[rat87]

> English has grossly grouped together Chinese as one unified language, when in actuality it is not.

English? Do you mean the UK? US?

My perception was that China said Chinese was one language and that most westerners agreed. Is this not the case?

[raincole]

The difference between a langauge and a dialet is political, not linguistic.

[Aloha]

"A language is a dialect with an army and navy"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...

[dllthomas]

It's cute, and gets at something real, but it's overstated. The first question is "are these things mutually intelligible", with an answer on a spectrum between "yes, perfectly, obviously" and "no, not at all, obviously". There is a huge gray area that stretches pretty far from the middle in which contingency, identity, community, and nation building projects (both military and literary) move the lines around quite a bit... but as we near either pole that factual question dominates. I think. I'd be interested to learn of counterexamples.

[DiogenesKynikos]

There are German "dialects" that are completely mutually unintelligible. Take someone who speaks the standard German dialect and drop them into the Swiss Alps, and they will understand next to nothing. It will be much easier for them to learn to understand Swiss German (linguists call it "Allemannic") than it would be for someone who doesn't speak German, but it will still take time and effort to adapt. Why are they both called German?

[samus]

There is Luxembourgish, which is basically the local dialect codified as one of the official languages of Luxembourg. It's otherwise perfectly understandable for people from adjacent parts of Belgium and Germany. But I guess the locals would see that it really is almost the same.

Similarly to Chinese, Germans see themselves as mostly the same culture. Standarddeutsch is pretty much a fusion between the different varieties and has evolved along with them for a long time; differently from 普通話, which is much younger and the standardized form of a northern variety of Chinese. Germans also really cling to their dialects, and Switzerland and Austria both use slightly different versions of Standarddeutsch.

The opposite example are the varieties of Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin, which are quite inter-intelligible, but which are considered as different languages by their speakers.

[DiogenesKynikos]

> Standarddeutsch is pretty much a fusion between the different varieties and has evolved along with them for a long time; differently from 普通話, which is much younger and the standardized form of a northern variety of Chinese.

Standard German is not that old. It was largely developed in the 19th Century, and it was not until the 20th Century that most people in Germany were able to speak it. Standard German is also heavily based on a regional dialect of German (in particular, central German dialects).

Standard Chinese is a product of the early-to-mid 20th Century, so about 50-100 years younger than Standard German. This just reflects the fact that German unification was in the mid-1800s, while China's modernization occurred in the early 20th Century.

[umanwizard]

People do typically consider German and Swiss German to be separate languages, I think.

[twixfel]

It's pithy but not really true. Breton is its own language. So is Basque. These are not political questions, but based on linguistics entirely.

[dllthomas]

It seems pretty well known that Mandarin and Cantonese are different languages. It turns out there are a whole bunch.

[seanmcdirmid]

newbie take: there is one Chinese language

intermediate take: there are many Chinese languages

expert take: there is one Chinese language

There are also plenty of languages in China that are not Chinese or a dialect of Chinese. Tibetan and Mongolian (and their many dialects) are obviously not Chinese. Chinese written language is used as a phonetic script for some minority languages (although many are based on uighur script is used a lot also, Uighur itself uses arabic).