Chinese Isn't (Really) A Language...

Controversial video title. It’s not as bad as it sounds. | Start learning for free with Busuu and try premium for 7 days!

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Sources:

Dong, J. (2009). "The enregisterment of Putonghua in practice". Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies.

Norman, J. (2003). "The Chinese dialects: Phonology". The Sino-Tibetan languages. Routledge.

Zhang, X. (1998). "Dialect MT: A Case Study between Cantonese and Mandarin". Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Zhao, E. & Wu, Y. (2020). "Over 80 percent of Chinese population speak Mandarin". People’s Daily Online.

0:00 - Intro
1:58 - Various Ramblings
5:50 - Credits

Written and created by me
Art by kvd102
Idea by gu-de-mao-ning
Music by me.
This video is sponsored by Busuu

Translations:
Leeuwe van den Heuvel - Dutch
Kaiserthe13th - Turkish
Дзишу Фурыч - Russian
João P. Magalhães - Portuguese (Brazil)
Rubýñ - Spanish
deacu daniel - Romanian

#chinese #linguistics #mandarin

[reasonableperson]

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.

[Scillat-hv]

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'.

[Hositrugun]

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.

[lohphat]

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.

[parabolaaaaa]

i think we should discover a new language and name it chinese

[gordyrroy]

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.

[fructoseg]

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)

[IPP]

"A language I would call Standard Mandarin, or -"
STANDARIN!
"Standard Chinese..."

[AccuracyKa]

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).

[eb.]

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" of "Filipino." 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

[buurmeisje]

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.

[jinashi]

nice video, love from China. you could make more videos about comparing different languages!

[logger]

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

[scaevolaludens]

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"

[john]

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.

[toratoratora]

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.

[simonlow]

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.

[nexmastercz]

Where's the line between language and dialect you ask? There isn't one, we all just speak a dialect of Haida.

[rateeightx]

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.

[widmawod]

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.