[echevil]

> Only Mandarin and Cantonese even have a fully developed way of writing with characters. Up until relatively recently Mandarin itself was considered a spoken language

Native speaker here. I have absolutely no idea where you get that.

Cantonese is just one of many dialects, and in fact, it is not a single dialect: People from different parts of Guadong province actually speak Cantonese very differently. Should you consider those different languages?

Cantonese, Hokkien and Mandarin do sound like different languages, but not all dialects are. Most Chinese speaker can understand dialects spoken in central, and north parts of China, even though they usually can't speak those dialects.

Even though some of the dialects sounds very differently, the words, syntax, sentences being used are actually the same. That's how people can read what other people speaking other dialects write, with no problem.

To complicate the issue even more, there're not one, but two writing systems currently being used: Simplified Chinese is used in China mainland and Singapore, while Traditional Chinese is used in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. That's the reason people from mainland China (no matter what dialect they speak, even Cantonese) cannot read Hong Kong newspaper fluently

The two writing systems are different but they have one to one mapping for each character. So it's also not two unrelated system.

[HumanDrivenDev]

> Native speaker here. I have absolutely no idea where you get that.

Mandarin wasn't really written until about 120 years ago. Before people would write classical Chinese. It's a "written vernacular/白話文".

> Cantonese is just one of many dialects, and in fact, it is not a single dialect: People from different parts of Guadong province actually speak Cantonese very differently. Should you consider those different languages?

No, I'd consider them different dialects of a language called Cantonese.

> Even though some of the dialects sounds very differently, the words, syntax, sentences being used are actually the same.

Nonsense. Hokkien has a different grammar, even the personal pronouns don't match up 1:1. They're clearly in the same language family, sure, but so are English and German.

> That's the reason people from mainland China (no matter what dialect they speak, even Cantonese) cannot read Hong Kong newspaper fluently

No, it's not. I've seen Taiwanese people try and read Hong Kong newspapers, and they can't do it fluently.

[echevil]

> Mandarin wasn't really written until about 120 years ago. Before people would write classical Chinese. It's a "written vernacular/白話文

This is true, but it's a separate issue from having various dialects. Language evolves as time goes by, and in the case of Chinese before "written vernacular", people would write in the same form of ancient Chinese (regardless of pronunciation) which diverged a lot from what people actually speak. With the promotion of "written vernacular", people started to write what they speak, irrelevant of dialects.

Even though each of the dialects have some special vocabulary, and even different grammar, that doesn't mean they're not still "MOSTLY" the same.

I speak a southern Chinese dialect myself (I don't know what to call it in English) which is also dramatically different from Mandarin. Yes it has a few words that we commonly used, that I thought to be unique, but it turns out all of the characters and words exist in standard Chinese dictionary. Those words actually existed for a long time, and they are just no longer commonly used by other people. That said, learning to speak Mandarin is no where close to be like learning a new language. Vast majority parts of the language are still the same. Hokkien might be slightly more different but still no where close to being a separate language.

On the other hand, Japanese is undoubtedly a separate language, even though it also use Chinese characters (plus about 100 characters of their own), and many of the Chinese characters and words in Japanese actually means the same as they do in Chinese. No one would claim Japanese as a dialect of Chinese, because the difference is both significant and clear.

I think you also agree that both Taiwanese and people from mainland China CAN read Hong Kong newspapers, just not as fluently. Part of the reason is what I said, different writing systems. The other reason is that people do use some different words, especially for new concepts. Since Taiwan, Hong Kong and mainland China has been fairly separated for a long time, divergence is inevitable. For example, new words like "program" is translated in different ways: "程序" in mainland China, and "程式“ in Taiwan. Again, this has nothing to do with dialects. Mandarin speakers form mainland China would not be able to read Taiwan newspapers as fluently even though it's also Mandarin. Cantonese speakers from Guangdong province couldn't read Hong Kong newspaper as fluently even though it's also Cantonese.

On the other hand, I grew up watching many Hong Kong movies that were spoken in Cantonese but with Chinese captions. The captions needed no translation at all - They were just what the actors were saying. After watching many of those, I could even understand some Cantonese though I still couldn't speak those. I admit there are occasionally some word that seems unfamiliar to me, but it didn't impacted much. I don't believe you can do that with a different language.

[HumanDrivenDev]

This is true, but it's a separate issue from having various dialects. Language evolves as time goes by, and in the case of Chinese before "written vernacular", people would write in the same form of ancient Chinese (regardless of pronunciation) which diverged a lot from what people actually speak. With the promotion of "written vernacular", people started to write what they speak, irrelevant of dialects.

No, people started to write down what they spoke in Mandarin. It wasn't irrelevant to the language they spoke, it was tailor made for Mandarin. Hong Kong went through this exact same process, and came out with a different written language. Which is why you have a cantonese wikipedia and a mandarin (w/ traditional chinese characters) wikipedia. And which is why Taiwanese people who can read mandarin in traditional characters fluently can't read cantonese in traditional characters fluently.

French and Spanish are 'mostly the same'. Same alphabet and everything. And they're not dialects. With languages like Hokkien it's more like the difference between English and German.

I speak a southern Chinese dialect myself (I don't know what to call it in English) which is also dramatically different from Mandarin. Yes it has a few words that we commonly used, that I thought to be unique, but it turns out all of the characters and words exist in standard Chinese dictionary.

That's because you never learned to write your language, because people don't consider it worth writing. You would have hammered mandarin characters into the right shape, because - presumably - that was the only thing your family was literate in. Of course it turned out the characters matched fairly well.

Again, that's like me finding out that "bonjour" in French actually literally translates to "Good day" in English - doesn't mean they are the same language.

I think you also agree that both Taiwanese and people from mainland China CAN read Hong Kong newspapers, just not as fluently.

Sure. I'm an English speaker that doesn't speak French or Dutch, but I can follow a French or Dutch newspaper well enough, if not all the details. Are French and Dutch just dialects of English? Goede Dag is just Good Day after all...

[echevil]

I don't know what to say. Believe in whatever you want to believe. I'm glad I can speak more languages than I thought.

[tonylinn80]

It's funny to see how westerners talk about dialects in China. Western propaganda worked pretty well I guess :)

And yeah, most Chinese are bi-lingual by default. Now I know I can speak tons of northern Chinese languages. That's a big upgrade!

We all learn classical Chinese at school, and that must be a completely different language. Wait, are "classical Chinese" a single language? Should we count each of those spoken in different dynasty and different regions all as different language? Oh man, I can't even count how many languages I can speak

[HumanDrivenDev]

I think it's even funnier to see how many Chinese people - even those Chinese people who are fluent in English - take the folksy word 方言 and try and shoehorn that into the precise linguistic term "dialect". For whatever reason Chinese the world over seem to believe in literal 1:1 translations of Chinese -> English terms, when they really don't mean the same thing. It makes it very hard to talk to them.

We all learn classical Chinese at school, and that must be a completely different language.

Of course it's a different language. It's not completely different. Languages can be related to each other. Old English is a different language than English. If English was written in Logograms instead of a phonetic alphabet, many of us could probably read Beowulf the same many of you can read the works of 老子.

Again, if I had the Chinese mindset, there would be a language called "Indo European" which would have various dialects like "Persian" and "Russian" and "Icelandic". There would also be "Standard Indo-European" - aka, English. It makes no sense.

[jacobolus]

If you can fluently understand people across northern China without explicitly learning to, then that means they speak “dialects” of your language.

But hundreds of millions of other people in China natively speak hundreds of other mutually unintelligible Chinese languages. Most of them are (at least) bilingual.

Here is a grossly simplified map showing major language groups: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_sinitic_languages_...