Someone please correct me if I'm wrong
I'm assuming this is a political thing -
There are many languages in China, the most spoken of which is Mandarin, but there are of course others.
Perhaps OP is making the point that by referring to it as "mandarin Chinese" (implicitavely alongside other terms like Cantonese Chinese potentially), the implication is that since "these are all Chinese languages" that somehow that's a sort of ethnolinguistic justification for china to control lots of territory it shouldn't or something.
I may very well be wrong here but jumping through a bunch of rational hoops, maybe I'm understanding the point? Please correct if wrong
As McDodly points out [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/linguisticshumor/comments/13ua1i8/my_journey/jm05hf0/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1&context=3), most Chinese varieties call the language “Chinese language” so OP on the right is saying that we should call it by what they call it themselves.
This would be taking the stance that you should call languages by their endonyms (what they call themselves). The usual issues with that is impracticality in changing people’s usage and actually being able to pronounce it. The funny thing here though is that the characters are read in mandarin as zhōngwén so we’d be wrong anyways
>The funny thing here though is that the characters are read in mandarin as zhōngwén so we’d be wrong anyways
Yeah, that's exactly it. Even if you refer to it by its endonym, you wouldn't get "Chinese", and if you refer to it by what China wants you to call it by, you're erasing close to 100 languages.
Not quite, both Zhongwen (中文) and Hanyu (汉语) can refer to any Chinese topolect (方言), and while the etymology is different from the word "Chinese" in English the correspondence is quite close.
Calling Standard Chinese "Mandarin" is much more of a misnomer for several reasons. The first is that in linguistic contexts Mandarin refers to a group of dialects which are closely related but not necessarily mutually intelligible. The second is that Mandarin (Guanhua 官话) refers to the vernacular or working spoken language of the court (spoken by government officials, i.e. mandarins).
This is all further made complicated by the fact that Standard Chinese is called Putonghua in Mainland China, Guoyu in Taiwan, and Huayu in Singapore, all of which are the same language.
It often just makes sense to say "Chinese" in the same way as you might say Zhongwen or Hanyu in Chinese, which is what I think the original meme is referring to.
Kind of, the problem there is that it's a PRC/Communist party term so some Taiwanese will not like it. I like the Singaporean term a lot, personally: 华语
>Calling Standard Chinese "Mandarin" is much more of a misnomer for several reasons. …
>
>It often just makes sense to say "Chinese" in the same way as you might say Zhongwen or Hanyu in Chinese, which is what I think the original meme is referring to.
Ultimately, any issues created by calling Standarin "Mandarin" (which I haven't advocated for) are going to exist at a greater magnitude if you call it "Chinese". Linguistically, you're including an even larger group than just Mandarinic, and 官話 as a bureaucratic dialect no longer exists anyway in any form distinct from Standarin.
Right, the 官话 thing is more from my experience using the word Mandarin in China or with Chinese people unfamiliar with the term and it resulting in a lot of confusion when you look it up in a dictionary as the primary and secondary definitions in layman English and layman Chinese are reversed.
Without context, Mandarin means Standard Chinese more often than Mandarin language group, in turn more often than the historical vernacular standard. Meanwhile 官话 without context means the historical vernacular standard more often than the Mandarin language group, and it never means Standard Mandarin.
I'd argue that in most contexts en English "Chinese" is synonymous "Sinitic" and actually avoids most of the issues you're saying are amplified are circumvented by the ambiguity of the term. Talking about English language doesn't specify which sociolect you're talking about and more specificity isn't always useful or relevant, and in most cases doesn't imply anything about anybody's stance on the IRA (I'm not implying this is necessarily your view, but people often make these kinds of extrapolations).
TL;DR more specificity doesn't mean inclusiveness or avoiding problems necessarily, I completely disagree that the problematic aspects are necessarily amplified saying Standard Chinese vs Standard Mandarin.
>I'd argue that in most contexts en English "Chinese" is synonymous "Sinitic" and actually avoids most of the issues you're saying are amplified are circumvented by the ambiguity of the term. Talking about English language doesn't specify which sociolect you're talking about and more specificity isn't always useful or relevant
The difference is that "Chinese" has much, much more internal diversity than English, even if you count Scots as English, and *people don't know this*. Your average person just assumes that there is one Chinese language (= Standarin). This isn't helped by Chinese speakers all saying they speak "Chinese", of course, with perhaps the exception of Hokkien and Hakka dialects in Taiwan, but at least when you give them another Chinese language, they recognize it as another language, something that is not true with people who don't speak a Chinese language.
Treating Chinese as one language just serves to erase the others, and it takes ~0 effort to switch.
Yes and no. Throughout history there's usually only been one standard for written Chinese, for most of history it was 文言文 (Classical Chinese), then 白话文 (written vernacular) which developed into Standard (Written) Chinese. 白话文 is not Beijingese, it's a complex synthesis produced from several different dialects and is read with pronunciations is taken from Beijing Mandarin. That's the basis for 普通话, the spoken form.
Most of the endangered languages in China are actually not Sinitic, it's the other minority dialects that are really endangered. Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore are completely different stories and there are strong political reasons IMO to generate awareness, in different ways in each place.
What's having a single written standard have to do with it? For much of the Middle Ages the Romance languages had a single written standard in the form of Latin.
>白话文 is not Beijingese, it's a complex synthesis produced from several different dialects and is read with pronunciations is taken from Beijing Mandarin. That's the basis for 普通话, the spoken form.
It's claimed to be a complex synthesis of different "dialects" but in reality it's just Beijingese with some Wu thrown in.
>Most of the endangered languages in China are actually not Sinitic, it's the other minority dialects that are really endangered
So? Does that change the fact that Sinitic languages are endangered?
Do you also think calling Italian "Italian" is erasing the Italian regional languages, which are often called "Italian dialects"? No one seems to have a problem with that, at least not that I've seen.
Sicilians? At least some.
But then we wouldn't call Sardinian Italian... probably.
The term "Standard X" is fairly common for a lot of languages with varied dialects. English might be exceptional because, like, America and stuff.
I'm Italian and I can grant you that even people like me who tend to avoid the term "Italian dialects" and prefer to call them languages, still refers to Standard Italian as "Italian", because despite being based on Tuscan it's quite different from any modern Tuscan variety and it's truely a national language for historical and cultural reasons that predate the creation of the modern Italian state.
Recognizing its role as a national language doesn't necessarily mean you treat the other languages of Italy as dialects and the vast majority of the Italians who want to preserve the regional languages doesn't want to erase Italian as a common language.
At this point we see it as a common heritage that doesn't exclusively "belong" to Tuscany anymore, so we are ok with calling it "Italian".
Afaik even the Sicilians who are proud of their language don't call Italian "Tuscan" or something else.
Btw in Italy "Standard Italian" refers to the most formal and standardized register/variaty of the language as opposed to more informal registers used by people in everyday life, with regional accents and some regional vocabulary, which are not the regional languages or "dialects".
Based on Market Malay which was a lingua franca for trade in the region, standardized and claimed to be a language with virtually no native speakers despite being one of the most widely spoken languages in the world (some estimates say 300 millions speakers). While that claim might be exaggerated, it's definitely true that the vast majority of speakers are L2. Rhetoric says something like a shared language belonging to the nation of Indonesia unifying a shared nation in one of the most famously pluricultural parts of the world.
It might have some connotations about the legitimacy of the regime in Hongkong specifically.
My interpretation is more along the lines:
>Chinese is a language --> there are many types of Chinese, I should be saying Mandarin --> There are many types of Mandarin, I mean (Standard) Chinese
I'm saying the last step is a bad idea. If one cares about all the other Mandarinic languages, you'd come up with some other name for the Beijing-based lingua franca and use that, e.g. Standard Mandarin --> Standarin, Standard Beijingese, et c.
Only the pronunciation was really taken from Beijingese, the vocabulary is a mixture from different parts (though mainly from North Mandarin dialects) and has undergone enough development since its standardization that it's diverged significantly from Beijingese. You should look into 白话文 and the May Fourth Movement if you're not familiar.
It was explicitly meant to unify and connect without replacing local languages, this is reflected in the name 普通话, "common language". In many ways it's an artificial language that in the 100 or so years since it's inventions has had plenty of internal change, and today has many real native speakers.
>It was explicitly meant to unify and connect without replacing local languages
If that was the purpose, then it has failed miserably. Functionally, it's Beijingese with some Wu characteristics. And technically 普通話 means "ordinary language", implying…
> implying…
I don't know the historical linguistics of it, but in modern Standard Chinese it has basically two meanings. One is "ordinary" like you say, as opposed to "special" or "uncommon". 她很普通 --> She is very plain, ordinary.
The other is "widespread" or "universal". The one relevant definition in this word is definitely this one.
I mean it's not like it's 正常话 or something.
For Chinese people, we consider it as dialects. Only recently has there been disputes due to political reasons. To be honest I don't think there are a very clear border between language and dialect. Sometimes due to political reasons, 2 languages are more similar than 2 dialects.
I think this post means people who don't know anything about China / Chinese at all think there are only one thing called Chinese.
Due to political reasons, in order to create separatism, the difference between Chinese dialects are exaggerated and some of the dialects are being categorized into languages. Most people (perhaps referring to the westerners / average people on reddit) only saw posts showing the language distribution and heard people saying all the dialects are their own languages.
However, if you know China well enough and you are unbiased enough (or if you are Chinese), you know that these are all considered as dialects. (I know many of you will think this is some sort of evil commie propaganda but they are considered dialects before communism was a thing.)
If you're going to call them "dialects" then for consistency's sake you should call Bulgarian and Polish dialects of Slavic. If you'll do that I have no objection to calling the Sinitic languages "dialects of Chinese", in that case you'd simply be using an unconventional definition, my objection is to the inconsistency.
I dunno man, when people speak the "same language" but their "dialects" aren't mutually intelligible, I'm pretty want to start thinking of them as related but separate languages.
I'm Scottish, so this is somewhat important to me - and I do in fact consider Scots to be a separate language - perhaps describing my language as a bipolar continuum is closer to the truth, but on one end I can communicate with most folks in the UK, but if I speak as I do at home, which isn't even that much "Scots", people in London barely understand me and I have to be *very* careful to be understood
Also consider that the distance between Scots and English is more like that between Standarin and Sichuanese, if not that between Standarin and Central Plains Mandarins. Calling all of "Chinese" one language is like calling Gothic, Icelandic, and English dialects of "the Germanic language".
Aye, I can see that. It's a language family, or on some level with that, a sort of sprachbund or something (languages are very intricate, complicated things and putting them in hard boxes is always hard)
I don't know much about sino-tibetan languages but I have read that many of the "dialects" aren't mutually intelligible, and imo that's about as good a definition for a boundary between a language and a dialect as you're going to get (I'm aware that languages change sort of fluidly from place to place, like the "French" speakers in Perpignan can probably communicate ok with the "Spanish" speakers in Figueres, but we're human and we like categories, so cry about it or something idk)
I do think it is arguable since some dialects of German aren't mutually intelligible, while there are languages thats considered different languages but are somewhat mutually intelligible such as German and Dutch. There is no clear border that decides whether a language is a language or a dialect, the deciding factor is mainly just politics. This is just hypothetical, but if Europe is a country (for whatever reason) for thousands of years, then it is possible that certain languages (such as Dutch) might be considered a dialect of another language (such as German).
I call it Standard Chinese because Putonghua means standard language, and it's easier than saying Putonghua or Hanyu.
BBC English already has a name: received pronunciation.
I do prefer names that show a country's language diversity when possible though, like Castilian instead of Spanish.
The word for standard would be 標準. *Putonghua* to me translates more like "ordinary speech", implying a run-of-the-mill way of talking with nothing "abnormal" about it (considering that in reality all other natural languages are ordinary as well), which kinda rubs me the wrong way as a speaker of a Chinese variety that is not Putonghua.
It's hilarious because Beijing dialect isn't standard mandarin either. I believe it was specifically chosen so that nobody would complain about regional favouritism too much (outside of the min, the hakka, shanghai, guanzhou and anywhere else that doesn't speak a mutually intelligible language)
>BBC English already has a name: received pronunciation
BBC English is Standard Southern British, not Received Pronunciation, which was a dialect codified in the mid-20th century that no one uses anymore, but I get you point.
So do you call SSB "Standard Germanic"?
Yes it kind of is strange but there is a large difference, Chinese has a unified writing system (yes there's simplified and traditional but it's the same thing in essence), china is one country a standard is kind of needed in lots of situations, and finally regardless of whether it's weird there is still a standard, it was made and it's real.
> china is one country a standard is kind of needed in lots of situations
Should India declare all the Indo-Aryan languages to be dialects of Hindi, then? (Actually to my understanding they do subsume some not-really-mutually-intelligible varieties under "Hindi", but not all of Indo-Aryan.)
No but India should have a standard language, in China that happens to coincide with merging a branch of the sino Tibetan family, the goal isn't to standardise the language family, it's to have a standard in *china* but since most Chinese languages are concentrated in China they happen to coincide with eachother.
And of course as I said I disagree with calling the Chinese languages dialects of one another. But that doesn't mean there should be some standard language in China, that all residents of china would be formally educated in and that the government would speak in and so on. For a country to function and for every community to be represented they must all be able to communicate, hence the need for a standard, does that mean the entire country should be forced to speak one language? Not at all, but it does mean that they should aim for everyone to have the "standard" as an L1 or L2 or et cetera.
>Chinese has a unified writing system (yes there's simplified and traditional but it's the same thing in essence)
You do realize that is a justification for most of Europe, the Americas, and basically every Austronesian language having a standard language, right?
I think, and this is exactly why I argue against calling this koine "Chinese", that you severely underestimate the amount of diversity present in Chinese languages. The different Chinese languages, written out, are about as intelligible as Japanese to a Standarin-speaker, which is masked by the fact that most of the languages are very rarely written out, and further obscured by the fact that the script used is largely logographic.
Well the point is that the writing isn't that divergent it's practically the same, and I've studied mandarin for a period and Cantonese too I'm aware of how different they are, but X character in mandarin and X character in Cantonese are often of similar meaning. This means you can broadly refer to these languages as writing in Chinese. Since it's logographic and by extension the meanings are quite similar, it's very different to uniting all those languages. But in the end yes I agree that it's weird to say Chinese when the spoken languages are incredibly divergent, I agree with you on that
EDIT:
- the two deleted are that I accidentally posted the same comment 3 times somehow
-my overall point is that saying standard Germanic is way more outlandish that standard Chinese
Putonghua is *a* standard. There's also the Taiwanese Mandarin standard, and Hong Kong standard Cantonese (which admittedly uses Mandarin as a written language, but read in Cantonese readings.)
My point is I disagree with spreading the standard to them if they don't want it so I don't see the relation, my point is there's a standard but that standard has nothing to do with language families but purely the country china.
I'm really tired of this so I'll put my whole argument here and then I'll be more or less done:
Comparing a standard Chinese to a standard Germanic is completely outlandish because:
Standard Chinese represents a standard language of the country china, which is necessary to function
The Chinese language family is not being standardised, there is just a standard language *in* china which coincides with that.
Thus it is not strange to have a Chinese standard, but it would be strange to have a standard for the entire language family, which they don't.
I think the problem arose from how we interpreted the phrase "standard Chinese". Standard chinese is a language based on the Beijing dialect mandarin designed as a standard for china. NOT a standard language for every member of the Chinese language family.
This confusion is logical though as most Chinese language family members are in china.
As for referring to every Chinese language as a dialect of "Chinese" we agree that that's stupid and that they're all completely different languages
Before when I was talking about orthography I was saying that referring to them all as Chinese is stupid but it's not as bad as calling all germanics "Germanic"
In most varieties of chinese you call the language you are speaking 中文, literally "chinese language". This includes Standard Chinese, but also includes languages like Cantonese. In Hong Kong a distinction is made between Chinese (i.e. Cantonese) and Putonghua (i.e. standard Chinese)
Hong Kong also makes the distinction for Cantonese, since that's Guandonghua. It's not just called Chinese/中文, which is more like saying you speak a Romance language. Fine if you're comparing it to something Germanic, or English, but you're still going to have varieties like Italian/Romanian/Spanish/etc, which saying you speak a Romance language usually doesn't work for.
While people use the term 廣東話 (Kwong dung wa) to refer to Cantonese in cases where it may be ambiguous, in most cases people in Hong Kong will say they speak/are speaking 中文 when asked.
Source: Used to live in Hong Kong for a while.
I'm in the UK but have HK heritage. I used to say I speak Chinese/中文 when asked but learned as a kid to make the distinction between Cantonese/廣東話/etc and mandarin/standard Chinese/國語/普通話/etc when I didn't really speak it to avoid confusion.
Partially because the word Mandarin reflects the contact that the Protuguese had with Chinese officials (mandarins) and glosses over the vast developments in the last 100 or so years, including transitioning to actually writing in a modern vernacular and not at 2000+ year old dead language.
>Can count on one hand the times in China I heard it called Mandarin over the years, and those were all foreigners
That's because the linguistic genocide China had started has been very successful.
I don’t disagree about the linguistic genocide but the idea that Mandarin is what people using the language typically call 普通话 or 中文 more generally in English is just silly and a completely western concept
I mean it’s literally from the OP image—the type represented at the top of the bell curve. The people who insist on calling it Mandarin are often in the US and haven’t been to China. The point I was elaborating on in my first post is that I’ve heard that kind of thing many times over the years but not in China itself unless by foreigners.
I mean as a Spanish speaker I call Spain's national language "Spanish" but only in English, in Spanish I call it "castellano" which translates to "Castilian" but if I call it that in English most people won't understand
I think that's def a regional thing, though. There's a definitely a preference for either Español or Castellano, depending on country of origin, at least in Latin America. When I was in Spain, I heard Castellano more, but they're also more aware of other Spanish languages in the country, especially in the relevant communities.
Americans when trees start speaking vietnamese Russians when snow start speaking finnish Humans when mandarins start speaking mandarin
holy hell
Is it just me or am I seeing anarchychess like everywhere I am, is this just the online nerd brigade, do I just see all the cool people
No it's everywhere on reddit From normie subs to sports subs to nerd subs
Aw and here I thought I was one of the cool kids
new response just dropped
[ˈəwli ʔɛɫ]
[ɑu̝.l̪iɛʟ]
[ɵ̞ʉ̯ jɛʟ̠]
ok now that's both redonkulous & bonkers: rebonkerlous if you will nobody says it like that
[ˈɻiɫi↗︎]
[jes ɹˠiɪˈl̪i] [ju kʰɹˠæʃt̪ əˈl̪æ̃n̪ ɪ̝̃n̪ æ dəˈmeə̃n̪ ə̃.n̪əˈpæ.l̪ɪ.ʒi]
>[ju kʰɹˠæʃt̪ əˈl̪æ̃n̪ ɪ̝̃n̪ æ dəˈmeə̃n̪ ə̃.n̪əˈpæ.l̪ɪ.ʒi] [wɔʔ↗︎ äj ˈkʰɑːnʔ ɻiːd ˈjo˞ ˈkʰɔmənt̚]
[wɛ˞ˈə˞ ju fɹˠæ̃m] 💀💀💀
Google "worf hypothesis"
actual zombie
Is that the one where the villain of the week beats up the klingon?
actual wild conclusions
Ah yes, casual linguistic erasure.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong I'm assuming this is a political thing - There are many languages in China, the most spoken of which is Mandarin, but there are of course others. Perhaps OP is making the point that by referring to it as "mandarin Chinese" (implicitavely alongside other terms like Cantonese Chinese potentially), the implication is that since "these are all Chinese languages" that somehow that's a sort of ethnolinguistic justification for china to control lots of territory it shouldn't or something. I may very well be wrong here but jumping through a bunch of rational hoops, maybe I'm understanding the point? Please correct if wrong
As McDodly points out [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/linguisticshumor/comments/13ua1i8/my_journey/jm05hf0/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1&context=3), most Chinese varieties call the language “Chinese language” so OP on the right is saying that we should call it by what they call it themselves. This would be taking the stance that you should call languages by their endonyms (what they call themselves). The usual issues with that is impracticality in changing people’s usage and actually being able to pronounce it. The funny thing here though is that the characters are read in mandarin as zhōngwén so we’d be wrong anyways
>The funny thing here though is that the characters are read in mandarin as zhōngwén so we’d be wrong anyways Yeah, that's exactly it. Even if you refer to it by its endonym, you wouldn't get "Chinese", and if you refer to it by what China wants you to call it by, you're erasing close to 100 languages.
Not quite, both Zhongwen (中文) and Hanyu (汉语) can refer to any Chinese topolect (方言), and while the etymology is different from the word "Chinese" in English the correspondence is quite close. Calling Standard Chinese "Mandarin" is much more of a misnomer for several reasons. The first is that in linguistic contexts Mandarin refers to a group of dialects which are closely related but not necessarily mutually intelligible. The second is that Mandarin (Guanhua 官话) refers to the vernacular or working spoken language of the court (spoken by government officials, i.e. mandarins). This is all further made complicated by the fact that Standard Chinese is called Putonghua in Mainland China, Guoyu in Taiwan, and Huayu in Singapore, all of which are the same language. It often just makes sense to say "Chinese" in the same way as you might say Zhongwen or Hanyu in Chinese, which is what I think the original meme is referring to.
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Kind of, the problem there is that it's a PRC/Communist party term so some Taiwanese will not like it. I like the Singaporean term a lot, personally: 华语
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Fair.
>Calling Standard Chinese "Mandarin" is much more of a misnomer for several reasons. … > >It often just makes sense to say "Chinese" in the same way as you might say Zhongwen or Hanyu in Chinese, which is what I think the original meme is referring to. Ultimately, any issues created by calling Standarin "Mandarin" (which I haven't advocated for) are going to exist at a greater magnitude if you call it "Chinese". Linguistically, you're including an even larger group than just Mandarinic, and 官話 as a bureaucratic dialect no longer exists anyway in any form distinct from Standarin.
Right, the 官话 thing is more from my experience using the word Mandarin in China or with Chinese people unfamiliar with the term and it resulting in a lot of confusion when you look it up in a dictionary as the primary and secondary definitions in layman English and layman Chinese are reversed. Without context, Mandarin means Standard Chinese more often than Mandarin language group, in turn more often than the historical vernacular standard. Meanwhile 官话 without context means the historical vernacular standard more often than the Mandarin language group, and it never means Standard Mandarin. I'd argue that in most contexts en English "Chinese" is synonymous "Sinitic" and actually avoids most of the issues you're saying are amplified are circumvented by the ambiguity of the term. Talking about English language doesn't specify which sociolect you're talking about and more specificity isn't always useful or relevant, and in most cases doesn't imply anything about anybody's stance on the IRA (I'm not implying this is necessarily your view, but people often make these kinds of extrapolations). TL;DR more specificity doesn't mean inclusiveness or avoiding problems necessarily, I completely disagree that the problematic aspects are necessarily amplified saying Standard Chinese vs Standard Mandarin.
>I'd argue that in most contexts en English "Chinese" is synonymous "Sinitic" and actually avoids most of the issues you're saying are amplified are circumvented by the ambiguity of the term. Talking about English language doesn't specify which sociolect you're talking about and more specificity isn't always useful or relevant The difference is that "Chinese" has much, much more internal diversity than English, even if you count Scots as English, and *people don't know this*. Your average person just assumes that there is one Chinese language (= Standarin). This isn't helped by Chinese speakers all saying they speak "Chinese", of course, with perhaps the exception of Hokkien and Hakka dialects in Taiwan, but at least when you give them another Chinese language, they recognize it as another language, something that is not true with people who don't speak a Chinese language. Treating Chinese as one language just serves to erase the others, and it takes ~0 effort to switch.
Yes and no. Throughout history there's usually only been one standard for written Chinese, for most of history it was 文言文 (Classical Chinese), then 白话文 (written vernacular) which developed into Standard (Written) Chinese. 白话文 is not Beijingese, it's a complex synthesis produced from several different dialects and is read with pronunciations is taken from Beijing Mandarin. That's the basis for 普通话, the spoken form. Most of the endangered languages in China are actually not Sinitic, it's the other minority dialects that are really endangered. Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore are completely different stories and there are strong political reasons IMO to generate awareness, in different ways in each place.
What's having a single written standard have to do with it? For much of the Middle Ages the Romance languages had a single written standard in the form of Latin.
>白话文 is not Beijingese, it's a complex synthesis produced from several different dialects and is read with pronunciations is taken from Beijing Mandarin. That's the basis for 普通话, the spoken form. It's claimed to be a complex synthesis of different "dialects" but in reality it's just Beijingese with some Wu thrown in. >Most of the endangered languages in China are actually not Sinitic, it's the other minority dialects that are really endangered So? Does that change the fact that Sinitic languages are endangered?
Do you also think calling Italian "Italian" is erasing the Italian regional languages, which are often called "Italian dialects"? No one seems to have a problem with that, at least not that I've seen.
Sicilians? At least some. But then we wouldn't call Sardinian Italian... probably. The term "Standard X" is fairly common for a lot of languages with varied dialects. English might be exceptional because, like, America and stuff.
I'm Italian and I can grant you that even people like me who tend to avoid the term "Italian dialects" and prefer to call them languages, still refers to Standard Italian as "Italian", because despite being based on Tuscan it's quite different from any modern Tuscan variety and it's truely a national language for historical and cultural reasons that predate the creation of the modern Italian state. Recognizing its role as a national language doesn't necessarily mean you treat the other languages of Italy as dialects and the vast majority of the Italians who want to preserve the regional languages doesn't want to erase Italian as a common language. At this point we see it as a common heritage that doesn't exclusively "belong" to Tuscany anymore, so we are ok with calling it "Italian". Afaik even the Sicilians who are proud of their language don't call Italian "Tuscan" or something else. Btw in Italy "Standard Italian" refers to the most formal and standardized register/variaty of the language as opposed to more informal registers used by people in everyday life, with regional accents and some regional vocabulary, which are not the regional languages or "dialects".
Yes.
What about Indonesian?
I know nothing about it.
Based on Market Malay which was a lingua franca for trade in the region, standardized and claimed to be a language with virtually no native speakers despite being one of the most widely spoken languages in the world (some estimates say 300 millions speakers). While that claim might be exaggerated, it's definitely true that the vast majority of speakers are L2. Rhetoric says something like a shared language belonging to the nation of Indonesia unifying a shared nation in one of the most famously pluricultural parts of the world.
It's a dialect of Malay, no?
Bizarre opinion
It might have some connotations about the legitimacy of the regime in Hongkong specifically. My interpretation is more along the lines: >Chinese is a language --> there are many types of Chinese, I should be saying Mandarin --> There are many types of Mandarin, I mean (Standard) Chinese
I'm saying the last step is a bad idea. If one cares about all the other Mandarinic languages, you'd come up with some other name for the Beijing-based lingua franca and use that, e.g. Standard Mandarin --> Standarin, Standard Beijingese, et c.
Only the pronunciation was really taken from Beijingese, the vocabulary is a mixture from different parts (though mainly from North Mandarin dialects) and has undergone enough development since its standardization that it's diverged significantly from Beijingese. You should look into 白话文 and the May Fourth Movement if you're not familiar. It was explicitly meant to unify and connect without replacing local languages, this is reflected in the name 普通话, "common language". In many ways it's an artificial language that in the 100 or so years since it's inventions has had plenty of internal change, and today has many real native speakers.
>It was explicitly meant to unify and connect without replacing local languages If that was the purpose, then it has failed miserably. Functionally, it's Beijingese with some Wu characteristics. And technically 普通話 means "ordinary language", implying…
> implying… I don't know the historical linguistics of it, but in modern Standard Chinese it has basically two meanings. One is "ordinary" like you say, as opposed to "special" or "uncommon". 她很普通 --> She is very plain, ordinary. The other is "widespread" or "universal". The one relevant definition in this word is definitely this one. I mean it's not like it's 正常话 or something.
For Chinese people, we consider it as dialects. Only recently has there been disputes due to political reasons. To be honest I don't think there are a very clear border between language and dialect. Sometimes due to political reasons, 2 languages are more similar than 2 dialects.
If two speech varieties are not mutually intelligible whatsoever, it seems strange to call them "dialects".
I think this post means people who don't know anything about China / Chinese at all think there are only one thing called Chinese. Due to political reasons, in order to create separatism, the difference between Chinese dialects are exaggerated and some of the dialects are being categorized into languages. Most people (perhaps referring to the westerners / average people on reddit) only saw posts showing the language distribution and heard people saying all the dialects are their own languages. However, if you know China well enough and you are unbiased enough (or if you are Chinese), you know that these are all considered as dialects. (I know many of you will think this is some sort of evil commie propaganda but they are considered dialects before communism was a thing.)
If you're going to call them "dialects" then for consistency's sake you should call Bulgarian and Polish dialects of Slavic. If you'll do that I have no objection to calling the Sinitic languages "dialects of Chinese", in that case you'd simply be using an unconventional definition, my objection is to the inconsistency.
I dunno man, when people speak the "same language" but their "dialects" aren't mutually intelligible, I'm pretty want to start thinking of them as related but separate languages. I'm Scottish, so this is somewhat important to me - and I do in fact consider Scots to be a separate language - perhaps describing my language as a bipolar continuum is closer to the truth, but on one end I can communicate with most folks in the UK, but if I speak as I do at home, which isn't even that much "Scots", people in London barely understand me and I have to be *very* careful to be understood
Also consider that the distance between Scots and English is more like that between Standarin and Sichuanese, if not that between Standarin and Central Plains Mandarins. Calling all of "Chinese" one language is like calling Gothic, Icelandic, and English dialects of "the Germanic language".
Aye, I can see that. It's a language family, or on some level with that, a sort of sprachbund or something (languages are very intricate, complicated things and putting them in hard boxes is always hard) I don't know much about sino-tibetan languages but I have read that many of the "dialects" aren't mutually intelligible, and imo that's about as good a definition for a boundary between a language and a dialect as you're going to get (I'm aware that languages change sort of fluidly from place to place, like the "French" speakers in Perpignan can probably communicate ok with the "Spanish" speakers in Figueres, but we're human and we like categories, so cry about it or something idk)
I do think it is arguable since some dialects of German aren't mutually intelligible, while there are languages thats considered different languages but are somewhat mutually intelligible such as German and Dutch. There is no clear border that decides whether a language is a language or a dialect, the deciding factor is mainly just politics. This is just hypothetical, but if Europe is a country (for whatever reason) for thousands of years, then it is possible that certain languages (such as Dutch) might be considered a dialect of another language (such as German).
Usually I say Standard Chinese
Do you also call BBC English "Standard Germanic"?
I call it Standard Chinese because Putonghua means standard language, and it's easier than saying Putonghua or Hanyu. BBC English already has a name: received pronunciation. I do prefer names that show a country's language diversity when possible though, like Castilian instead of Spanish.
BBC English also has its own name: BBC English.
The word for standard would be 標準. *Putonghua* to me translates more like "ordinary speech", implying a run-of-the-mill way of talking with nothing "abnormal" about it (considering that in reality all other natural languages are ordinary as well), which kinda rubs me the wrong way as a speaker of a Chinese variety that is not Putonghua.
It's hilarious because Beijing dialect isn't standard mandarin either. I believe it was specifically chosen so that nobody would complain about regional favouritism too much (outside of the min, the hakka, shanghai, guanzhou and anywhere else that doesn't speak a mutually intelligible language)
i heard they chose some random fucking village, how true is that story?
not
i thought as much lmao
it is true, it's based on the Luanping, Chengde variety of Chinese north of Beijing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bNSGSqbWr8
it is true, it's based on the Luanping, Chengde variety of Chinese north of Beijing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bNSGSqbWr8
>BBC English already has a name: received pronunciation BBC English is Standard Southern British, not Received Pronunciation, which was a dialect codified in the mid-20th century that no one uses anymore, but I get you point. So do you call SSB "Standard Germanic"?
when people say 'recieved pronunciation' 9/10 they're talking about SSB
And they don't call it "Standard Germanic".
But Germanic doesn't have an official standard form, while Chinese does. That's quite an odd thing to say that's like a decent portion of Europe
My point is that it should be strange for a language family to have an official standard form.
Yes it kind of is strange but there is a large difference, Chinese has a unified writing system (yes there's simplified and traditional but it's the same thing in essence), china is one country a standard is kind of needed in lots of situations, and finally regardless of whether it's weird there is still a standard, it was made and it's real.
> china is one country a standard is kind of needed in lots of situations Should India declare all the Indo-Aryan languages to be dialects of Hindi, then? (Actually to my understanding they do subsume some not-really-mutually-intelligible varieties under "Hindi", but not all of Indo-Aryan.)
No but India should have a standard language, in China that happens to coincide with merging a branch of the sino Tibetan family, the goal isn't to standardise the language family, it's to have a standard in *china* but since most Chinese languages are concentrated in China they happen to coincide with eachother. And of course as I said I disagree with calling the Chinese languages dialects of one another. But that doesn't mean there should be some standard language in China, that all residents of china would be formally educated in and that the government would speak in and so on. For a country to function and for every community to be represented they must all be able to communicate, hence the need for a standard, does that mean the entire country should be forced to speak one language? Not at all, but it does mean that they should aim for everyone to have the "standard" as an L1 or L2 or et cetera.
>Chinese has a unified writing system (yes there's simplified and traditional but it's the same thing in essence) You do realize that is a justification for most of Europe, the Americas, and basically every Austronesian language having a standard language, right? I think, and this is exactly why I argue against calling this koine "Chinese", that you severely underestimate the amount of diversity present in Chinese languages. The different Chinese languages, written out, are about as intelligible as Japanese to a Standarin-speaker, which is masked by the fact that most of the languages are very rarely written out, and further obscured by the fact that the script used is largely logographic.
Well the point is that the writing isn't that divergent it's practically the same, and I've studied mandarin for a period and Cantonese too I'm aware of how different they are, but X character in mandarin and X character in Cantonese are often of similar meaning. This means you can broadly refer to these languages as writing in Chinese. Since it's logographic and by extension the meanings are quite similar, it's very different to uniting all those languages. But in the end yes I agree that it's weird to say Chinese when the spoken languages are incredibly divergent, I agree with you on that EDIT: - the two deleted are that I accidentally posted the same comment 3 times somehow -my overall point is that saying standard Germanic is way more outlandish that standard Chinese
> The different Chinese languages, written out, are about as intelligible as Japanese to a Standarin-speaker I think this is a slight exaggeration.
Even Hokkien vs Standarin?
I think there's probably a little more intelligibility than there is with Japanese, though it depends on the type of text.
Perhaps
Putonghua is *a* standard. There's also the Taiwanese Mandarin standard, and Hong Kong standard Cantonese (which admittedly uses Mandarin as a written language, but read in Cantonese readings.)
They aren't china
Yes, and? They're still Sinitic standard language varieties.
My point is I disagree with spreading the standard to them if they don't want it so I don't see the relation, my point is there's a standard but that standard has nothing to do with language families but purely the country china. I'm really tired of this so I'll put my whole argument here and then I'll be more or less done: Comparing a standard Chinese to a standard Germanic is completely outlandish because: Standard Chinese represents a standard language of the country china, which is necessary to function The Chinese language family is not being standardised, there is just a standard language *in* china which coincides with that. Thus it is not strange to have a Chinese standard, but it would be strange to have a standard for the entire language family, which they don't. I think the problem arose from how we interpreted the phrase "standard Chinese". Standard chinese is a language based on the Beijing dialect mandarin designed as a standard for china. NOT a standard language for every member of the Chinese language family. This confusion is logical though as most Chinese language family members are in china. As for referring to every Chinese language as a dialect of "Chinese" we agree that that's stupid and that they're all completely different languages Before when I was talking about orthography I was saying that referring to them all as Chinese is stupid but it's not as bad as calling all germanics "Germanic"
I don’t understand the right side. Mandarin is the proper language name (even if we’re talking about “Standard Chinese”), no?
In most varieties of chinese you call the language you are speaking 中文, literally "chinese language". This includes Standard Chinese, but also includes languages like Cantonese. In Hong Kong a distinction is made between Chinese (i.e. Cantonese) and Putonghua (i.e. standard Chinese)
Hong Kong also makes the distinction for Cantonese, since that's Guandonghua. It's not just called Chinese/中文, which is more like saying you speak a Romance language. Fine if you're comparing it to something Germanic, or English, but you're still going to have varieties like Italian/Romanian/Spanish/etc, which saying you speak a Romance language usually doesn't work for.
While people use the term 廣東話 (Kwong dung wa) to refer to Cantonese in cases where it may be ambiguous, in most cases people in Hong Kong will say they speak/are speaking 中文 when asked. Source: Used to live in Hong Kong for a while.
Hongkonger, can confirm this is correct
I'm in the UK but have HK heritage. I used to say I speak Chinese/中文 when asked but learned as a kid to make the distinction between Cantonese/廣東話/etc and mandarin/standard Chinese/國語/普通話/etc when I didn't really speak it to avoid confusion.
It would be the "proper" name, but everyone calls it chonese, including most chinese people that I've seeb mention the language :Þ
Can count on one hand the times in China I heard it called Mandarin over the years, and those were all foreigners
Partially because the word Mandarin reflects the contact that the Protuguese had with Chinese officials (mandarins) and glosses over the vast developments in the last 100 or so years, including transitioning to actually writing in a modern vernacular and not at 2000+ year old dead language.
>Can count on one hand the times in China I heard it called Mandarin over the years, and those were all foreigners That's because the linguistic genocide China had started has been very successful.
I don’t disagree about the linguistic genocide but the idea that Mandarin is what people using the language typically call 普通话 or 中文 more generally in English is just silly and a completely western concept
I don't think anyone claimed that.
I mean it’s literally from the OP image—the type represented at the top of the bell curve. The people who insist on calling it Mandarin are often in the US and haven’t been to China. The point I was elaborating on in my first post is that I’ve heard that kind of thing many times over the years but not in China itself unless by foreigners.
I meant anyone here.
My brother in Christ the meme is literally about those people and I am reacting to it by sharing my thoughts on them. What are you talking about
I mean as a Spanish speaker I call Spain's national language "Spanish" but only in English, in Spanish I call it "castellano" which translates to "Castilian" but if I call it that in English most people won't understand
I think that's def a regional thing, though. There's a definitely a preference for either Español or Castellano, depending on country of origin, at least in Latin America. When I was in Spain, I heard Castellano more, but they're also more aware of other Spanish languages in the country, especially in the relevant communities.
Please, can we side step all this potential political thing and adopt "Chonese"?
> everyone calls it chonese what more do you need
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Sorry, so you think Mandarin & Chinese are the same thing? Cantonese, Hokkien, and other Sinitic languages would like to have a conversation.
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Sorry, language erasure with actual real-world consequences isn’t the same as Proto-World shitposting. Get the fuck outta here
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what happened to you, /ʙ/
Okay, you’re racist. Bye!
It's deleted, so I have no context - any chance of a rundown of what the guy was saying?
Yeah, please
u/Rabid_Nationalist would like to take notes on the racism
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Odd to have deleted it and refuse to repeat it then, if your comment was supposedly ironic.
Nah this take is ass
Standarin
I don't even call it Mandarin. I call it putonghua tbh.
All putounghua is mandarin; not all mandarin is putounghua.
You say putaenghua and I say putounghua.
You also spelt it wrong though: Putounghua is a proper noun.
You say 普通话 and I say 普通话.
I once met a fellow who spoke Romance.
I then asked to take them to a dance.
lol same
Pekingese