What exactly does “The Chinese language” mean? Does it mean Mandarin, or are other langs like Cantonese, Hakka, and Teochew included?
I mean it’s not quite the same. Chinese dialects have varying degrees of mutual intelligibility which ranges from basically none to similar to heavily accented speech. Fujian dialects are famously very indecipherable for other Chinese speakers for example. I believe Fujian dialects were used as code during Japanese occupation because it was unintelligible for Chinese speaking Japanese occupiers and I’m guessing Chinese collaboraters from different provinces.
I guess I still have a lot to learn… my parents were from China, and they always gave me the impression that they were just dialects. My father spoke(speaks) in an Anhui dialect, and although it sounded like a separate language, if you listened really closely it was really just ‘mandarin’ but distorted. A lot, sure, but it’s all the same language in the end. I guess I just assumed it was the rule, not the exception.
The difference between it being a rule and an exception depends on which side of the North/South dividing line a speaker is from. Generally, people from south and south-east of the Yangtze river speak languages whose most recent common ancestor is Middle Chinese and not Mandarin.
Here’s a map of the Sinitic languages and a map of the varieties of Mandarin.
Maybe we can say it’s more like saying a French person from one region speaks Languedoc and one from another speaks Provencal. Yes, there are multiple languages in France with origins there, but there’s massive institutional weight thrown behind a standard one, and the variation is, as I understand it, almost completely gone in France, and mostly being maintained or slightly declining in China?
without being familiar with the linguistic landscape in France that sounds like a fair comparison. contrary to what a lot of Western chauvinists love to claim, linguistic diversity is quite celebrated in China. One such example I am familiar with is the effort to try and revitalise 上海话 in the last decade or so. Although of course I’m sure there has been erosion of some dialects as well, an unfortunate aspect of nation building, increasing education, and creating economic opportunity for people throughout the nation is that some small dialects will become less useful for younger generations with internal migration and so forth.
When first considering learning Chinese, “Shanghainese” caught my interest, because apparently they only use two tones? Tones didn’t turn out to be so bad. That is cool it is being promoted.
Just to add some more info from a nearby city to Shanghai. In Suzhou, schools run programmes for the preservation of the topolect, they also have 苏州话 in some of the busses that go around the city centre. There’s even a Wu language section in the Suzhou library. Of course, with anything in the PRC every municipality will be different, but at least there is some preservation going on.
Though, according to this source (in Chinese) from 2022 only 2.2% of 6 - 20 year-olds can use 苏州话 proficiently.
The author does say they are unclear about how that data was gathered, so it could just be a limited amount of people from the Suzhou area gave a response. Still, from personal experience I don’t think it’s that low, as I’ve had several students (and some colleagues, though that would break the 6 - 20 year-old limit) claim that they spoke 苏州话 with their parents or grandparents.
