Comment by jamesli | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jamesli | Hacker News Reader

Many people think Mandarin and Cantonese are basically the same language, or Cantonese is an accent of Mandarin. It is understandable since the majority of early Chinese immigrants were from Canton Province (or Guangdong Province), where Cantonese is the dominant language.

Cantonese is a dialect, with very different sound system, although it shares the same writing system with Mandarin. The difference between their sound systems could be larger than that between English and German, or between Russian and and Bulgarian. It makes sense if one considers the size of China. It is as big as Europe sans Russian. There are as many dialects in China as languages in Europe. In some remote parts in East China, the people in the towns next to each other could not understand each other's dialects. So a common writing system was enforced more than 2000 years ago so that people could communicate with each other in writing.

Native Cantonese speakers is less than 5% of total population in China. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language. It is mostly spoken in Canton and Hongkong. A helpful analogy (not accurate definitely) is to think of it as Spanish in the scope of Europe. A native Mandarin speaker will not understand Cantonese if he doesn't study it, just as a native English speaker will not understand Spanish without study.

Good point. As someone who lived in Nanning (not Nanjing, Nanning is the province across is the one above the Vietnamese border, across from Guandong/Hong Kong), it is intriguing to me how few people know they border on almost completely separate languages.

I took time to learn Mandarin, and could string sentences together. I could not even say thank you in Cantonese, once, without others laughing at me. The Cantonese-speaking kids I knew just say just give up.

Then I moved onto Arabic, that is another fun story.

Nanning is actually not a province. It's the capital of Guangxi province.

Yeah, sorry. I was tired. I was thinking Guangdong city, then Guangdong province, then made the jump to Nanning -> Nanning Province. I should have known better, and thanks for correcting me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an...

An excellent summary. Trying to get everyone in China to speak Mandarin would be like getting everyone in Europe to speak English. It will never be 100% unless you obliterate other languages.

Hmm, if Cantonese is as different from Mandarin as Spanish is from English, why do you still call it a "dialect" of Mandarin?

Because it's mentally and politically convenient for people to consider China to be one entity.

He didn't say that. Cantonese is not a dialect of Mandarin. Mandarin and Cantonese (and many others) are both dialects of Chinese.

Chinese is traditionally only written. A Chinese person would speak in his local dialect, but read and write in Chinese. The local dialect typically had a different vocabulary and grammar from written Chinese. Since these dialects aren't written, only spoken, they're dialects.

Largely due to politics, over the last two centuries written Chinese has gradually shifted such that nowadays its grammar and vocabulary have a one-to-one correspondence with a particular dialect, namely Mandarin. But that wasn't always the case. Indeed, most ancient written Chinese poems don't rhyme in Mandarin: but they rhyme in many older dialects (like Cantonese).

Now stuff like Tibetian: that is a language, separate from Chinese and with its own writing system. This is not the case for Cantonese (and 40 other major dialects in China).

OK, that's a good point, but IMHO the question still stands.

If Cantonese is as different from Mandarin as French is from Italian (though, IIRC, both are Latin languages), then why are they still called dialects?

I see from the rest of the comments that dialect vs. language is political and arbitrary rather than an objective difference.

> If Cantonese is as different from Mandarin as French is from Italian (though, IIRC, both are Latin languages), then why are they still called dialects?

If France and Italy weren't different countries, we might well not call French and Italian languages rather than dialects of the same language. The dialect/language distinction isn't particularly clear cut.

> then why are they still called dialects?

Things have changed for Mandarin nowadays. But traditionally: Chinese dialects are only spoken and are regional, whereas Chinese the language (the written symbols) is national -- and very different from the dialects.

The case can be made that Mandarin is now a language and has subsumed Chinese; but the rest are still dialects.

you may say that French and Italian are "dialects" of Romance Languages. Just like how people wrote commonly in Latin, people in China share a similar writing system but differ when spoken.

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