
The Future of Language - kafkaesq
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/09/24/the-future-of-language/
======
evmar
Does anyone know why articles like this, which often seem to involve
consulting experts, always count all of China as one language? Aside from the
many different languages of China[1], Wikipedia also says that "Chinese"/Hanyu
in different regions is mutually unintelligible[2], which as far as I know is
the same as the difference between similar languages like Italian and Spanish.

I don't mean this as a middlebrow dismissal -- I am not very knowledgeable
about Chinese and I am hoping someone has a good explanation for this. For
example, maybe it's the case that everyone speaks their local language _and_ a
unified dialect as well; or maybe it's that the vast majority of people all
speak one dialect (Mandarin?) such that these articles are only counting those
people; or maybe it's some other thing I don't understand.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_China](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_China)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language)

~~~
beisner
While the different dialects of Chinese (Mandarin/普通话/putonghua being the most
common, followed by Cantonese/广东话/Guangdonghua, etc.) sound entirely different
spoken, the written character representations of the dialects are essentially
the same. That means that the syntax, grammar, and other conventions of
written Chinese underpin all spoken dialects. This extends to both written
Traditional and Simplified Chinese, which are just two parallel character sets
that represent the same fundamental characters (Simplified characters are just
simplified versions of the Traditional characters, and were introduced in the
1940's and '50s to promote literacy). So while two people speaking different
dialects may not be able to speak to each other because the tones and
pronunciations of words are different, they most certainly can communicate by
writing with each other because each dialect is just a different vocal
representation of the same underlying language.

~~~
mchaver
>> So while two people speaking different dialects may not be able to speak to
each other because the tones and pronunciations of words are different, they
most certainly can communicate by writing with each other because each dialect
is just a different vocal representation of the same underlying language.

That's actually not true. Modern written Chinese is pretty much Mandarin
Chinese. You can pronounce written Chinese with a non-Mandarin dialect but
most of the times that is not how the dialect is spoken, and if you write the
spoken form of a non-Mandarin dialect, there is a good chance that a lot of
pieces of it won't make sense to someone who doesn't speak that dialect, on
top of the fact that most dialects don't have a standardized written form in
Chinese Characters. Most people speaking two different dialects can
communicate via characters because they have learned written Mandarin.

~~~
beisner
Interesting - thanks for the correction. I have been learning Mandarin for a
few years now, and made the assumption that since the accepted writing system
was standard nationally (and practiced by all literate Chinese speakers,
regardless of regional dialect) that the spoken languages were all underpinned
grammatically by the same writing system. As you pointed out, this is not the
case.

Adding to what you said (and correct me if I'm wrong here, this is based on
some quick research [1]), while written Mandarin is by far the most common -
and official - writing system, most dialects have completely different sets
(i.e. non-1-to-1 mappings) of words than Mandarin, and many have supplemental
character sets that wouldn't make any sense to someone reading Mandarin. The
Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set, for instance, is a set of characters
that are specific to the Cantonese dialect, and don't have close/exact
relatives in standard written Mandarin [2]. Additionally, while the grammar of
the different dialects seem rather close (similar to the relationships between
Romance languages), the number of syllables used to represent vocabulary
varies from dialect to dialect, which suggests vastly different etymology
between the dialects. What I find particularly interesting is that given these
substantial differences in vocabulary, one's native spoken language and one's
native written language can be at odds with one another. Perhaps this is
mitigated by the fact that spoken Mandarin is so widespread, but I wonder how
this affects written communication for those who don't speak Mandarin
natively.

[1] [https://www.quora.com/Linguistically-speaking-how-similar-
ar...](https://www.quora.com/Linguistically-speaking-how-similar-are-the-
various-dialects-of-Chinese)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese)

~~~
mchaver
>> most dialects have completely different sets (i.e. non-1-to-1 mappings) of
words than Mandarin, and many have supplemental character sets that wouldn't
make any sense to someone reading Mandarin

Yes, that is correct. Cantonese is probably the non-Mandarin dialect with the
most writing going on, and that is mostly informal writing like facebook,
blogs, gossip magazines, although there is some modern literature written in
Cantonese characters, wikipedia in Cantonese probably counts as well for more
formal writing.

>> The Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set, for instance, is a set of
characters that are specific to the Cantonese dialect, and don't have
close/exact relatives in standard written Mandarin

Yes, though I don't know if there are Unicode code points for all the
Cantonese characters. You often see this like o的,o個,o即 instead of 啲,嗰,嘅. I
know a lot of people in Hong Kong use Cangjie for character input and a lot of
the Cantonese characters don't have (or didn't have) Cangjie mappings.

>> I wonder how this affects written communication for those who don't speak
Mandarin natively

When speaking Taiwanese it is common to use Mandarin words for more educated
topics or if you don't know the word in Taiwanese just use the Mandarin term.
Probably because Taiwanese is not generally used in higher education and there
are varying levels of Taiwanese fluency in Taiwan. I would imagine it's
similar for a lot of dialects in China since speaking dialects is often
discouraged and a lot of younger people abandon their native dialects.

------
Aqwis
It is sort of touched on later in the article, but the first graphic, showing
the number of native speakers for each language, isn't very useful. The
statistic that better measures the utility of knowing a language is the total
number of people with working knowledge of the language, which would boosts
the numbers of English, French and Russian dramatically.

I wonder if a better statistic would be number of speakers with working
knowledge of a language, weighted by GDP per capita of the countries in which
those speakers live. Of course, that assumes the purpose of learning a
language is to do business, which is not necessarily true.

~~~
maehwasu
Very interesting, and can be stated even more strongly. Even if the purpose of
learning a language isn't business, the GDP per capita of the target language
matters. Countries that are better off have more people with leisure time who
you are likely to meet/interact with, and also tend to produce more
interesting culture.

------
jaimebuelta
I'm curious about the discrepancy of the number of Arabic speakers. The
article says 467 Million, while Wikipedia states 290 Million [1]

I know that Wikipedia can't be taken as The Truth, but a quick search on
Internet seems to get values closer to 200-300M than to 450M (except for
Ulrich Ammon, which is the source for the post). It seems a sensible
difference, anyone has an explanation?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic)

~~~
hasenj
Arabic is not one language, but a family of languages, with "Standard Arabic"
serving as an almost artificial lingua-franca, that no one actually can speak
natively.

I say almost artificial because it has never been any body's native language
at any point in time.

Now, Classical Arabic, theoretically was the native language of certain tribes
in the Hijaz region (of modern day Saudi Arabia) some 1400 years ago. Standard
Arabic is a _modernized_ version of Classical Arabic. Some vocabulary have
almost completely different meanings, and a large number of modern
collocations would probably make no sense to the native speakers of Classical
Arabic if they were alive today.

