What exactly does “The Chinese language” mean? Does it mean Mandarin, or are other langs like Cantonese, Hakka, and Teochew included?
It’s not ambiguous for anyone familiar with the topic. Chinese withoutany further clarification means Mandarin, putonghua, “common language”. That being said any discussion of other Chinese languages or dialects I’m sure would be welcome in this community.
addit: I don’t think anyone would feign confusion about whether a community for learning Italian was referring to the Italian national language or Sicilian or Naples dialect.
Well put, I’m also not familiar with any sentiment that assuming Chinese means putonghua is a problem. Although I won’t assume OP meant to imply that. Many nation building projects in the “old world” (where linguistic diversity is great) have involved language standardization.
maybe ”the” is incortect then. if it is meant to be anything but unambiguous it would have been ”a Chinese language” never ”the” Chinese language. this leaves us with two mysteries. 1. which language could they possibly have meant? 2. how insulted should we be?
Those aren’t languages! They’re dialects. Like seriously, calling different regional dialects “languages” is like saying southern Americans speak “Texan” or “Floridan”.
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.
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.
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.
