Non-Mandarin Chinese / 汉语方言 / 漢語方言

Moderator:OldBoring

User avatar
OldBoring
Language Forum Moderator
Posts:6152
Joined:2012-12-08, 7:19
Real Name:Francesco
Gender:male
Location:Milan
Country:ITItaly (Italia)
Contact:
Non-Mandarin Chinese / 汉语方言 / 漢語方言

Postby OldBoring » 2016-02-01, 11:52

Feel free to talk about non-Mandarin Chinese languages / dialects (including Mandarin dialects apart from Standard Mandarin, i.e. 官话方言) here.

vijayjohn
Language Forum Moderator
Posts:27056
Joined:2013-01-10, 8:49
Real Name:Vijay John
Gender:male
Location:Austin, Texas, USA
Country:USUnited States (United States)
Contact:

Re: Non-Mandarin Chinese / 汉语方言 / 漢語方言

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-02-20, 21:24

Oh yay, now we get to talk all about Qingtianese! :silly:

User avatar
linguoboy
Posts:25540
Joined:2009-08-25, 15:11
Real Name:Da
Location:Chicago
Country:USUnited States (United States)

Re: Non-Mandarin Chinese / 汉语方言 / 漢語方言

Postby linguoboy » 2016-02-21, 13:51

Last night coming back from the opera I passed a group chattering away in Mandarin and it made me all nostalgic. You used to hear so much more Cantonese in this city and I've always preferred the sound of it.
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons

User avatar
OldBoring
Language Forum Moderator
Posts:6152
Joined:2012-12-08, 7:19
Real Name:Francesco
Gender:male
Location:Milan
Country:ITItaly (Italia)
Contact:

Re: Non-Mandarin Chinese / 汉语方言 / 漢語方言

Postby OldBoring » 2016-02-28, 16:14

So why did you learn Mandarin but not Cantonese?

I'd be curious if there are data about which places in North America are still Cantonese speaking, and which Mandarin speaking.
I have friends from Hebei who emigrated to Canada (don't know which city) and live in a predominantly Cantonese speaking Chinese community, so even though they are from Northern China they picked up Cantonese by living there.

In a similar way, I feel nostalgic about China in the early 2000s, where the local dialects were still the main languages spoken in the streets. In a way, it made my travelling to China during summer holidays more interesting, letting me see more diversity when going to other cities and letting me feel more at home when I went back to my hometown.

One argument is that the predominance of dialects makes the cities "排外" (discriminatory to outsiders). But I don't think so. When I had been in many cities in Southern coastal China, most people were more than happy to switch to Mandarin when speaking to tourists and people passing in town.
So I don't believe in the ‘discrimination’ argument. If anything, the predominance of Mandarin has deprived the newcomers to the city of a tool to assimilate better in the city and be considered more like a ‘local’.
In the past generation, when my mom's cousin emigrated to Shanghai, she learned to speak fluent Shanghainese, and so all the people around and her social circle don't consider her an outsider.
So yes, it has made the life of students, tourists and newcomers easier, but it has also created a situation where migrants don't learn the local vernacular, cause even if they wish, it's difficult to learn a tongue that even the locals don't speak daily anymore. And so migrants will always remain ‘outsiders’, unlike ten years ago, when as long as they learnt the local dialect, they wouldn't be considered as such anymore.

vijayjohn wrote:Oh yay, now we get to talk all about Qingtianese! :silly:

Another Mandarin-speaking place nowadays…

User avatar
linguoboy
Posts:25540
Joined:2009-08-25, 15:11
Real Name:Da
Location:Chicago
Country:USUnited States (United States)

Re: Non-Mandarin Chinese / 汉语方言 / 漢語方言

Postby linguoboy » 2016-02-28, 16:46

OldBoring wrote:So why did you learn Mandarin but not Cantonese?

Because our travel plans didn't include Guangdong.
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons

raoul2
Posts:102
Joined:2006-07-12, 23:28
Real Name:raoul2
Gender:male
Location:FR
Country:FRFrance (France)

Re: Non-Mandarin Chinese / 汉语方言 / 漢語方言

Postby raoul2 » 2016-06-14, 19:51

In 1988, Jerry Norman wrote in his book "Chinese": While great progress has been made in promoting putonghua in the last 30 years, the position of the dialects has hardly been weakened as a result, and this state of affairs can be expect to remain fairly stable for the foreseeable future.

In 2016, the situation has changed dramatically as the cities (except Hong Kong) are switching little by little to putonghua. The rapid economic development is probably one cause of this.

User avatar
OldBoring
Language Forum Moderator
Posts:6152
Joined:2012-12-08, 7:19
Real Name:Francesco
Gender:male
Location:Milan
Country:ITItaly (Italia)
Contact:

Re: Non-Mandarin Chinese / 汉语方言 / 漢語方言

Postby OldBoring » 2016-06-15, 17:22

Yes, but IMO the change probably already occured some ten years ago. Besides economic growth, I would add more accessibility to mass media, young parents born in the 80s and 90s, and internal immigration.

vijayjohn
Language Forum Moderator
Posts:27056
Joined:2013-01-10, 8:49
Real Name:Vijay John
Gender:male
Location:Austin, Texas, USA
Country:USUnited States (United States)
Contact:

Re: Non-Mandarin Chinese / 汉语方言 / 漢語方言

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-01-28, 19:40

I wonder what variety of Chinese my colleague from Anhui, who also used to live in Ningbo and maybe somewhere else in Zhejiang, speaks natively. She said something about it being similar to Shanghainese, so maybe it's Xuanzhounese? I somehow doubt it's Huizhou Chinese although who knows. I wonder whether I can manage to get her to say something in her variety.

User avatar
OldBoring
Language Forum Moderator
Posts:6152
Joined:2012-12-08, 7:19
Real Name:Francesco
Gender:male
Location:Milan
Country:ITItaly (Italia)
Contact:

Re: Non-Mandarin Chinese / 汉语方言 / 漢語方言

Postby OldBoring » 2017-01-31, 17:56

Huh why don't you ask her? :P
But yes, Wu is spoken in some areas in Anhui (in the easter part of it, and in some isolated parts as language islands, IIRC).
Or maybe she has lived long enough in Ningbo and in other parts of Zhejiang to speak the dialects of those places. That's also possible.

lingoman
Posts:4
Joined:2017-05-19, 4:23
Real Name:Tony Wang
Gender:male

Re: Non-Mandarin Chinese / 汉语方言 / 漢語方言

Postby lingoman » 2017-05-19, 4:42

raoul2 wrote:In 1988, Jerry Norman wrote in his book "Chinese": While great progress has been made in promoting putonghua in the last 30 years, the position of the dialects has hardly been weakened as a result, and this state of affairs can be expect to remain fairly stable for the foreseeable future.

In 2016, the situation has changed dramatically as the cities (except Hong Kong) are switching little by little to putonghua. The rapid economic development is probably one cause of this.


There are too many debates over the status of Cantonese, and the "dialect" might be a term of some sort of "degradation" to the ears of certain Cantonese speaking communities - especially for HK society. They prefer to call it a "language".

I've read many discussions about the status of the Cantonese and understand that difference between a "language" and a "dialect". I am from Sichuan so my native tongue should be "Sichuanese", which I won't hesitate a second to refer to as a "dialect" - it's easily mutual-intelligible with Mandarin as long as we don't purposely use local slangs.

Cantonese is apparently a different situation. Most mandarin speakers would be deaf to Cantonese speeches, and I would assume the vice versa should there not be so many Mandarin TV programs made available to Cantonese speaking communities these years - they are NOT mutual-intelligible by pronunciation, despite that the writing forms are the same/similar.

User avatar
linguoboy
Posts:25540
Joined:2009-08-25, 15:11
Real Name:Da
Location:Chicago
Country:USUnited States (United States)

Re: Non-Mandarin Chinese / 汉语方言 / 漢語方言

Postby linguoboy » 2017-05-19, 14:49

lingoman wrote:There are too many debates over the status of Cantonese, and the "dialect" might be a term of some sort of "degradation" to the ears of certain Cantonese speaking communities - especially for HK society. They prefer to call it a "language".

I've read many discussions about the status of the Cantonese and understand that difference between a "language" and a "dialect". I am from Sichuan so my native tongue should be "Sichuanese", which I won't hesitate a second to refer to as a "dialect" - it's easily mutual-intelligible with Mandarin as long as we don't purposely use local slangs.

Cantonese is apparently a different situation. Most mandarin speakers would be deaf to Cantonese speeches, and I would assume the vice versa should there not be so many Mandarin TV programs made available to Cantonese speaking communities these years - they are NOT mutual-intelligible by pronunciation, despite that the writing forms are the same/similar.

"Mutually intelligibility" is often held up as the chief criterion for distinguishing a "dialect" from a "language", but in fact the distinction is ultimately political. Sichuanese and Standard Mandarin are probably no less mutually intelligible than Danish and Norwegian and may even be at the level of Spanish and Italian or Bulgarian and Macedonian.

In his book The Chinese mosaic, Leo Moser uses the term "sublanguage" for first-order divisions of Sinitic such as Mandarin, Yue, Wu, Hakka, etc. I think it's a good term: it recognises both the fact that these varieties are different enough that in a different political context (e.g. one more similar to contemporary Europe), they would unequivocally be considered "languages". But it also acknowledges the current political situation, which is that Standard Chinese is the only written form most speakers recognise regardless of what vernacular varieties they speak.

The status of Cantonese (the prestige variety of Yue) is interesting because it does have a more-or-less standard written form which actually gets some use. It also has more prestige and recognition than other varieties due to the political status of Hong Kong. If you think of there being a continuum between dialects which go unrecognised outside of their local range and official standard languages, it's much closer to the latter than any other variety apart from Taiwanese Hokkien (臺語).
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons

vijayjohn
Language Forum Moderator
Posts:27056
Joined:2013-01-10, 8:49
Real Name:Vijay John
Gender:male
Location:Austin, Texas, USA
Country:USUnited States (United States)
Contact:

Re: Non-Mandarin Chinese / 汉语方言 / 漢語方言

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-09-16, 3:59

OldBoring wrote:Huh why don't you ask her? :P

I did eventually. She speaks 合肥话, which has enough Wu influence in it to not really be mutually intelligible with Mandarin.

User avatar
atalarikt
Posts:441
Joined:2014-10-02, 1:37
Real Name:Taufan Atalarik
Gender:male
Location:Malang Kota
Country:IDIndonesia (Indonesia)

Re: Non-Mandarin Chinese / 汉语方言 / 漢語方言

Postby atalarikt » 2018-01-17, 9:27

Anybody here speak Hokkien (or at least have some knowledge on it)? It's one of the predominant non-Mandarin Chinese languages used in Indonesia. In fact, there are several Hokkien loanwords in Indonesia (e.g. tahu, from Hokkien tau-hu (dou-fu in Mandarin)).
وَمِنْ آيَاتِهِ خَلْقُ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ وَاخْتِلَافُ أَلْسِنَتِكُمْ وَأَلْوَانِكُمْ ۚ إِنَّ فِي ذَٰلِكَ لَآيَاتٍ لِلْعَالِمِينَ۝
"And of His signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth and the diversity of your languages and your colors. Indeed in that are signs for those of knowledge." (Ar-Rum: 22)

Jika saya salah, mohon diperbaiki. If I make some mistake(s), please correct me.
Forever indebted to Robert A. Blust for his contributions to Austronesian linguistics

księżycowy

Re: Non-Mandarin Chinese / 汉语方言 / 漢語方言

Postby księżycowy » 2018-01-17, 10:50

I can't say I speak Taiwanese (Hokkien), or even that I have much knowledge of it, but I am very interested in it if that helps any. :P

User avatar
OldBoring
Language Forum Moderator
Posts:6152
Joined:2012-12-08, 7:19
Real Name:Francesco
Gender:male
Location:Milan
Country:ITItaly (Italia)
Contact:

Re: Non-Mandarin Chinese / 汉语方言 / 漢語方言

Postby OldBoring » 2018-01-19, 20:49

Gua ka li kong! Gua be "speak" Bam Lam Ngu.

User avatar
atalarikt
Posts:441
Joined:2014-10-02, 1:37
Real Name:Taufan Atalarik
Gender:male
Location:Malang Kota
Country:IDIndonesia (Indonesia)

Re: Non-Mandarin Chinese / 汉语方言 / 漢語方言

Postby atalarikt » 2018-03-12, 10:57

Out of curiosity, what non-Mandarin dialects of Chinese do you actually speak (other than Shanghainese), OldBoring?
وَمِنْ آيَاتِهِ خَلْقُ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ وَاخْتِلَافُ أَلْسِنَتِكُمْ وَأَلْوَانِكُمْ ۚ إِنَّ فِي ذَٰلِكَ لَآيَاتٍ لِلْعَالِمِينَ۝
"And of His signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth and the diversity of your languages and your colors. Indeed in that are signs for those of knowledge." (Ar-Rum: 22)

Jika saya salah, mohon diperbaiki. If I make some mistake(s), please correct me.
Forever indebted to Robert A. Blust for his contributions to Austronesian linguistics

User avatar
OldBoring
Language Forum Moderator
Posts:6152
Joined:2012-12-08, 7:19
Real Name:Francesco
Gender:male
Location:Milan
Country:ITItaly (Italia)
Contact:

Re: Non-Mandarin Chinese / 汉语方言 / 漢語方言

Postby OldBoring » 2018-04-24, 17:03

atalarikt wrote:Out of curiosity, what non-Mandarin dialects of Chinese do you actually speak (other than Shanghainese), OldBoring?

No, I don't speak Shanghainese.
The dialects I speak are Qingtianese (青田话, my native language spoken in my family) and Wenzhounese (温州话, spoken in Wenzhou where I grew up in my early childhood).
They are both classified as Wu, but quite different from Shanghainese.

vijayjohn
Language Forum Moderator
Posts:27056
Joined:2013-01-10, 8:49
Real Name:Vijay John
Gender:male
Location:Austin, Texas, USA
Country:USUnited States (United States)
Contact:

Re: Non-Mandarin Chinese / 汉语方言 / 漢語方言

Postby vijayjohn » 2018-08-11, 9:48

In addition to our Hokkien-specific threads on this forum, I figured I might as well go ahead and post this:

http://qtnews.zjol.com.cn/video/text.asp?id=3998

which is a set of short lessons for Qingtianese and the only resource I know of for that particular language variety, courtesy of our dear moderator. :)

EDIT: Old link broken, but course is now available on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKpVDo6XAdk

vijayjohn
Language Forum Moderator
Posts:27056
Joined:2013-01-10, 8:49
Real Name:Vijay John
Gender:male
Location:Austin, Texas, USA
Country:USUnited States (United States)
Contact:

Re: Non-Mandarin Chinese / 汉语方言 / 漢語方言

Postby vijayjohn » 2022-02-14, 21:04

I'm reviving this thread with a restatement (from the other thread) of the groups of varieties of Chinese, courtesy of the Wikipedia article on the Chinese language:
Wikipedia wrote:Mandarin, including Standard Chinese, Pekingese, Sichuanese, and also the Dungan language spoken in Central Asia
Wu, including Shanghainese, Suzhounese, and Wenzhounese
Gan
Xiang
Min, including Fuzhounese, Hainanese, Hokkien and Teochew
Hakka
Yue, including Cantonese and Taishanese

The classification of Li Rong, which is used in the Language Atlas of China (1987), distinguishes three further groups:

Jin, previously included in Mandarin.
Huizhou, previously included in Wu.
Pinghua, previously included in Yue.

Some varieties remain unclassified, including Danzhou dialect (spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island), Waxianghua (spoken in western Hunan) and Shaozhou Tuhua (spoken in northern Guangdong).

vijayjohn
Language Forum Moderator
Posts:27056
Joined:2013-01-10, 8:49
Real Name:Vijay John
Gender:male
Location:Austin, Texas, USA
Country:USUnited States (United States)
Contact:

Re: Non-Mandarin Chinese / 汉语方言 / 漢語方言

Postby vijayjohn » 2022-02-15, 18:59

Standard Mandarin is based on Beijing Mandarin, which is also spoken in some parts of Hebei and other parts of China that speakers have migrated to relatively recently, such as Xinjiang.
Northeastern Mandarin, spoken in the northeast as the name implies, is close enough to Beijing dialect that some dialectologists do not consider it a separate group from Beijing Mandarin.
Jilu Mandarin is spoken in most parts of Hebei and Shandong.
Jiaoliao Mandarin is spoken on the Shandong and Liaoning Peninsulas.
Central Plains (Zhongyuan) Mandarin is spoken over a wide area from Henan to Xinjiang.
Lanyin is spoken in the central and western parts of Gansu and in the Ningxia Autonomous Region.
Lower Yangtze Mandarin (Jianghuai) is spoken north of the Yangtze River in Jiangsu and Anhui and in isolated locations south of Yangtze such as Nanjing.
Southwestern Mandarin is spoken in Hubei, Sichuan, Guizhou, Yunnan, and the Mandarin-speaking areas of Hunan, Guangxi and southern Shaanxi. Wikipedia claims that intelligibility with Beijing Mandarin "is limited to varying degrees."
Image


Return to “Chinese (中文)”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 10 guests