From Wikipedia:

Until the mid-20th century, most Chinese living in southern China did not speak any Mandarin. However, despite the mix of officials and commoners speaking various Chinese dialects, Beijingese Mandarin became dominant at least during the officially Manchu-speaking Qing Empire.

Most of posters are right about saying that Mandarin does not belong to any particular locality but there regional identities belonging to Mandarin group.

"Mandarin" usually refers to only standard Mandarin in everyday usage. The broad academic concept of "Mandarin" encompasses a large number of linguistically related dialects, some less mutually intelligible than others, and is very rarely used outside of academic circles as a self-description. Instead, when asked to describe the spoken form they are using, Chinese speaking a form of Mandarin will describe the variant that they are speaking, for example Sichuan dialect or Northeast China dialect, and may not recognize that it is in fact classified by linguists as a form of "Mandarin". Nor is there a common "Mandarin" identity based on language—due to the wide geographical distribution of speakers—though there are strong regional identities centered around individual Mandarin dialects.

Mandarin subdialects:

Generally speaking, the local pronunciations of people from other Mandarin-speaking areas depart more and more from the standard as distance from Beijing increases. Some areas, such as Heilongjiang, have pronunciations that are not significantly different from the standard, though this is the exception rather than the rule. Cities very close to Beijing, such as Tianjin, Baoding, Shenyang, or Dalian, already have pronunciations that are markedly different. In general Mandarin can be divided into the following dialect areas:

Beijing and environs, such as Chengde, Hebei. The basis of Standard Mandarin

Northeastern, or that spoken in the northeast of China (or what the West knows as Manchuria), except the Liaodong Peninsula

Ji-Lu, or that spoken in Hebei ("Ji") and Shandong ("Lu") provinces, except the Jiaodong Peninsula

Jiao-liao, or that spoken in Jiaodong Peninsula and Liaodong Peninsula

Zhongyuan ("central plain"), or that spoken in Henan province, the central parts of Shaanxi in the Yellow River valley, and southern Xinjiang

Lan-Yin, or that spoken in Gansu province (with capital Lanzhou) and Ningxia autonomous region (with capital Yinchuan), as well as northern Xinjiang. The Dungan language, a Chinese-derived language spoken in Kyrgyzstan, also belongs to this category (atitarev: it's written in Cyrrillic, not Hanzi)

Southwestern, or that spoken in the provinces of Hubei, Sichuan, Guizhou, Yunnan, and the Mandarin-speaking areas of Guangxi

Jiang-huai (or Xia-jiang), spoken in the parts of Jiangsu and Anhui on the north bank of the Yangtze, as well as some areas on the south bank, such as Nanjing, Jiangsu; Jiujiang, Jiangxi; etc.

In addition, Jin is sometimes categorized under Mandarin, as the Qin-jin subdivision. However, current practice tends to set it apart as a separate division on equal footing with Mandarin.

Don't forget that some of the provinces above have dialects that are not part of Mandarin.

IMO, althgough, the standard Mandarin is artificial, the choice to make it official is obvious, the Mandarin subdialects make up the largest dialectal group in China. No other dialects is so common, even we take the rest of China where no Mandarin dialect is used. We have either Cantonese, or Wu, Hakka or Min or others.

[hakkaboy]

This discussion has shed more heat than light. What I am really interested in is what is the relationship of SW Mandariin to the standard. I will find that out I suppose when I get to Kunming.

[hakkaboy]

There is no evil Westerner imposing anything on the Chinese. The Chinese willingly adopted the Western notion of languages, but stopped short of the definition on the Sinitic languages in the name of national unity.

This is an example of a comment shedding heat but not light. If the Chinese had adopted the Western definition of languages the Sinitic language/languages would be seen as many languages rather than one. You claim that because litttle Burmese languages are regarded as separate, that means that the Western definitiion of language is accepted. But: Tibetan is seen as one language, despite at least three, and arguably many more, mutually unintelligible forms of the spoken language. May I humbly suggest that the Chinese regard Chinese as one language because of the written script. Before the days of putonghua, Classical Chinese did unite all the speakers of Chinese dialects. Now that Classical Chinese has been replaced by "baihuawen", the script is less of a unifier, but clearly Chinese dialects do have a common origin, and mostly standard Mandarin words do have a reading pronunciation in the other dialects, even if not all words and phrases are natural to the dialects concerned. Similarly: Tibetan dialects are united by......the Tibetan script. Little Burmese languages with no script are a different thing entirely. To a large extent it is cultural too: the Chinese script is the vehicle for Chinese culture, the writings of Confucius, Tang poetry etc, and so, regardless of the divergence between dialects today, the Han Chinese who share that cultural inheritance are regarded as one minzu, therefore speaking dialects of one language. Tibetan script is also the vehicle for Tibetan culture, which is the common heritage of all Tibetans. Languages with no traditional written form do not preserve heritage and culture in the same way, except through oral tradition, and so are not in the same category at all. This email will be picked over for the sake of it...generating heat, but no light.

[liande]

Dear me, now we even run into that minzu thing.. Considering the Chinese have their script and so many other things to be proudly united by why do they have to identify by their Hanzu?? Especially considering that while there is no uniting Hanyu there is the most amazing intriguing and special Zhongwen to be proud of. Wierd.

[ala]

This is an example of a comment shedding heat but not light. If the Chinese had adopted the Western definition of languages the Sinitic language/languages would be seen as many languages rather than one. You claim that because litttle Burmese languages are regarded as separate, that means that the Western definitiion of language is accepted. But: Tibetan is seen as one language, despite at least three, and arguably many more, mutually unintelligible forms of the spoken language. May I humbly suggest that the Chinese regard Chinese as one language because of the written script. Before the days of putonghua, Classical Chinese did unite all the speakers of Chinese dialects. Now that Classical Chinese has been replaced by "baihuawen", the script is less of a unifier, but clearly Chinese dialects do have a common origin, and mostly standard Mandarin words do have a reading pronunciation in the other dialects, even if not all words and phrases are natural to the dialects concerned. Similarly: Tibetan dialects are united by......the Tibetan script. Little Burmese languages with no script are a different thing entirely. To a large extent it is cultural too: the Chinese script is the vehicle for Chinese culture, the writings of Confucius, Tang poetry etc, and so, regardless of the divergence between dialects today, the Han Chinese who share that cultural inheritance are regarded as one minzu, therefore speaking dialects of one language. Tibetan script is also the vehicle for Tibetan culture, which is the common heritage of all Tibetans. Languages with no traditional written form do not preserve heritage and culture in the same way, except through oral tradition, and so are not in the same category at all. This email will be picked over for the sake of it...generating heat, but no light.

I'm confused by your comments, since when did linguistics become a cultural study? And for your information, there are dialects in Wu 吳語 alone that are as different as the Tibetan dialects. The fact that Chinese dialects used Classical Chinese means little considering that Vietnamese, Japanese and Korean all used Classical Chinese well into the last millennium. Korean only started using Hangul in masse during the last 50 years. As a non-Cantonese speaker, Cantonese to me sounds as foreign as Japanese or Vietnamese; but today, we all know Cantonese is a Chinese dialect, while Vietnamese is a separate language, but how do we know this? Do we innately know this? We know this through school and massive propaganda of one language: Hanyu. We could have just as easily learned that Cantonese like Mandarin are Sinitic languages, that we are all part of the big happy Sinitic language family, but no.... our Chinese nationalism is so brittle that we must claim to be speaking the exact same language for 1 billion people. The term Hanyu 漢語 traditionally referred to written Classical Chinese (this usage still exists in Japanese) and did NOT include ANY of the Chinese dialects, not Mandarin either.

You claim that because litttle Burmese languages are regarded as separate, that means that the Western definitiion of language is accepted. Little Burmese languages with no script are a different thing entirely. Languages with no traditional written form do not preserve heritage and culture in the same way, except through oral tradition, and so are not in the same category at all.

Are you suggesting that the Chinese dialects don't have a rich and independent oral tradition like the Burmese languages? If so you have definitely mistaken. Are Cantonese and Shanghainese operas, folk tales, folk songs somehow in Mandarin? This is the Ugly Chinese syndrome at its finest: treat others like royalty, treat your own like slaves.

[Gary Soup]

Don't know who said it, but "A language is a dialect with an army."

It could equally be said that a dialect is a language without an army.