Changing China
Giant on the move
Talking the same language
By Ben Blanchard and Ralph Jennings What’s in a word? A great deal if you are Chinese or Taiwanese. Despite unprecedented detente in recent months, China and Taiwan sometimes seem as far apart as ever when it comes to language. Take, for example, the vexed question of the wording of a future political solution between the two sides. China claims Taiwan as its own, and views it as a rebel province to be reeled in, by force if necessary. Beijing says Taiwan has been China’s “since days of old”, and it is only because defeated Nationalist forces fled there at the end of a civil war in 1949, and managed to hold off the Communists, that the island is still run separately. China says it wants “reunification”, to bring back together that which was once whole. But for many in Taiwan, that’s the wrong word. They would rather term it “unification”, saying that China, or at least the Communist Party, has never run Taiwan and has no legitimate claim over the island. Hence there is nothing to “reunite”. Trouble is, in Chinese the word “tongyi” can be translated as either “reunification” or “unification”. That makes writing about the issue in English tricky for reporters who seek to stay neutral. The politics of language go deeper, though. Taiwan, along with Hong Kong, Macau and many in the overseas Chinese world, use the traditional Chinese script, rather than the simplified version used in China and introduced by the Communists. Some in Taiwan call their traditional script “correct font,” implying that China uses the wrong words. The official spoken language, Mandarin Chinese, is largely the same on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, but Taiwanese often eject a mouthful at foreigners who speak in mainland-inflected Mandarin. Likewise, mainland Chinese may laugh at foreigners who speak Taiwan-accented Mandarin when in China. Taiwanese also love throwing in English and Japanese words when speaking Mandarin, which does not happen much on the mainland. Taiwan is proud, too, of its non-Mandarin linguistic heritage. Taiwanese, also known as Hokkien, as made a big comeback since being supressed by the Nationalists and is now widely used in politics, on the television and in pop songs. Written Taiwanese, using Chinese characters, is all but impossible for someone who only speaks Mandarin to understand, though they can guess at the gist of it. Taiwanese is also spoken in China, in the southern part of Fujian province, the origin centuries ago for many ethnic Chinese people in Taiwan, and is generally called Hokkien. In China though, use of okkien in public life gets little official backing. So while China and Taiwan may talk about moving closer together, they might not always be talking the same language.
Dialect fun
There is a common myth perpetrated about China — that everyone speaks “Chinese”.
There is in fact no single “Chinese” language.
There is an official language, Mandarin, taught at schools and used on the airwaves, yet even the government admits that only about half the country’s 1.3 billion population speak it fluently.
But there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other Chinese languages spoken in the country. The government calls them dialects, but linguistically the likes of Cantonese, Hokkien and Shanghainese are as distinct and mutually unintelligable as French, Spanish, German and English.
Linguists consider them separate languages, though many others are genuinely dialects. Mandarin has been promoted as a single unifying tongue by the Communists, and the Nationalists before them, as otherwise somebody from Guangzhou would find it impossible to speak to somebody from Beijing or Shanghai.
That makes total sense. But Chinese “dialects” today are increasingly marginalised, which is, I think, a great loss for Chinese people and their centuries-old culture, both in China and abroad.
First and foremost, to Ben Blanchard, I would like to commend you on a well thought out and informative article. I plan on posting a link to this article on Myspace for my friends to read.
To many of the ignorant commenters I\’ve read from above, I think it is deplorable how very uninformed people have been lambasting this writer. I am ethnically Chinese but raised in the United States. My family\’s dialect is DioJiu (also spelled commonly known as TeoChew and ChiuJau), which is part of the Min(Minnan)subgroup of dialects. I speak English fluently as I\’ve resided in the U.S. since the age of 5 months, but also speak fluent DioJiu, learned a smidgen of Spanish from friends, smidgen of French in high school, and went to Chinese language school to learn Mandarin and write in hanzi (Chinese character script) although I am not at all fluent in Mandarin, I can understand it when spoken to me better than I can reply. Speaking from experience, what Blanchard said is absolutely true. Linguistically, the languages of China were united to use the same writing system because the government devised that it would unite the country and allow people to communicate. China is large and this occured when its kingdoms were united into what is relatively the territory of modern China. People were encouraged to learn Mandarin-later forced even-to speak to one another but could also communicate by writing. In ancient times, people were not educated in schools but learned information passed down orally. Not everyone could write, least of all the poor peasants. This was possible because at the time, not all languages of China likely had their own writing system. Chinese characters are not phonetically read but are ideograms, depicting an idea rather than a sound. Spoken tongues sharing the same writing system are defined as being the same language, whereas a dialect is defined as a variety of a language sharing a writing system but differing in speech. So you can see why Chinese cannot be defined as different languages although they are. This is why Chinese is considered one language. However, linguists do acknowledge that were it not for the singular writing system, China would indeed be considered to have many native languages. This is because most Chinese cannot understand each other while speaking different dialects. However, as noted in a comment, Chinese youth would have no difficulty passing notes in class, because all writing is written the same. In some dialects, spoken idioms and grammar are different when written because they must be converted to the standardized Mandarin version. Some colloquialisms have no translation in other dialects. It is true that people can sometimes understand other dialects because they can guess at the meanings of some words, but this is only true of those dialects from the same region of the country. Unless using Mandarin, a northern Chinese would not understand a southern Chinese by speaking for example. Two southern Chinese speaking different dialects could passably communicate. They could all communicate by writing however.
Chinese … it’s easy
It’s a piece of cake. In fact, China’s Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi says Chinese is one of the easiest languages in the world to learn.
“Otherwise,” Yang reasoned at today’s National People’s Congress, “it’s hard to explain why 1.3 billion have chosen it as their mother tongue.” (Thanks to Danwei for the Xinhua link.)
Right, said the foreigner who took his first Chinese lesson 16 years ago and is still learning.
Maybe Yang meant Chinese was easy to learn for kids growing up immersed in the language (although he did encourage reporters and others to take up the language). Maybe he meant it was easy for Japanese people to learn because some things are written the same way in both languages, with characters. Perhaps Yang knew that prospective Korean and Vietnamese students of Chinese, too, would benefit from the many words in those two tongues that came from China and still sound vaguely similar.
Or maybe Yang, who happens to speak excellent English and enjoys a cup of tea, was just joking. (Was his statement even logical? And people don’t choose their mother tongue, do they?)
Japanese is actually in the same language family with Korean and it is very difficult for the Chinese, although some writtern words are the same and vice versa.
I agree with that, as a Chinese speaking Mandarin, Cantonese, and Hokkien-like dialect. But while that may cause a problem, it’s also a treasure of diversified culture. People should always get alone in a multi-cultural ambience, and if fact, we do.