
Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin - tareqak
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-23975037
======
jamesli
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](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.

~~~
taway2012
Hmm, if Cantonese is as different from Mandarin as Spanish is from English,
why do you still call it a "dialect" of Mandarin?

~~~
SeanLuke
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).

~~~
taway2012
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.

~~~
dragonwriter
> 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.

------
afreak
> Of the 70% of the population who can speak Mandarin, many do not do it well
> enough, a ministry spokeswoman told Xinhua news agency on Thursday.

Keep in mind that there are many dialects of Mandarin and what this ministry
is referring to is the fact that people do not speak the Beijing dialect well,
which is the national standard.

~~~
speeder
He said that 70% do not speak Mandarin, and most of these do not speak "well".

I guess only the "speak well enough" is related to dialects.

The other 30% I think he is referring to people that speak cantonese, and all
other interesting languages that exists there, including the mongolian
languages (almost everything in China west of the great wall, was originally
part of mongolia, like Tibet for example... and thus they have not much to do
with China actually, specially Han people).

I hope someday people will figure a way to keep mongolians peaceful without
erasing their culture or resorting to extreme tyranny.

~~~
flanbiscuit
I knew China had different languages but wow there are quite a lot of them

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_China#Spoken_langu...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_China#Spoken_languages)

~~~
gaoshan
And some of them sound rather radically different from Mandarin. My wife
speaks something called Hangzhou dialect (spoken just a few hours away from
Shanghai) and when other Chinese hear it they sometimes think she is visiting
from another country. On one occasion some people thought she was speaking
English (it sounds nothing like English).

An example of the differences... in Mandarin to say "It is." you would say
"Shi de." but in Hangzhou dialect you would say something that sounds like
"Zede ye." The adverb "very" is "hen" in Mandarin but sounds like "molaolao"
(though colloquially people often just say "mo") in Hangzhou dialect.

The differences between the various dialects are fascinating sometimes radical
and they must have developed for many centuries in near isolation from one
another to get where they are today.

~~~
laumars
I'm no expert, but I always wondered if it was a result of the language being
tonal. In England, you have dialects that can sound so different that it could
be another language to the untrained ear. However as English isn't tonal,
there's a larger margin for error (so to speak) - accents can exist without
transforming the word. Whereas with a tonal language, an accent could change
the language more dramatically.

Though what's also interesting is some of the different languages and dialects
in China also have different sentence structures (eg verb placements).

~~~
gaoshan
>However as English isn't tonal, there's a larger margin for error

True. The tones are critical in a way that can be very difficult for non-
native speakers to grasp. Here are the four tones used with the words mā
(mother), má (hemp), mǎ (horse) and mà (to curse) with an extra for ma
indicating a question
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRkCf6Djprs](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRkCf6Djprs).

And in that video she pronounces them far clearer than would be used in actual
conversation.

------
maaku
“A dialect is a language without an army or navy.”

Chinese dialects are totally separate languages, in some cases only distantly
related. A Mandarin speaker with no previous exposure to dialect X would find
it incomprehensible. It'd be like calling Swedish and Portuguese dialects of
the common language “Euro-nese” (as was once the case with 'vulgar' Latin
before we started calling it French, Spanish, Italian, etc.)

The Chinese government calling these languages 'dialects' is Orwellian new-
speak that makes “language unity” sound like speech therapy instead of the
linguistic genocide that it is (a practice which, to be fair, predates both
Orwell and Mao).

~~~
saraid216
Except that the Chinese writing system is basically the same across all
dialects. This is one of the most remarkable oddities of the Chinese language.
This isn't true of the various Romance languages, which will cheerfully
include random additional letters all over the place.

And nevermind that Swedish is descended from Germanic whereas Portuguese is
descended from Latin, so your comparison is closer to Cantonese with Hindu.

~~~
maaku
No, the Chinese written language is not common to all sino languages; most
local languages are not written down, ever. People write in Mandarin. A
century ago, people wrote in classical Chinese, which is an entirely separate
literary language. When you go to Shanghai or Chenzhou you see signs, books,
advertisements, etc. written in Mandarin, not the local languages of
Shanghainese or Dzao Min. There are some exceptions -- Cantonese and Yi come
to mind -- but these are very specific historical exceptions.

I purposely chose Swedish from the Germanic language family to prove a point.
When this topic ever does get brought up, people usually make the comparison
to Latin and the romance languages in Europe, harkening back to a time when
all written communication was in Latin, and the vulgar or Germanic languages
were spoken only. But would you seriously claim that Latin was the written
form of Old German? Or that the Latin literary culture of the time was
inclusive and representative of Germanic cultural norms?

Many (most, depending on how you count) of the local and minority languages in
China are only distantly related to Chinese, in the same way that Swedish and
Portuguese are both Indo-European languages. What we call China was a
culturally, ethnically, religiously, and especially linguistically diverse
place when it was politically unified by Qin Shi Huang 2200 years ago. Many of
those languages still exist today, in the same regions. But thanks to 2,000
years of linguistic suppression these languages have no written form or
literary culture, and very few people are even conscious of the loss.

~~~
saraid216
Huh.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese#Vocabulary](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese#Vocabulary)

Apparently I've never actually been taught written Cantonese. I wonder if my
mother is familiar with the difference. I find it odd since she's fluent in
both Cantonese and Mandarin (whereas I'm only fluent in Cantonese).

That may also possibly explain some instances where I saw unfamiliar
characters and simply assumed that it was my vocabulary that was lacking.

------
weu
It's worth noting that China has a 90% literacy rate so while they speak may
not speak Mandarin they still have some ability to read (and of course use
their local dialect): [http://world.time.com/2013/08/15/what-the-word-toad-
can-tell...](http://world.time.com/2013/08/15/what-the-word-toad-can-tell-you-
about-chinas-modernization/)

------
saraid216
I recently went and saw _The Grandmaster_ , and one of the more interesting
subtleties I noticed was that the Northerners were speaking in Mandarin while
the Southerners were speaking in Cantonese. That isn't noted in subtitles
anywhere.

(I'm ethnically Chinese, grew up in a household speaking Cantonese, and took
some lessons for Mandarin.)

------
snake_plissken
Mandarin is a very interesting language because there are hundreds if not
thousands of dialects across China that can vary substantially. For a while I
lived in China and could speak the Beijing dialect well enough to get to know
someone and engage in small talk about the NBA. I took a train trip from
Beijing to Lanzhou which is like 1500 km west. My buddies and I got off the
train and couldn't understand a lick for the first 2 days.

Then there's southern China which speaks Cantonese, which is about 100 million
people give or take.

------
w1ntermute
Waiting for tokenadult to comment on this...

~~~
niuzeta
who's that and why?

~~~
ihsw
According to his profile[1] he seems to be somewhat of an expert on Chinese
languages.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tokenadult](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tokenadult)

~~~
newman314
Interesting. On an somewhat related note, I would be interested in hearing his
opinion on math textbooks.

------
newsign
India is also in similar situation where many dont speak Hindi - its like a
Britain or American cant speak English ... being multi dialect/language
country shouldn't be an excuse of not being able to speak the national
language - i guess past and present government is to be blamed...

~~~
kyllo
That's because Hindi is no-one's native language, it's an artificial language
that was invented by a committee.

Mandarin is almost the same situation, except that it is very very close to
the native language of Beijing and Northeast China. So it's almost like
they're forcing the entire country to learn Beijing dialect.

~~~
dragonwriter
> That's because Hindi is no-one's native language, it's an artificial
> language that was invented by a committee.

More accurately, Modern Standard Hindi (like Modern Standard Urdu) is a
committee-standardized register of the Hindustani (also known as "Hindi-Urdu")
language. (prior to standardization, "Hindi", "Urdu", and "Hindustani" all
referred to the same language, apparently.)

> Mandarin is almost the same situation, except that it is very very close to
> the native language of Beijing and Northeast China.

Hindustani has 240 million native speakers.

~~~
newsign
Also those people are purely native speakers, meaning people whose first
language is Hindi - while there are many whose command over Hindi is very
strong but their first language is Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi etc.

If you count all those people who can speak/write Hindi then the count goes
way over 500 Million ....

------
jl6
While it makes me uncomfortable to think of anyone being forced into a new
language, I like the idea that this increases the number of people who can
talk to each other.

~~~
jccc
People in the western world have been able to talk to each other culturally,
economically, etc. without necessarily speaking English.

But the Communist Party might have a better time influencing
culture/economy/policy/ideology across all of China with more people speaking
the official language.

------
tokenadult
A lot of the commenters aren't believing what this news report says. But the
news report kindly submitted here matches the facts of an earlier news report
from China, reporting that "The survey of half a million people shows that
53.06 percent of the population can effectively communicate orally in
mandarin."[1]

[1]
[http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838...](http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838.htm)

In other words, hundreds of millions of persons in China cannot have a
telephone conversation with one another, or ask for directions and get a
comprehensible answer if they travel to each other's home regions, and so on.
National common language promotion in China still has a very long way to go
(although of course it is farther along in the younger generation than in the
older, and farther along in urban areas than in rural areas). For this issue
of national policy, the relevant issue is whether or not people can understand
one another when they have a conversation. Many, many, many groupings of
citizens of the P.R.C. would include people none of whom have a common
language mutually understood by any other person in the group.

By contrast, Taiwan has been much, much, much more successful, much earlier in
history, in making Modern Standard Chinese (Mandarin) a common language in a
region where historically "Taiwanese" (the Taiwan dialect of Southern Min
Chinese) was the majority language and Hakka was a significant regional
minority language. After 1949, when the defeated Nationalist forces retreated
to Taiwan, perhaps 10 percent (mostly soldiers) was added to Taiwan's
population, but not all of those persons were speakers of (mutually
understandable) Mandarin either, yet Mandarin was thereafter treated as the
sole national language in Taiwan. My wife grew up speaking Taiwanese to her
parents (who spoke Japanese to each other, because of their prewar education
in occupied Taiwan, then a colony of the Japanese empire), and Mandarin to her
siblings and classmates. I met her in 1982. She spoke perfectly adequate
(Taiwanese-accented) Mandarin as young adult, and she often impressed visitors
from the P.R.C. to the United States in the mid-1980s when we were both
students with the quality of her Mandarin. My nieces are now generally more
proficient in Mandarin than in Taiwanese, although both languages are still
used among our relatives in Taiwan. (Mandarin and Taiwanese are cognate
Sinitic languages, but no more similar than English and German are, and
certainly NOT mutually comprehensible.) Taiwan achieved much more rapid spread
of Mandarin by having a stronger economy in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and
1980s, and thus much more use of personal telephone calls and radios and
televisions and much more internal travel. China still has a lot of catching
up to do.

The book _The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy_ by John DeFrancis

[http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-
DeFranci...](http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-
DeFrancis/dp/0824810686)

does a lot to disentangle the issues of speech versus writing, and dialect
versus language, that are discussed in several of the interesting comments
that preceded my comment here.

Here's an example of how you might write the conversation

"Does he know how to speak Mandarin?

"No, he doesn't."

他會說普通話嗎？

他不會。

in Modern Standard Chinese characters. Contrast that with how you would write

"Does he know how to speak Cantonese?

"No, he doesn't."

佢識唔識講廣東話？

佢唔識。

in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even
to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin"
and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters. Even the
traditional Chinese character writing system doesn't bring about mutual
understanding among people from all parts of China.

~~~
Sagat
I'm currently trying to learn Mandarin. Thanks for posting.

------
cwhy
So you prefer them to communicate using English, a language that is even more
unrelated?

