One correction: you mentioned the "altaic languages". I just wanted to let you know that this proposed language family has widely been disproved, and the vast majority of linguists do not consider them as genetically related languages anymore. Other than that, cool video
Han Chinese is a fake ethnicity. In reality the Chinese race ended long ago when the Mongols swept all of China and throughout Asia during the Yuan Dynasty. It's like saying Germans and Italians are the same people. What we call as "Han Chinese" is nothing but a nefarious lie concocted by the machinations of the evil CCP. There's no such thing as "Chinese" as the race doesn't exist anymore.
Turkish, mongolic, thai, indonesia, burma, Japan Korea china are same language family which got differentiate due to country, n these language can get unrecognizable within 5 to 10 generation, due to tonal n variety. I can't understand my cousin language though we speak same language in different tone, he use tune n we don't.
I'm Chinese and this is how I view Chinese as a language. Chinese is a written language, not a spoken language, as each region, even village, in China, has its own dialect. The reason for that is Chinese is not a alphabetical or phonetical language. Take English as an example. Many people argue that English is not a phonetical language, because its spelling doesn't necessarily reflect its pronunciation. However, because English uses Latin alphabet, each alphabet still provide guidance to the pronunciation to some degree. The problem with Chinese characters is that there's not so much connection between each character and its pronunciation, hence, thereotically speaking, each region can pronounce the characters however way they want.
Han Chinese is a fake ethnicity. In reality the Chinese race ended long ago when the Mongols swept all of China and throughout Asia during the Yuan Dynasty. It's like saying Germans and Italians are the same people. What we call as "Han Chinese" is nothing but a nefarious lie concocted by the machinations of the evil CCP. There's no such thing as "Chinese" as the race doesn't exist anymore.
@@diydylana3151 It has certain combinations to form vocabulary, but even one Chinese character has meaning, so, which people could have their own combination to make people understand, possibly freestyle?
@@diydylana3151 "Have you eaten yet?" Mandarin: 吃飯了 沒 (eat-rice-"en" yet?) Canto: 食咗 飯 未 (eat-en rice yet?) Wu: 飯 吃過 伐 (rice eat-en yet?) Mandarin prefers to combine the verb and noun as a verb-noun combination (吃飯, eat-rice) and puts the present-perfect marker (了, ed/en) after it. So, "吃飯了" (eat-rice "ed"). Canto prefers the use of word surffixes, like putting the surffixes next to the verb (食咗, eat-en), then putting the object (飯, rice) after it. As a whole, "食咗飯" (eat-en rice). Wu prefers Subject-Object-Verb (except the one in Shanghai, which is heavily influenced by Mandarin). So it makes use of pharses like "飯吃過" (rice eat-en).
@@diydylana3151 They can have different nouns, verbs, or even pronouns for the same meaning. They/them: (Mandarin) 他們 ta men (Canto) 佢哋 kui dei (Wu) 渠拉 hi la There: (Mandarin) 那裡 na li (Canto) 嗰道 go toh (Wu) 埃搭 i taq Home/house: (M) 家 jia (C) 屋企 okei (W) 屋裡向 on li sia Dollars: (M) 元 yuan (C) 文 mun (W) 鈿 ti To love: (M) 愛 ai (C) 冧 lum (W) 愛幕 emo
@@diydylana3151 yeah... it's kinda an excuse, but people still use it. Just like how the same group of people didn't treat other western languages as one just becuz they're written in the Latin alphabet. That's why starting from the 20th century, the Japanese chose to develop their own katakana and hiragana systems to mix with kanji. Korea has banned schools from teaching Chinese characters and adopted the Korean alphabet created on their own. Vietnam even opted to use the Latin alphabet after all. This shows that the ex-Sinosphere countries more or less tried to reduce the impacts from China regime by reducing the use of Chinese characters.
China was unified in 221 BC under Qin dynasty (famous for Terracotta army). That was when Chinese script was standardized. But because Chinese script is non-phonetic, doesn't guide pronunciation, spoken form vary regionally despite all sharing the same script.
As a foreigner who’s been living in China for almost 25 years now I wouldn’t want to even guess at how many dialects there are. I myself am accustomed to using two of them Mandarin mostly as spoken in Beijing but also as used in the Northeast as well as Cantonese but I travel in country a lot and am quite used to hearing a number of the others. Great video thanks
One should think of China as the Roman Empire. The Chinese written language is like written Latin but pronounced the French way, the Italian way, the Spanish way etc. Imaging Latin being the only official language, while French, Italian, Spanish and etc are considered dialects. That is the Chinese language.
Good way tobsee... but china language it is its own phenomenon.... Just like arabic its own phenomenon using the quran as the state root invariant fix point. But unlike chinese based lexiogram philosophy.... it is based on hereditary hierarchical model. But strangely all linguistics seems to related to computations .... Automata automaton... How the current ai get so good at large language model, especially by its topology math
Thanks for this great episode. My mum is from the Putian region of Fuzhou and speaks the Xinghua language. I had only heard this language when my mum was speaking with my late grandparents. About 20+ years ago I had stepped into a sushi restaurant and heard the staff there speaking this language. I immediately spoke an expression similar to "wow" in that language and they surprised to have a random customer being able to understand and speak that language. They were the only people outside of my family that I had spoken this language with. I am Hakka and there is no one that I know of in my region that speaks it. The last time that I had spoken this was about 40 years ago. I am now looking this up in TH-cam to relearn this language from again.
China is basically a combined Europe. Some Chinese dialects are close to each other and people who speak them can pretty much understand each other (similar like people speaking Danish and Norwegian), some are more different (similar like Danish vs Dutch), some are even more different, which people cannot understand each other (similar like Danish vs Bulgarian).
Actually Thanks to Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor that unified the entire china and start Qin Dynasty from 221 BC, who decided to unify all writing system by burned all other book written in other way inherit in other ex-rulers territories. But unfortunately his dynasty overthrown shortly after the Qin Shi Huang passed away, and another Han Dynasty which support by all previous rulers descendant took over and begun to discredit all effort Qin Shi Huang done to make China a unified nation than whatever Europe remained to be until nowadays.
@@JeusAlprime108 Don't forget Qin burned all the books written in other languages and characters to fulfill his unification ambition. Just like, if the British and Americans from now on burned all books written in your mother language and forced you and your generations to use English only for a few ten years, would you still thank him?
@@user-rc8kd9vn1q Burning book doesn't work in modern era anymore, because internet never forget, and before they can do that, they need to conquer entire Earth and defeat all other countries with different language. Now even if U.S+U.K+Aus unable to do that, so you are discussing an unrealistic scenario.
@@user-rc8kd9vn1q I don't think you understand context correctly when you put out such absurd scenario of U.S/U.K conquer the world and wipe out all non-english civilisation. Qin and all rulers back are branch from same civilisation, even tho their languange and wording system are not exactly the same, but the difference ain't as big as how for e.g English and French language nowaday. Chinese word characters are logogram which is similar to drawing, and different region of people who share the same logogram character tend to draw differently as time progress. That's why back then during Zhou Dynasty Early Spring and Autumn period, their wording system difference aren't as big as how Europe has develop into nowadays. So if from back then, in Qin scenario, of course I wouldn't mind since back then the literacy rate is not even reach 10% population, If I'm one of them, I wouldn't even care to bother too. But now you suggesting U.K/U.S conquer the world and eliminated all other non-english civilisation, that's is a totally none apple to apple scenario. Of course, I couldn't agree to how you put it this way, since you doesn't seem to comprehend the context of both scenario correctly.
In Chinese there is a distinction between oral form (语) and written form (文) for the language. The national language subject being taught in schools is exactly named 语文 (in the mainland). The 语 part is basically Mandarin while the 文 part includes both classical literacy and modern writings.
I studied Cantonese because I'm in San Francisco and that's the main Chinese language, although Mandarin has established a much stronger presence in recent years. Even though Cantonese has 9 tones, I consider it easier than Mandarin. This is because it has consonant stop endings, which reduce the meaning pile-up of homonyms.
Cantonese is traditional Chinese, Mandarin was invented in the year 1949. Cantonese use traditional Chinese writing system while Mandarin use simplified writing system.
Yaaay finally tackling 2 other languages that I speak. Mandarin and Hokkien. It's actually hard to learn Hokkien if your family doesn't speak it. I learned Hokkien purely from speaking with my parents and elders, I hope this ancient language doesn't die. Edit: so many comments on whether Mandarin or Hokkien or Cantonese are languages. However you want to call it, (language/dialect/pattern of speech people in Fujian speak etc) what it means to me is simply if two people are placed in the same room one person who only speaks and understands Mandarin, the other person who only speaks and understands Hokkien, they would both just stare at each other and not understand each other because they are not mutually intelligible. Unlike Russian and Ukrainian, or Spanish and Portuguese where you have similar words and sounds and these 4 are even considered 4 separate languages.
Filipino Chinese American here, I want to learn hokkien so bad but in America the only real way to learn is with an online tutor, it’s such a beautiful language
I'm a native Cantonese speaker who is learning Hokkien. I found Hokkien is very interesting to learn because as if I'm learning Japanese or Korean, although the grammar is almost same as Chinese languages.
The Chinese languages or dialects (the Sinitic languages) are comparable to the modern Germanic languages (Danish, Dutch, German, English) or the contemporary Romance languages (French, Spanish, Romanian, Italian). The Chinese languages share the same origin & are members of the same language family.
4:21 Fun fact - the two main ways to say 'tea' in the different languages both come from China. One came from the Mandarin pronunciation "cha" e.g. chai, whilst the other comes from Hokkien "te" e.g. tea, thé, té
Chai probably didn't come from Mandarin, probably from Cantonese instead. The maritime trade route only involved port cities like Canton, never the north. And tea was also grown in the south due to the climate, never the north.
I think a lot of things people associate with China has little to do with the Mandarin-speaking North. Most of them are from indigenous cultures of the South.
@@larshofler8298 Most of the Chinese immigrants to S.E. Asia and the West in form of laborers and indentured servants were from the South as you've pointed out, mostly thru' Canton and Shanghai.
Mandarin was actually chosen as the official language way before 1955. That is why Taiwanese official language is also basically mandarin, or “National Tone”.
Yeah, I remember reading it was either Putonghua or Cantonese to be made the "lingua franca". And I'd imagine a final decision made possibly by most board members whose first language was neither the Mandarin or Cantonese, in Nanjing....(?)
@@wokio.91 Yeah… but the thing is Mandarin is adapted from Beijing dialect. Being the capital of Qing, I imagine people had to learn Beijing dialect for capital affairs. The reason Cantonese was also brought up was because Chang’ ROC was founded in Guangdong 20 years prior to the Lingua Franca vote. Cantonese is the most Spoken dialect in Guangdong and HongKong
@@arthaschen4701 However even Chiang himself couldn't speak Cantonese. I can't come up with any reason that Cantonese might be chosen as the official language.
@@arthaschen4701 cantonese is also widely spoken in south east asia... places like singapore, malaysia and indonesia for example commonly uses cantonese by the native chinese in those area.
Imagine Europe as a single country, and I ask you, do you speak European? Disregard French, Spanish, Italian, German as merely some form of European dialect. That's basically China.
this is the exact scenario. they all use the latin alphabet too so it follows with the same Chinese writing. you begin to see how ridiculous it is to claim these other Chinese languages are mere dialects. in fact, there's more intelligibility between Spanish and Italian than there are between Mandarin and the other Chinese "dialects".
Lmfao.😅you don't know anything.Every chinese can understand mandarine,they have always been the same language,just with different accents and characteristics, the words they use are all the same,grammar is the same.If you listen carefully, you can understand the dialects.Mandarine is official and the best.But what you said about French,German,Spanish......in Europe.They are no even the same language,the words and vocabularies are totally different.
I work as a geological investigator for the National Geological Service, and my team regularly goes on field trips to remote areas. We always have one or two local government translators on our team, because we as outsiders simply can't understand some of the local languages.
What a huge surprise to see Olly again! We worked together around ten years ago at the British Council. I clicked on this video because it was recommended by TH-cam and was amazed to see Olly was the presenter! I've never seen this channel before. Anyway, having lived in Beijing for four years and then moved to Hangzhou, understanding Hangzhou Mandarin is virtually impossible because they don't distinguish between the z/zh, c/ch and s/sh sounds. So 四 and 是 have the same pronunciation. 茶 is pronounced ca2. 支持 is pronounced zi1 ci2. It's very strange and extremely challenging, because in English, we associate different accents with different vowel sounds (like the difference between British English "hot" and American English "hot", or the way Australians pronounce "life"), but the different varieties in Mandarin have different consonants. I teach economics at an international school, where I sit between a Hangzhou local (mathematics teacher) and someone from Nanjing who speaks completely standard Mandarin (she's a Chinese teacher). When they have a conversation, I can understand most things she says but almost nothing he says, even though they understand each other 100%.
If you are Chinese, then you would have developed a "flexible ear" and be able to understand 99% of various "Local accent", in Mandarin, as we put it. Though you will need a bit more flexibility to understand distinct dialects. 😀
There you are. Like in America where there are many accents - it takes a while for us Asians to get used to their accents - although all of them use the English Language. Chinese is harder unless one is immersed in their daily lives.
Thus it is a challenge for native English speaker to get it right. I have observed that many caucasians- no matter how well versed in the Chinese Language or have been in China for decades, immersed in Chinese living - that they still cannot get some words right in intonation. One is Amoybill , he is very good, can even speak better Chinese than me in Singapore, but I still cant help noticing him going off key on some words. I dont speak Mandarin, just a mixed bag of all languages and dialects here ( Singlish) - but i can quickly spot his off-key words without fail easily.
Chinese people understand each other by catching tones. Not pronunciation, specially people from Southern don't care z/zh, c/ch, s/sh.... But they never say the words with wrong tones. Foreigners pay too much attention on Pinyin not tones. Some of them even skip tones.
I must point out that the Wu languages today are different from the so called "Wu language" in texts before Tang Dynasty. Actually, the historical "Wu language" is connected to Min languages today, as the Min dialects are descendents of the language of Sun Wu of the three kingdoms period. And the historical "Wu language" refers to the languages spoken in roughly the territory of Sun Wu. The Wu dialects today are derived from the common speach of Tang Dynasty, only a few words from Sun Wu period remains today (those words are more common in Southern Wu, which is closer to Min geographically).
Luanping was only one of the many cities chosen to collect audio samples for this newly constructed language called "Putong hua," but most people in that town don't speak perfect mandarin. The city nowadays say they are the place where mandarin was created for tourism and city images reasons, but what they claimed isn't true. All Chinese languages inherit old expressions from middle Chinese and old Chinese, so there is no Chinese language that is "older."
The Chinese situation is very similar to Italy's. There is Italian, the national language taught in all the schools, but there are a lot of regional tongues which are usually called dialects even though many are actually separate languages. A Sicilian speaking Sicilian would not easily understand someone in Venetp speaking Venetian. And funny enough, they're all subdivided into their own dialects which differentiate from town to town.
it is far greater than that, think of "Italy" as one region/language family on that map like "Min" or "Wu", with the other regions being Spain+Portugal, France, even English etc and then you can begin to grasp how varied they are
Dialects are really something to be protected, they contribute so much to a rich cultural history. We had many in France, but in order to standardize french, the government actively repressed the transmission of regional languages. My great grandmother talked about being beaten and punished if the teacher heard her speak her regional language. Nowadays only the most culturaly proud regions have managed to keep they language afloat, even though almost no one speaks them. But you'll find roadsigns in both french and regional language if you go to Brittany, or Pays Basque, and some in Alsace. You'll still find some very old farmers far back in the country speaking only in their native regional dialect, and that's quite cool (+ they understand standard french no problem)
It has already happened. Some dialects are fading and the young generations tend to not speak their own dialects. The pronunciation among teenagers is often influenced by mandarin, and strictly speaking, is incorrect. That's why we have the 语保 project (language resource protection project), which records speeches from old native speakers of dialects to preserve those languages. This project also aims to preserve non-chinese languages in china, such as the mongolian dialects (the official language of mongolia is just Khalkh dialect, and we have many other dialects in inner mongolia) and tibetan dialects (traditionally three main dialects are recognized but it turns out there are mutually unintelligible sub-dialects within each "dialect", and even languages that are not tibetan such as Gyalrong were seen as tibetan dialects traditionally).
The modern Chinese words/characters are a repository of all local dialects. Each town/township/district/… has their own dialect. If you cannot see your neighbour village(s), then they might speak different dialects, especially when they are divided by a mountain or a river. You do the math counting the number of villages in China, then that is roughly the amount of Chines languages/dialects. Each dialect usually possesses from couple hundred words to couple thousand words depending on their life experiences.
Chinese the most intelligent language ever invented by human beings. If Chinese doesn't use characters and alphabet instead, the dialects will become different languages and much more complex the all of the European languages together.
I’m from Indonesia, but I don’t speak Hokkien. 😅 I speak Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, and Teochew. Teochew and Hokkien are both under the Minnan language family, so I can make out some Hokkien, but communicating is difficult so we often resort to another common language (Mandarin, Indonesian, English). I cannot understand all Yue languages either. I’ve spoken to some folk from Jiangmen city and Yulin city, and cannot understand their language, so we also have to resort to another common tongue. I think Hakka is the one where I can understand various dialects more easily, because I was exposed to various Hakka dialects growing up. But even then it’s only limited to those from Guangdong. I can’t understand the Hakka from Fujian and Jiangxi.
@@supernova7966 I speak Indonesian, but not Arabic. I think the number of Arabic speakers in Indonesia is even lower than Sinitic language speakers. Most Muslims here can recite prayers and passages from the Quran, but this isn't the same as speaking Arabic. Only those who studied or worked in the Middle East can speak Arabic. Even among the Arab Indonesians I know, they speak a form of Indonesian/Malay with a lot of Arab vocabulary. For example saying "anta" instead of "kamu" for "you." But at the end of the day, it's still not Arabic.
"Is Chinese a language?" The answer to that question is weird. Chinese languages are written using a meaning-based writing system, rather than a sound-based writing system. This is a kind of writing system that was much more common in the ancient world than now, with hieroglyphics and the Mayan and Aztec scripts also being examples, but in China it has persisted, in part because when you use a meaning-based writing system, it is possible for two people who speak different languages but use the same meaning-based writing system to communicate with each other in writing, which in a land as linguistically diverse and topographically rugged as China is exceedingly useful. With such systems, it could be said that the written language and the spoken language are actually completely separate, in part because it is possible for two people to share one and not the other, and in part because the sound of the language does not effect the writing, and so Chinese is a written language, but not a spoken language.
BY THE PRINCIPLE OF CHINESE CHARACTERS, THE READING VOICE IS DEPENDED ON WHICH KIND OF LANGUAGE YOU SPEAKING. THEREFORE, THE CHINESE CHARACTERS CAN ALSO CALL THEIR READING VOICE IN ENGLISH, SUCH AS : 馬、虎、水、火 YOU CAN DIRECTLY CALL THEM IN ENGLISH 馬=HORSE 虎=TIGER 水=WATER 火=FIRE
Linguistic diversity in China is so interesting, but so under-recognized. Wu is almost unknown outside of China, in spite of the fact that it has >$80m native speakers. That’s even more than French! And it’s not as if it’s a language spoken in some backwater area, it’s the native language in Shanghai, one of the world’s largest and most economically important cities.
Cause Wu itself has shit tons of languages, Shanghainese can't have a conversation with Hangzhounese. Wu itself is not just one language, is like 5 languages. He also made a mistake, he should have at least try to analyze the phonology of Gan. Gan has 9 languages, not 9 dialects XD
Most Chinese "dialects" have millions of speakers more than most medium-size countries... It is pure politics that mandarin became the national language and not one of the widespread southern languages like hokkien or Cantonese.
11:14 “Did you know that China has one tropical zone?” I think you mean Hainan (海南), but you went on talking about Hunan (湖南). One could say part of Guangdong (广东), Guangxi (广西), and Yunnan (云南, famous for Xishuangbanna) is in the tropical zone, but definitely not Hunan (湖南). ❤️
Olly, good job! There's so much to unpack here! I'll just touch on a few points included in this video (and skip the ones not mentioned in this video). 1. Geographic China is the size of western Europe plus. So if Europe has so many languages, it would be natural to assume that there are as many languages inside geographic China. (In fact, during several periods in Europe, there was a single official language required to be spoken / written for official business. In geographic China, Mandarin has been that since 1644, the start of the Qing Dynasty, and has survived as such.) 2. Since Chinese writing is basically a drawing, to say that "Chinese" is one language, because the speakers of different dialects share a single writing system, is a bit faulty. Imagine if Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan all use drawings instead of phonetic letters as written language. Then instead of perro, cane, cachorro, and gos, there would just be a single drawing of a dog. Could we then say that Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Catalan are different dialects of the same language, because they use the same drawing?? 2. Min is the most ancient among all languages in China mainly due to the topography of the region in which it has been spoken. The mountainous southeastern portion of geographic China kept Min speakers well isolated from the rest of geographic China. After Middle Chinese moved into southeastern China, it evolved separated there into modern Min. 3. "Mandarin" is not a Mandarin word, nor is it any other Chinese language word. It is a Malay word meaning "official". It was used to describe the language used by officials of the Qing Dynasty (headquartered in Beijing) doing business in the South China sea, different from the typical Cantonese spoken by southern Chinese. The reason why your map of Mandarin-speaking region is so vast has to do with the speed at which the Qing officials was able to spread it within geographic China. (Qing is the last dynasty of China, during a much more modern time, with more advanced transportation.) As these Qing officials spread Mandarin, it picked up local influence. The Mandarin that is the official language of the People's Republic of China today is a unified version of the original northern dialect. 4. Historically, the Great Wall acted as a hard barrier, creating a "cul-du-sac" in terms of the migration of Chinese languages within the boundaries of geographic China. Albeit, tradespeople from the north took their languages through the gates along the Great Wall for centuries, thereby influencing the northern Chinese dialect (ie Mandarin), Mandarin is sort of an "extremity" when it comes to Chinese language evolution in geographic China.
Chinese is a language, a macrolanguage. It can also be defined as a group of languages or dialects--there's no broad consensus, just like Scots language, Standard German & Bavarian...etc. Mandarin 官话 is also known as Standard or Official Chinese, that's spoken in imperial court of Ming and Qing dynasty. Following the tradition, Mandarin was made national language in 1912 by KMT party (Republic of China). That's why it is also Taiwan's national language. Mao merely continued the same policy in 1950. China was unified in 221 BC under Qin dynasty (famous for Terracotta army). That was when Chinese script was standardized. But because Chinese script is non-phonetic, doesn't guide pronunciation, spoken form vary regionally despite sharing the same script.
The variation of written forms before qin dynasty was very much due to the wartime during 春秋战国… language can evolve pretty fast both in calligraphy and phonetics…phonetic is the worst form in preserving the essence of a language.
Mandarin was not made national language in 1912. Instead, a commitee was convened and literally voted on how each of the 6500 characters should be pronounced. Due to the composition of the commitee, quite a few characters had a more southern sound, especially from Zhejiang. This system passed in 1913 was known as "老國音". However, it was soon discovered that this new system is highly impractical, primarily due to the fact that nobody can speak it properly, let alone teach it. The teachers themselves are making mistakes due to it largely being different from all the exisiting dialects. Therefore in 1923, a new commitee was formed, and settled on the Beijing standard on the practical standpoint that in 1920s China, Beijing had the largest number of teachers, and an excess can be sent elsewhere to teach Mandarin. This new set was named "新國音". So no. KMT didn't follow "tradition", but out of practicality.
I always tell my students that I am ethnically Chinese, and I speak Cantonese as my first language being from HK. Just like you ask an Indian, you dont say they speak Indian as India has so many different languages with Hindi is the main one with other languages like Tamil, Urdu Pashtun etc.
As a Taiwanese, I think you got the history that Standard Beijing Mandarin in 1955 became the national language WRONG After the Republic of China was established in 1912, there was more success in promoting a common national language. A Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation was convened with delegates from the entire country.[34] A Dictionary of National Pronunciation (國音字典; 国音字典) was published in 1919, defining a hybrid pronunciation that did not match any existing speech.[35][36] Meanwhile, despite the lack of a workable standardized pronunciation, colloquial literature in written vernacular Chinese continued to develop apace.
One thing that keeps me away from the idea of learning Chinese or Cantonese is the tone system. As a 50-year-old person whose listening ability is beginning to decrease, would I be able to really learn Chinese?
The "9-tone" system in Cantonese was a traditional analysis, which now deemed redundant by most of the modern linguists (in fact, more accurately, 6 tones). It's easy to learn, with easy grammar, no tense, no word forms (i.e. go, went, gone; mouse, mice). Anyway, don't let the "tones" scare you! Even if you can't get the tones right, people will understand you. Contexts are always more important than tones.
I'm older than you. I'm low-intermediate in Chinese, and if I could start over I would ignore tones completely. Spoken sentences in natural speech do not have the pitch pattern you would expect from memorized tones in isolated words. It is far more complicated than that. It is similar to English: inFLATed, HAPpy, reDUNdant.
The Dungans are descendants of Hui Chinese from Northwest China who fled China during 1870s-1880s due to a failed rebellion and settled in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Their language is derived from 19th Century Mandarin Chinese dialect spoken in Ganzu Province and is written in Cyrillic alphabets. Dungan language is influced by Russian and Turkic languages and incorporate loanwords from them. It is reported that there is varying degree of mutual intelligibility between Dungan and various Mandarin Chinese dialects and the Dungans are able to understand Central Plains varieties of Mandarin Chinese.
Southern Min people here, glad to see you mentioned our language(however i can barely understand the min language in video, we have different accents... so many.
I speak Cantonese, Mandarin and Polish. In my humble opinion I consider “Chinese” a similar term to “Slavic”. Slavic languages include Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Slovak and etc. Many of them have so similar pronunciation and grammar, the only difference is perhaps the writing system - some use latin alphabet while some use cyrillic alphabet. Apart from languages, they have also similar cultures. The same like Chinese, it can be seen as a comprehensive term to describe different group of people: Cantonese, hakka, hokkien, Shanghainese, Manchurian, and etc. Their languages have similar grammar, writing system, pronunciation but they are not at all the same exact language. Same with their cultures.
as someone who speaks polish as well... I beg to differ. To me if I didn't spend time learning and studying Russian it would sound almost completely foreign to me, like a monolingual Anglophone trying to parse French. Slavic cultures' similarities are also not exactly comparable to Chinese cultures, even the northern vs southern china divide is so large without touching on particular ethnicities like nomadic Manchus/Mongols.
A prevailing thought about the province I was born in, Jiangxi (江西), is it has the most complex dialect system. There is a saying that notes this phenomenon: "A different dialect every 5 kilometers" (十里不同音). Due to the lack of necessity of speaking my hometown dialect, I am not able to speak my hometown dialect but can understand what elders are saying. Note that my hometown is Jingdezhen (景德镇), and the dialect spoken is yingyi (鹰弋片).
yingyi itself is a language of gan. I analyzed all those 片 just to find out, if you hold a intermediate conversation with someone from nanchang, both of you can't understand each other. same goes for other Gan 片
I think this is similar to the Philippine's linguistic identity...our national language is Filipino and the Philippines has two official languages, English and Filipino, but Filipino is mostly based on Tagalog and doesn't really contain much words from other Philippine languages that claims to be our "national" language which is technically just Tagalog, this makes millions of Filipinos and other people to think that languages such as Tagalog, Cebuano, Ilocano, Hiligaynon etc. are just dialects of the Filipino language and that erases so much of the diverse and complicated linguistic history of the Philippines dating back to when we were never one country and pre-colonial influences...It's also important to mention that the term for the "Filipino" language only came about in the past 20th century or so and these islands had to endure this complicated problem until today...You can check up on google or any search engine and most of these languages that Filipinos themselves think of as "dialects" are in fact LANGUAGESs. The four languages that I've just mentioned are part of the World's top 100 languages, so we really need to recognize these languages more... check up on google or any search engine and most of these languages that Filipinos themselves think of as "dialects" are in fact languages...
What you're describing is nothing new, it has always happened in history that minority languages become "dialects" and only one language is recognized as the main one. For example in Italy, where I was born, there are so many regional languages but they are considered dialects of Italian, even though all those regions were not a single country before and each of them has its own culture
6:14 oh my god that was so beautiful i almost cried, I'm Polish so like no way i can understand literally anything, but for some reason this singing really touched me lol
I’m currently in university and taking Simplified/Mandarin courses. I love Chinese it’s such an interesting language but the hardest thing for me is all the different dialects and writing forms. My professor was from the northern part of the Beijing province so we are being taught the Beijing dialect and simplified script, which is great if you want to go to China. But I’ve always planned to live in Taiwan where they use the Traditional writing system for Chinese. It’s difficult because now I am learning both Traditional and Simplified writing, and I sometimes forget which one is which and write the wrong characters in class.
But are you really writing a "wrong" character, or the other correct one ?.. (maybe the better of the 2 if it's the one that correspond to a 2000 year usage)
@@qrsx66 yes you’re right, it’s technically correct since they have the same meaning but since it’s a simplified class it’s automatically counted wrong on an exam if I write the traditional scripts instead of the simplified. I see how when I didn’t give the context it sounds like I’m implying that traditional is “wrong” and I by no means believe that. In some ways traditional makes more sense since the characters were made to look like the words they where representing. (I hope that makes more sense)
I am a native speaker from Taiwan. Nowadays we rarely write Chinese by hand. When we enter Chinese with keyboards, it doesn't really matter they are simplified or traditional because we enter with Pinyin. You type what you pronounce in forms of alphabets. For native speakers, we can read both simplified and traditional. In the rare occasions of writing a note by hand, we are writing more and more simplified characters as a way of shorthand writing.
Many people know Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Wu, Hokkien… are not mutually intelligible, but many people don’t know is even in the same language/dialect, it’s not always mutually intelligible. Take Mandarin (官話) as an example, people mistakenly think all Mandarins are the same, they are mutually intelligible, but actually, different varieties of Mandarins may mutually unintelligible. If you speak Putonghua or if you are studying Putonghua, you’ll have difficulty to understand other varieties of Mandarin. For example Once I went to Weifang, they speak Mandarin too but the different variety of Mandarin (Jiaoliao Mandarin), I heard two people chatting on the bus, and I couldn’t understand what were they talking about.
as a native chinese, as far as I'm concerned chinese is a single language. think of english. you have american english, british english, austrilian english, indian english, etc. it's all the same language just spoken with some minor differences in dialect and word choices. same thing with chinese. it's just that the britsh colonization period ended fairly recentlty so everybody still sound simular to british english. give it another thousand year and everybody's english will sound very different just like chinese.
I am Taiwanese. I always wander why SE Asian Ethnic Chinese call Minan as Hokkiien. They said they are Fujianese. Yes or no. Most of their ancestors came from southern Fujian, or Minan, but they like To overgeneralize to fujianese. In dialect. For political correctness, in China, its called Minan. In Taiwan, its called Taiwanese. The complicate part is Fujian has so many dialects just like you said. They are like the foreign language. Se Asian countries have many Fuzhou descendants. Fuzhou dialect is total different dialect. According to Wikipedia, Fuzhou is so different. It cannot even be dialect, its different language. Therefore calling Minan as Hokkien is rude n confusing. I visited my Indonesia friend. He n i either communicated in English or Mandarin. One day, we were with other ethni Chinese. He wanted to speak personal stuff. He said lets speak Hokkien. I started to talk Taiwanese. He had no ideas, back to Mandarin. He speaks Xinhua. Where that was, he only know its in Fujian. I can't understand a word. For some reasons, SE Asian ethnic Speak Minan, they sound like Taiwanese. They were mistaken as Taiwanese. There are some differences. SE Asia Minan is influenced by Malaysia or Indonesia. Taiwanese borrowed a lot vocabulary. Over all, SE Asian dialect are very closed to Taiwanese. However, Taiwanese is much different than Minan dialect in Fujian, China, except Xiamen. On internet, i heard Quanzhou, Zhangzhou, Jingjiang n other Minan dialect. Excuse for poor language skill dialects, i have hard time understanding those dialects. Ok, they are easier than Cantonese. Bare in mind, most Taiwanese ancestors came from Zhangzhou, Quanzhou, JingJiang n other Minan regions. My mom father came from Jingjiang to Taiwan in 1930. I learn 50% of Taiwanese from my mom side. I have hard time understanding Jingjiang dialect. I guess my grandfather intermingled in Taiwanese style. My father grand father came from some Minan part. None of them speak thecway other Minan speak in Fujian, China. Xiamen is different. Watching Xiamen program, i have no problem. One day , my parents were talking. Someone was shcking n happy my parents were from Xiamen. My father corrected her n said they were from Taiwan. Weird, we live LA neighborhood with lots of Taiwanese. In certain part of southern Zhejiang province, they speak some flavor of Minan. How different i have no ideas. I have seen any from China. However, many of them escaped to Taiwan in 1949 n 1950s. They have less difficulty adapting Taiwanese culture. Their dialect are very similar to Taiwanese. Then there is Teochow dialect. According to Wikipedia, its part of Minan dialect family. Taiwanese can understand some, but the difference is too big. Making conversations between Taiwanese n Teochow is mission impossible. Lets put this way, i have less difficult time in Minan flavir dialect. I can guess some Teochow dialect. Other tons of Fujian or Hokkien dialect, to me, they are foreign languages. I probably understand Cantonese more than Fuzhou n other non Minan Fujian/Hokkien dialects. Oh, Teochow is Canton province. Thats another misconception. HKER Cantonese can not go much far. I don't know how far. I am not from hong Kong. Taiwanese can understand Teochow better than Hker even its still difficult. TaShan, where many of ancestors came to USA to build railroad. The dialect is different than HK Cantonese. How many Cantonese flavors, i have no idea. Canton/Guangdong is abbreviated as Yue. Even calling Yue dialect is confusing. I am beginner in history. There were couple major migration because of wars. Initially, they moved to Jiangsu, Wu, Huan. Then couple wars happened, they moved to further South to Guangdong or Fujian. Some are Hakka. Some are Minan n Cantonese. Thats reason Minan n Cantonese families contain many ancient Chinese. In Northern part, many Han have been killed by wars or starvation . The death tolls were huge. There were many era. They were replaced by nomad inaders f4om Manchuria, Mongolia, southern Siberia or central Asia. The surviving Han people intermingled with Nomad languages. It is my guess that Northern Chinese dialect drift away from ancient Chinese. After Manchu conquered China, Manchu came up Mandarin dialect or Beijing dialect. Of course, Manchu has its own languages which is totally different than other Han dialect. Well languages experts can explain tge evolution of Mandarin better.
Thank you Olly for the great introduction to the Chinese language! I first heard of you when I read your Short Stories in Spanish and later the World War I and II series in Spanish. They were wonderful! Mandarin is my mother tongue and I also speak Taiwan Hokkien and Cantonese. I feel that Mandarin is the Chinese language most distant from its old Han origin because it was influenced by Mongolian and Manchu the most. Hokkien and Cantonese have kept a lot more ancient Han vocabulary that you can see on ancient Chinese literatures. China's political centers have always based in the North, therefore Mandarin (or Northern Han) has always been used as the 官話, the official language or the franca lingua of the governments. One interesting fact, the dialects of the two southern cities: Hangzhou is a quasi-Mandarin and Nanjing is Mandarin, which is totally distinct from the areas surrounding them. Hangzhou, Zhejiang was the capital of Southern Song Dynasty. The Songs escaped the Jing nation (a Manchu people) invasion from Kaifeng Henan. Nanjing was the capital of various dynasties resettled from the North.
The word Chinese is the limitation of the English language. "Chinese languages" are unified by script, which was the very idea in the first place of a unified script. But the various so called dialects are de facto spoken languages in their own right And that's before the minority languages are added in. Good vid.
Han Chinese is a fake ethnicity. In reality the Chinese race ended long ago when the Mongols swept all of China and throughout Asia during the Yuan Dynasty. It's like saying Germans and Italians are the same people. What we call as "Han Chinese" is nothing but a nefarious lie concocted by the machinations of the evil CCP. There's no such thing as "Chinese" as the race doesn't exist anymore.
The reason isn't that complicated it's because China expanded and grabbed a lot of lands around it. In the Warring States period roughly 2,500 years ago, the Sinitic peoples most lived on the Central Plains around the Yellow River region, whereas South China at that time was the homeland of Kra-Dai, Hmong-Mien, Austroasiatic, and Austronesian peoples, West China was the homeland of Tibeto-Burman, Turkic, and Indo-European peoples, and the Northeast of China was the homeland of Mongolic, Tungusic, Koreanic, and Japonic peoples. Throughout the next 2 millennia China gradually expanded in all directions and grabbed other peoples' lands and assimilated many of the surrounding groups, forming the nation of China that we know today. By the way, I'm a Chinese polyglot myself, my mother tongue is Mandarin, but over the years I've learned many words and phrases of some of the other languages in China, such as Cantonese, Hainanese, Cuengh/Zhuang, Li/Hlai, Miao/Hmong, and Dai/Tai Lue.
That's how Cantonese emerged: some Kra-Dai language users around 1000 years ago chose to speak Middle Chinese, with their Kra-Dai features kept till today.
@@user-rc8kd9vn1q Agreed, both genetically and linguistically the Cantonese have a lot of connection to neighboring Kradai peoples like Zhuang, Ong-Be, and Hlai.
@@GL-iv4rw There's no reason to believe and no evidence whatsoever to show that Japonic belongs to the Yangtse civilization. You need to check some new research and papers about this subject. According to recent genetic research, Japonic people are mostly composed of 3 components, a Neolithic Yellow River or Lower Yellow River component closely related to Neolithic Shandong, a Neolithic Amur River or Bronze Age West Liao River component, and some residual Jomon.
Cantonese is historically said to have "9 tones," but if you actually analyze it, it's 6 tones plus 3 "checked" tones. (Tones that end in k, p and t) The 3 checked tones can be said to fit into the 6 tones, and recently, that's exactly what a lot of scholars do. Just Google it and you'll see that nowadays you're taught 6 tones. I think it's simpler than that. As a musician, to my ears it sounds like there are actually 3 tones in a high and low register. 1 and 4 sound like falling tones one high, one low, 2 and 5 rising, one high, one low and 3 and 6 sound like flat mid-tones, one high one low. Fascinating video. I love how music is part of a lot of the local culture. I love music. It was fascinating for me to hear that every region has a genre of "opera." So beautiful and colorful. 🥰
You're right! The 9-tone approach was much influenced by the traditional Chinese Qieyun and somehow has lots of redundant analysis. What's more fascinating is, Cantonese shares lots of similarities from its non-Sinitic neighbor Zhuang (also w/ 6 tones, or "9 tones" if analysed using Qieyun) in Guangxi, and even Vietnamese (w/ 6 tones) and Thai (w/ 5 tones). I would say the substratum of Canto, Zhuang, Viet, Thai is very similar, or even of the same origin.
Yeah, I've seen in the Google, there are 302 languages in China! Chinese is not a language, it's a language family, it's also called Sinitic language family, like Germanic, Romance or Slavic language family. As a native Cantonese speaker, I'm proud of you Olly, you speak my mother tongue very well ! I'm currently learning Hokkien and planning to learn more Chinese languages, such as Shanghainese or Hakka.
Han Chinese is a fake ethnicity. In reality the Chinese race ended long ago when the Mongols swept all of China and throughout Asia during the Yuan Dynasty. It's like saying Germans and Italians are the same people. What we call as "Han Chinese" is nothing but a nefarious lie concocted by the machinations of the evil CCP. There's no such thing as "Chinese" as the race doesn't exist anymore.
Han Chinese is a fake ethnicity. In reality the Chinese race ended long ago when the Mongols swept all of China and throughout Asia during the Yuan Dynasty. It's like saying Germans and Italians are the same people. What we call as "Han Chinese" is nothing but a nefarious lie concocted by the machinations of the evil CCP. There's no such thing as "Chinese" as the race doesn't exist anymore.
🤣.. By the way, the single ethnicity of Chinese is also questionable. I would consider "ethnic Cantonese", "ethnic Min" and "ethnic Wu" a better way of referring to the groups, because of the de-facto difference of their cultures.
@@user-rc8kd9vn1q Chinese = fake ethnicity That is like Spanish and Italians still calling themselves "Latin" China = fake country What's called "China" should be called Mandarin Empire instead
@@user-rc8kd9vn1q Chinese is the nationality, i think you meant ethnicity of Han is pretty vague, which i agree, it was used by the northern nomads to refer to all peoples of China proper and did not see common usage by Han Chinese themselves until the Qing dynasty. before then people used their city/towns/provinces to self-identify amongst each other in the nation. the difference in culture if you want to split hairs can also be diverse enough to split cities but is all unified by the belief: Hua people of the Xia, decedents of the Flame and Yellow Emperor unified by the mandate of heaven.
Saying people speak Chinese in China would be like saying Europeans speak the European language. There are many different but similar languages in Europe with many languages of Europe coming from a distant common language. So if someone generalizes China as being of one language, just tell them that would be like saying Europeans only speak one common language.
there may not be the same words. Fore example the clip on the word umbrella, the Cantonese speaker speaks a single syllabus word "遮“ which in standard Mandarin, carries the meaning on "shielding someone or something". This word is used by the cantonese speakers to refer to umbrella
It's true that the same character can be used differently. And another question ist, how or why did Cantonese come to use 遮 to name umbrella(s) instead of 伞 ?
@@chen-zhuqi4594 That’s how languages naturally develop. Maybe when umbrellas originated people simply called them ‘covers’ 遮, then in some regions they invented a more specialised word 伞 which gradually spread as the new standard. But in Guangdong, far from the linguistic fashion of the capital, be it Luoyang, Chang'an or Beijing, they preferred to use the old word for centuries.
My everlasting question is how to learn Chinese using stories when you know no kanji? How Krashen’s comprehensible input theories work in relation to idiogram wrtiting systems?
Well stories is just the content, of course you need to learn the meaning of the hanzi and its pinyin (to learn pronunciation) until you learn the hanzi and you recognize it.
The first step in learning pinyin (phonetic Chinese). You gradually learn written characters as you learn vocabulary. It's the same as English: learn the word sound, the word meaning, and how to write it. All at the same time.
Han Chinese is a fake ethnicity. In reality the Chinese race ended long ago when the Mongols swept all of China and throughout Asia during the Yuan Dynasty. It's like saying Germans and Italians are the same people. What we call as "Han Chinese" is nothing but a nefarious lie concocted by the machinations of the evil CCP. There's no such thing as "Chinese" as the race doesn't exist anymore.
Well, to be fair, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese were also using the same writing system and it wasn’t designed to be the same, people who went to school for an office in the government would learn the official spoken language, which often differs from their local dialect, and spoken languages often didn’t match the written version due to high rate of illiteracy before the literature was simplified.
Japanese writing is way more interesting as it’s combined both Chinese and Hebrew characters, but the speaking has a lot common with Hebrew and not really many with Chinese.
So is China as diverse as Europe in terms of language? You have Spanish with many dialects, entire families of language, and even some mysteries like Basque.
I would say it's more diverse and less diverse at the same time. It has more absolute diversity in term of number of languages spoken. But Europe has more relative diversity because each of the European language has a good chunk of locutors and none dominate the landscape. In China, only Mandarin dominates and the others have smaller chunks, and shrinking. (and I personally deplore and hate this situation)
Hakka is a language group that matntain the tradition of Tang and Song official language from the middle China, so it is more close to mandarin than Cantonism. There folk songs also are from ancient Chinese music tradition too
I'm not sure about that last part... Ideograms don't carry pronunciation but they don't really carry meaning either. Sure, there are radicals and components that allow one to sometimes understand what the character means (with loads of exceptions), but meanings change from on region to another.
Without Qin Shihuang, people in different parts of China could not communicate well and had to translate, because before the Qin Dynasty, there were seven major countries who wrote and spoke differently, and countries needed to communicate with each other
Loved this video, and as a native Mandarin speaker (from Tianjin) I have to say most of this is accurate. However there is one mistake I would like to raise, Luanping’s dialect is *not* actually the basis for standard Mandarin, nor is it the purest. Standard Mandarin is actually a semi-conlang, as in it’s based on the vocabulary of northern Chinese dialects and pronunciation of Beijing dialect (part of the larger Beijing Mandarin dialect group) but also imported southern vocabulary and formalized. Beijing dialect is actually the original phonetic system that standard Mandarin is based off, not Luanping. However it’s possible Luanping dialect sounds closer to standard Mandarin than the Beijing dialect by chance, considering both Beijing and Luanping dialects belong to the Beijing Mandarin group of dialects. Also, on the title of the video, is Chinese a language? Well both yes and no. Because of the different ways “language” is defined in English and in Chinese, there’s some discrepancy. In English we mostly refer to languages as those with official recognition and are used by people with distinct identities, thus the saying “a language is a dialect with an army”. Like how the Slavic languages developed into Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Slovak, Bulgarian etc., it’s because each of these nations developed separate identities that both united speakers of each dialect and distinguished from their neighbors, formalizing their dialects into separate languages. In the opposite way of Chinese, most people from Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina and Serbia consider their tongues as separate languages rather than one single “Serbo-Croatian” language. But in China, because the people speaking different tongues never developed different ethnic or national identities, they’re more inclined to call Chinese a single language and the subdivisions dialects, instead of the scientific classification of Chinese as a family of different languages. And within Chinese, the definition of “language” is not fixed. Some people call the Yue language(s) as 广东话, meaning Guangdong speech, while it’s also correct to call it 粤语, literally meaning Yue language. A language within a language. Even for sub-dialects for example Henan dialect that belongs under Mandarin, you can say either 河南话 meaning Henan speech, or 豫语 meaning Yu language (Yu being the abbreviation for Henan). But nobody says Guangdong language, Henan language. No one says Yue dialect, Yu dialect - these terms sound weird and obviously incorrect. Some unexplainable things that just show how inconsistent Chinese is as defining what’s a language :P
The amount of diversity in China always blows my mind, its beautiful. I never get tired of learning more about china's history, I feel like it's literally never ending! Although mandarin is taught, which is great and allows everyone to communicate with each other, many keep their cultural roots speak their dialect. My grandparents speak hakka and I can understand most of it when it's spoken but it's a shame I cannot speak it 😔 thank you for such an informative video!
Same here, my husband is Teo chew and his mother is Cantonese, I m hokkien so basically we speak mandarin if I m involved, if not they will speak in hakka, and if between mother in law and father in law the will use Cantonese crazy right?
As a middle age Malaysian Chinese, Cantonese is my mother tongue and Mandarin is my second language. I'm well versed in both. The sad fact is that Chinese dialects are dying here in Malaysia. Chinese parents here are not teaching their kids of their dialects anymore because Mandarin is considered the 'future Chinese language' and the most widely spoken Chinese presently. This is also happening in Guangdong province China - the hometown of Cantonese.
That is simple, learning takes time, and time is money. If you have the time, you can learn as many languages as you want. But not everyone has that kind of free time, so they make the more economical choice.
well CCP did force mandarin on everyone when they declare it as the national language of china, so people have no choice but to learn it... cantonese was once the national language of hong kong but now has been replace by mandarin upon it being return to china..
China is a multi-ethnic, multilingual and multilingual country, with 56 ethnic groups, more than 80 languages and 30 written languages. The Han people have their own language and characters. Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family, is the official language of China today, and is also one of the common languages in the world. The "National Spoken and Written Language Law of the People's Republic of China" promulgated on October 31, 2000 determined that Mandarin is the national common language. Chinese dialects are usually divided into nine major dialects: northern dialects, Wu dialects, Hunan dialects, Gan dialects, Hakka dialects, Cantonese dialects, northern Fujian dialects, southern Fujian dialects, and Puxian dialects. There are several dialects and many kinds of local languages distributed in each dialect area. Among them, the northern dialect with the largest number of users is divided into four sub-dialects: Northern Mandarin, Northwest Mandarin, Southwest Mandarin, and Xiajiang Mandarin. --From Baidu Encyclopedia
Chinese "dialects" are separate languages, Cantonese and Mandarin are less related than even French and Spanish. Han people have their own language family, the Sinitic languages--not just one language.
I just loved the linguistic diversity of China. It's not something that you can get easily in English, maybe if you go to Scotland or Appalachia or time travel to Shakespeare you get the same feeling. I've spent time near Shanghai where the people speak a variant similar to Shanghaiese and usually can't understand things but it will sound familliar but I can't piece anything together. Then one day the stars aligned and I understood a speaker clearly for about... three sentences. It was a funny feeling. You go a couple hours north and the people speak Mandarin and I can understand, but I need up to four listens to understand. You go south and Mandarin becomes more of an asset to learning to understand rather than something that helps you. I stand a chance when I hear Mandarin influenced Southern Languages. A little bit. In Hong Kong I realised that Cantonese is really similar to Mandarin. Except in sound. The most important part.
Very educational video. Happy to see that was made by a Westerner. Cuz many foreigners have mixed up this concept when we talking about Chinese and Mandarin. 🤣🤣🤣 Cantonese is my mother language. I can speak and listen to Mandarin. For Hakka, I only can listen but can't speak. The more interesting thing is that there are several types of Hakka depending on which area you lived in. My parents can speak 2 types of Hakka, esp my Mum, who is Chinese Indonesian. Her Hakka sounds a bit Cantonese, which is very easy to understand. This dialect is very common for those Chinese Indonesians who lived in West Kalimantan in Indonesia. Support your video! 😊😊
😅My city is a small city in China. There’s 7 languages in my city, each town has one, people come from different town CANNOT understand each other, we have to communicate with official language- Mandarin or Cantonese
Brilliant Olly!!This is why I call them the Sinitic Group of Languages.Because in reality, that is what they are.The language difference in China is so great that without Putonghua, communication in China would be impossible and I dare say Hazardous.
Han Chinese is a fake ethnicity. In reality the Chinese race ended long ago when the Mongols swept all of China and throughout Asia during the Yuan Dynasty. It's like saying Germans and Italians are the same people. What we call as "Han Chinese" is nothing but a nefarious lie concocted by the machinations of the evil CCP. There's no such thing as "Chinese" as the race doesn't exist anymore.
Yep. It's absurd how whole language groups with several branches and dozens of mutually unintelligble languages and hundreds of dialects are commonly referred to as dialect.
The concept is China is kind of like Europe, and mandarin is the simplified language to communicate through the whole country, kinds of like English, but simplified to frequently used words
🇨🇳 Watch my deep dive into the fiery story of Chinese 👉🏼 th-cam.com/video/2fwWZdjL2lU/w-d-xo.html
One correction: you mentioned the "altaic languages". I just wanted to let you know that this proposed language family has widely been disproved, and the vast majority of linguists do not consider them as genetically related languages anymore. Other than that, cool video
Han Chinese is a fake ethnicity. In reality the Chinese race ended long ago when the Mongols swept all of China and throughout Asia during the Yuan Dynasty. It's like saying Germans and Italians are the same people. What we call as "Han Chinese" is nothing but a nefarious lie concocted by the machinations of the evil CCP. There's no such thing as "Chinese" as the race doesn't exist anymore.
The Yue language a;sp cover the language spoken in Vietnam too. If you listen carefully, Vietnamese sound very Cantonese.
Turkish, mongolic, thai, indonesia, burma, Japan Korea china are same language family which got differentiate due to country, n these language can get unrecognizable within 5 to 10 generation, due to tonal n variety. I can't understand my cousin language though we speak same language in different tone, he use tune n we don't.
99% of English words were copied from other languages, can you find one word that is originally an English word? Perhaps the word dog?
I'm Chinese and this is how I view Chinese as a language. Chinese is a written language, not a spoken language, as each region, even village, in China, has its own dialect. The reason for that is Chinese is not a alphabetical or phonetical language. Take English as an example. Many people argue that English is not a phonetical language, because its spelling doesn't necessarily reflect its pronunciation. However, because English uses Latin alphabet, each alphabet still provide guidance to the pronunciation to some degree. The problem with Chinese characters is that there's not so much connection between each character and its pronunciation, hence, thereotically speaking, each region can pronounce the characters however way they want.
Han Chinese is a fake ethnicity. In reality the Chinese race ended long ago when the Mongols swept all of China and throughout Asia during the Yuan Dynasty. It's like saying Germans and Italians are the same people. What we call as "Han Chinese" is nothing but a nefarious lie concocted by the machinations of the evil CCP. There's no such thing as "Chinese" as the race doesn't exist anymore.
@@diydylana3151 It has certain combinations to form vocabulary, but even one Chinese character has meaning, so, which people could have their own combination to make people understand, possibly freestyle?
@@diydylana3151
"Have you eaten yet?"
Mandarin: 吃飯了 沒 (eat-rice-"en" yet?)
Canto: 食咗 飯 未 (eat-en rice yet?)
Wu: 飯 吃過 伐 (rice eat-en yet?)
Mandarin prefers to combine the verb and noun as a verb-noun combination (吃飯, eat-rice) and puts the present-perfect marker (了, ed/en) after it. So, "吃飯了" (eat-rice "ed").
Canto prefers the use of word surffixes, like putting the surffixes next to the verb (食咗, eat-en), then putting the object (飯, rice) after it. As a whole, "食咗飯" (eat-en rice).
Wu prefers Subject-Object-Verb (except the one in Shanghai, which is heavily influenced by Mandarin). So it makes use of pharses like "飯吃過" (rice eat-en).
@@diydylana3151
They can have different nouns, verbs, or even pronouns for the same meaning.
They/them:
(Mandarin) 他們 ta men
(Canto) 佢哋 kui dei
(Wu) 渠拉 hi la
There:
(Mandarin) 那裡 na li
(Canto) 嗰道 go toh
(Wu) 埃搭 i taq
Home/house:
(M) 家 jia
(C) 屋企 okei
(W) 屋裡向 on li sia
Dollars:
(M) 元 yuan
(C) 文 mun
(W) 鈿 ti
To love:
(M) 愛 ai
(C) 冧 lum
(W) 愛幕 emo
@@diydylana3151 yeah... it's kinda an excuse, but people still use it. Just like how the same group of people didn't treat other western languages as one just becuz they're written in the Latin alphabet. That's why starting from the 20th century, the Japanese chose to develop their own katakana and hiragana systems to mix with kanji. Korea has banned schools from teaching Chinese characters and adopted the Korean alphabet created on their own. Vietnam even opted to use the Latin alphabet after all. This shows that the ex-Sinosphere countries more or less tried to reduce the impacts from China regime by reducing the use of Chinese characters.
China was unified in 221 BC under Qin dynasty (famous for Terracotta army). That was when Chinese script was standardized. But because Chinese script is non-phonetic, doesn't guide pronunciation, spoken form vary regionally despite all sharing the same script.
Love this!!!! I speak Hokkien as I was born and raised in the Philippines. I’m so glad you really broke down the different languages. Great work!
do pinoy chinese descendants still maintain their dialects?
@@fannyalbi9040 Depends on the family. The conservative ones maintain it, while the liberal ones either maintains it or abandons it.
@@fannyalbi9040 yes they do, so is malaysia thailand and singapore.
Hokkien is on great decline in Malaysia now and being replaced with Mandarin. Only in Medan, Indonesia that still have young people speaking Hokkien.
@@elootl not only in Medan.
As a foreigner who’s been living in China for almost 25 years now I wouldn’t want to even guess at how many dialects there are. I myself am accustomed to using two of them Mandarin mostly as spoken in Beijing but also as used in the Northeast as well as Cantonese but I travel in country a lot and am quite used to hearing a number of the others. Great video thanks
well, no one knows how many dialects are there. in my hometown, city of 3M people, we can tell which town you are from by dialects. 🤣
会普通话就足够到中国任何地方了。
@@烧炕战情妇 yeah,if you venture in big cities only.
@@烧炕战情妇 If you can speak in Mandarin you Are able to communicate with the people in anywhere in China
Lucky I'm stuck in America 😔
I speak Hakka, Cantonese, Mandarin and understand a little Hokkien... greetings from Malaysia 🇲🇾
Impressive! 👏👏👏
One should think of China as the Roman Empire. The Chinese written language is like written Latin but pronounced the French way, the Italian way, the Spanish way etc. Imaging Latin being the only official language, while French, Italian, Spanish and etc are considered dialects. That is the Chinese language.
Totally correct
You can still see what Chinese language it is from a written sentence
Good way tobsee... but china language it is its own phenomenon....
Just like arabic its own phenomenon using the quran as the state root invariant fix point.
But unlike chinese based lexiogram philosophy.... it is based on hereditary hierarchical model.
But strangely all linguistics seems to related to computations ....
Automata automaton...
How the current ai get so good at large language model, especially by its topology math
Thanks for this great episode.
My mum is from the Putian region of Fuzhou and speaks the Xinghua language. I had only heard this language when my mum was speaking with my late grandparents.
About 20+ years ago I had stepped into a sushi restaurant and heard the staff there speaking this language. I immediately spoke an expression similar to "wow" in that language and they surprised to have a random customer being able to understand and speak that language. They were the only people outside of my family that I had spoken this language with.
I am Hakka and there is no one that I know of in my region that speaks it. The last time that I had spoken this was about 40 years ago. I am now looking this up in TH-cam to relearn this language from again.
Wow, fuzhou
Nge hay Hakka ngin meh?
@@Zakaius I thinks so. My grandparents speak hakka eventough they weren't hakka ngin
China is basically a combined Europe. Some Chinese dialects are close to each other and people who speak them can pretty much understand each other (similar like people speaking Danish and Norwegian), some are more different (similar like Danish vs Dutch), some are even more different, which people cannot understand each other (similar like Danish vs Bulgarian).
Actually Thanks to Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor that unified the entire china and start Qin Dynasty from 221 BC, who decided to unify all writing system by burned all other book written in other way inherit in other ex-rulers territories. But unfortunately his dynasty overthrown shortly after the Qin Shi Huang passed away, and another Han Dynasty which support by all previous rulers descendant took over and begun to discredit all effort Qin Shi Huang done to make China a unified nation than whatever Europe remained to be until nowadays.
@@JeusAlprime108 Don't forget Qin burned all the books written in other languages and characters to fulfill his unification ambition. Just like, if the British and Americans from now on burned all books written in your mother language and forced you and your generations to use English only for a few ten years, would you still thank him?
@@user-rc8kd9vn1q Burning book doesn't work in modern era anymore, because internet never forget, and before they can do that, they need to conquer entire Earth and defeat all other countries with different language. Now even if U.S+U.K+Aus unable to do that, so you are discussing an unrealistic scenario.
@@JeusAlprime108 I'm not asking if the Internet forgets or not, but if you're okay with this and thank the US and UK unite the world.
@@user-rc8kd9vn1q I don't think you understand context correctly when you put out such absurd scenario of U.S/U.K conquer the world and wipe out all non-english civilisation. Qin and all rulers back are branch from same civilisation, even tho their languange and wording system are not exactly the same, but the difference ain't as big as how for e.g English and French language nowaday. Chinese word characters are logogram which is similar to drawing, and different region of people who share the same logogram character tend to draw differently as time progress. That's why back then during Zhou Dynasty Early Spring and Autumn period, their wording system difference aren't as big as how Europe has develop into nowadays. So if from back then, in Qin scenario, of course I wouldn't mind since back then the literacy rate is not even reach 10% population, If I'm one of them, I wouldn't even care to bother too. But now you suggesting U.K/U.S conquer the world and eliminated all other non-english civilisation, that's is a totally none apple to apple scenario. Of course, I couldn't agree to how you put it this way, since you doesn't seem to comprehend the context of both scenario correctly.
As a Chinese, i am here listening to a foreign guy explaining Chinese to me, nice.
In Chinese there is a distinction between oral form (语) and written form (文) for the language. The national language subject being taught in schools is exactly named 语文 (in the mainland). The 语 part is basically Mandarin while the 文 part includes both classical literacy and modern writings.
I studied Cantonese because I'm in San Francisco and that's the main Chinese language, although Mandarin has established a much stronger presence in recent years. Even though Cantonese has 9 tones, I consider it easier than Mandarin. This is because it has consonant stop endings, which reduce the meaning pile-up of homonyms.
As a person who has spoken Mandarin and Cantonese for nearly 40 years, this was highly educational!
Cantonese is traditional Chinese, Mandarin was invented in the year 1949. Cantonese use traditional Chinese writing system while Mandarin use simplified writing system.
Yaaay finally tackling 2 other languages that I speak. Mandarin and Hokkien. It's actually hard to learn Hokkien if your family doesn't speak it. I learned Hokkien purely from speaking with my parents and elders, I hope this ancient language doesn't die.
Edit: so many comments on whether Mandarin or Hokkien or Cantonese are languages. However you want to call it, (language/dialect/pattern of speech people in Fujian speak etc) what it means to me is simply if two people are placed in the same room one person who only speaks and understands Mandarin, the other person who only speaks and understands Hokkien, they would both just stare at each other and not understand each other because they are not mutually intelligible. Unlike Russian and Ukrainian, or Spanish and Portuguese where you have similar words and sounds and these 4 are even considered 4 separate languages.
Spoken dialects are often like this. Glad you’re keeping it alive
Filipino Chinese American here, I want to learn hokkien so bad but in America the only real way to learn is with an online tutor, it’s such a beautiful language
I have a friend who speaks Yuet-Ping...a Cantonese sounding dialect. It's her family language.
Hokkien is spoken alot in countries like Taiwan and Singapore.
I'm a native Cantonese speaker who is learning Hokkien. I found Hokkien is very interesting to learn because as if I'm learning Japanese or Korean, although the grammar is almost same as Chinese languages.
In canton ( Guangdong ) province alone , there are at least 3 languages are spoken: Cantonese, Hakka and Teochew .
The Chinese languages or dialects (the Sinitic languages) are comparable to the modern Germanic languages (Danish, Dutch, German, English) or the contemporary Romance languages (French, Spanish, Romanian, Italian). The Chinese languages share the same origin & are members of the same language family.
4:21 Fun fact - the two main ways to say 'tea' in the different languages both come from China. One came from the Mandarin pronunciation "cha" e.g. chai, whilst the other comes from Hokkien "te" e.g. tea, thé, té
Chai probably didn't come from Mandarin, probably from Cantonese instead. The maritime trade route only involved port cities like Canton, never the north. And tea was also grown in the south due to the climate, never the north.
I think a lot of things people associate with China has little to do with the Mandarin-speaking North. Most of them are from indigenous cultures of the South.
@@larshofler8298 Most of the Chinese immigrants to S.E. Asia and the West in form of laborers and indentured servants were from the South as you've pointed out, mostly thru' Canton and Shanghai.
@@larshofler8298 Ah right I remember thinking that but I couldn't find an exact location for the origin so I just said Mandarin
@@brianliew5901 True. Immigration out of Northern China is very recent, mostly in the past 20-30 years.
Mandarin was actually chosen as the official language way before 1955. That is why Taiwanese official language is also basically mandarin, or “National Tone”.
Yeah, I remember reading it was either Putonghua or Cantonese to be made the "lingua franca". And I'd imagine a final decision made possibly by most board members whose first language was neither the Mandarin or Cantonese, in Nanjing....(?)
@@wokio.91 Yeah… but the thing is Mandarin is adapted from Beijing dialect. Being the capital of Qing, I imagine people had to learn Beijing dialect for capital affairs.
The reason Cantonese was also brought up was because Chang’ ROC was founded in Guangdong 20 years prior to the Lingua Franca vote. Cantonese is the most Spoken dialect in Guangdong and HongKong
@@arthaschen4701 Cantonese is the most spoken in some part of Indonesia and Vietnam
@@arthaschen4701 However even Chiang himself couldn't speak Cantonese. I can't come up with any reason that Cantonese might be chosen as the official language.
@@arthaschen4701 cantonese is also widely spoken in south east asia... places like singapore, malaysia and indonesia for example commonly uses cantonese by the native chinese in those area.
Imagine Europe as a single country, and I ask you, do you speak European? Disregard French, Spanish, Italian, German as merely some form of European dialect. That's basically China.
this is the exact scenario. they all use the latin alphabet too so it follows with the same Chinese writing. you begin to see how ridiculous it is to claim these other Chinese languages are mere dialects. in fact, there's more intelligibility between Spanish and Italian than there are between Mandarin and the other Chinese "dialects".
Lmfao.😅you don't know anything.Every chinese can understand mandarine,they have always been the same language,just with different accents and characteristics, the words they use are all the same,grammar is the same.If you listen carefully, you can understand the dialects.Mandarine is official and the best.But what you said about French,German,Spanish......in Europe.They are no even the same language,the words and vocabularies are totally different.
@@reverse2063 try to speak Cantonese or Teochewese with Mandarin speaker and see what you get lol
@@reverse2063 Everything you said is the COMPLETE opposite, lol. Get the F out of here CCP shill.
@@reverse2063 别不懂装懂，你以为的哪些跟普通话很相似的方言都是官话区的方言，包括南方的四川话、湖南湖北话、广西话，都属于官话区，英文也叫mandarin。吴语、粤语、闽南语、客家话等等不论词汇还是语法都跟普通话相去甚远
Just woke up. Had lunch. A new video by Olly on Chinese languages = oh boy, this is going to be awesome!
Hope you like it!
@@storylearning I loved it :)
@@storylearning Chi Na 🎉
I work as a geological investigator for the National Geological Service, and my team regularly goes on field trips to remote areas. We always have one or two local government translators on our team, because we as outsiders simply can't understand some of the local languages.
What a huge surprise to see Olly again! We worked together around ten years ago at the British Council. I clicked on this video because it was recommended by TH-cam and was amazed to see Olly was the presenter! I've never seen this channel before. Anyway, having lived in Beijing for four years and then moved to Hangzhou, understanding Hangzhou Mandarin is virtually impossible because they don't distinguish between the z/zh, c/ch and s/sh sounds. So 四 and 是 have the same pronunciation. 茶 is pronounced ca2. 支持 is pronounced zi1 ci2. It's very strange and extremely challenging, because in English, we associate different accents with different vowel sounds (like the difference between British English "hot" and American English "hot", or the way Australians pronounce "life"), but the different varieties in Mandarin have different consonants. I teach economics at an international school, where I sit between a Hangzhou local (mathematics teacher) and someone from Nanjing who speaks completely standard Mandarin (she's a Chinese teacher). When they have a conversation, I can understand most things she says but almost nothing he says, even though they understand each other 100%.
If you are Chinese, then you would have developed a "flexible ear" and be able to understand 99% of various "Local accent", in Mandarin, as we put it. Though you will need a bit more flexibility to understand distinct dialects. 😀
There you are. Like in America where there are many accents - it takes a while for us Asians to get used to their accents - although all of them use the English Language. Chinese is harder unless one is immersed in their daily lives.
Thus it is a challenge for native English speaker to get it right. I have observed that many caucasians- no matter how well versed in the Chinese Language or have been in China for decades, immersed in Chinese living - that they still cannot get some words right in intonation. One is Amoybill , he is very good, can even speak better Chinese than me in Singapore, but I still cant help noticing him going off key on some words.
I dont speak Mandarin, just a mixed bag of all languages and dialects here ( Singlish) - but i can quickly spot his off-key words without fail easily.
Chinese people understand each other by catching tones. Not pronunciation, specially people from Southern don't care z/zh, c/ch, s/sh.... But they never say the words with wrong tones. Foreigners pay too much attention on Pinyin not tones. Some of them even skip tones.
@@ng6148 Spot on!
I must point out that the Wu languages today are different from the so called "Wu language" in texts before Tang Dynasty. Actually, the historical "Wu language" is connected to Min languages today, as the Min dialects are descendents of the language of Sun Wu of the three kingdoms period. And the historical "Wu language" refers to the languages spoken in roughly the territory of Sun Wu. The Wu dialects today are derived from the common speach of Tang Dynasty, only a few words from Sun Wu period remains today (those words are more common in Southern Wu, which is closer to Min geographically).
Luanping was only one of the many cities chosen to collect audio samples for this newly constructed language called "Putong hua," but most people in that town don't speak perfect mandarin. The city nowadays say they are the place where mandarin was created for tourism and city images reasons, but what they claimed isn't true. All Chinese languages inherit old expressions from middle Chinese and old Chinese, so there is no Chinese language that is "older."
The Chinese situation is very similar to Italy's. There is Italian, the national language taught in all the schools, but there are a lot of regional tongues which are usually called dialects even though many are actually separate languages. A Sicilian speaking Sicilian would not easily understand someone in Venetp speaking Venetian. And funny enough, they're all subdivided into their own dialects which differentiate from town to town.
it is far greater than that, think of "Italy" as one region/language family on that map like "Min" or "Wu", with the other regions being Spain+Portugal, France, even English etc and then you can begin to grasp how varied they are
Dialects are really something to be protected, they contribute so much to a rich cultural history. We had many in France, but in order to standardize french, the government actively repressed the transmission of regional languages. My great grandmother talked about being beaten and punished if the teacher heard her speak her regional language. Nowadays only the most culturaly proud regions have managed to keep they language afloat, even though almost no one speaks them. But you'll find roadsigns in both french and regional language if you go to Brittany, or Pays Basque, and some in Alsace.
You'll still find some very old farmers far back in the country speaking only in their native regional dialect, and that's quite cool (+ they understand standard french no problem)
It has already happened. Some dialects are fading and the young generations tend to not speak their own dialects. The pronunciation among teenagers is often influenced by mandarin, and strictly speaking, is incorrect. That's why we have the 语保 project (language resource protection project), which records speeches from old native speakers of dialects to preserve those languages. This project also aims to preserve non-chinese languages in china, such as the mongolian dialects (the official language of mongolia is just Khalkh dialect, and we have many other dialects in inner mongolia) and tibetan dialects (traditionally three main dialects are recognized but it turns out there are mutually unintelligible sub-dialects within each "dialect", and even languages that are not tibetan such as Gyalrong were seen as tibetan dialects traditionally).
The modern Chinese words/characters are a repository of all local dialects. Each town/township/district/… has their own dialect. If you cannot see your neighbour village(s), then they might speak different dialects, especially when they are divided by a mountain or a river. You do the math counting the number of villages in China, then that is roughly the amount of Chines languages/dialects.
Each dialect usually possesses from couple hundred words to couple thousand words depending on their life experiences.
Chinese the most intelligent language ever invented by human beings. If Chinese doesn't use characters and alphabet instead, the dialects will become different languages and much more complex the all of the European languages together.
Oh no, did you just say the dangerous word "Altaic" 😂
But great and comprehensive coverage of the family!
I’m from Indonesia, but I don’t speak Hokkien. 😅 I speak Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, and Teochew. Teochew and Hokkien are both under the Minnan language family, so I can make out some Hokkien, but communicating is difficult so we often resort to another common language (Mandarin, Indonesian, English). I cannot understand all Yue languages either. I’ve spoken to some folk from Jiangmen city and Yulin city, and cannot understand their language, so we also have to resort to another common tongue. I think Hakka is the one where I can understand various dialects more easily, because I was exposed to various Hakka dialects growing up. But even then it’s only limited to those from Guangdong. I can’t understand the Hakka from Fujian and Jiangxi.
东南亚华人普遍会讲很多中国语言
You don't speak Indonesian and Arabic?
@@supernova7966 I speak Indonesian, but not Arabic. I think the number of Arabic speakers in Indonesia is even lower than Sinitic language speakers. Most Muslims here can recite prayers and passages from the Quran, but this isn't the same as speaking Arabic. Only those who studied or worked in the Middle East can speak Arabic. Even among the Arab Indonesians I know, they speak a form of Indonesian/Malay with a lot of Arab vocabulary. For example saying "anta" instead of "kamu" for "you." But at the end of the day, it's still not Arabic.
@@supernova7966 they are mostly speak Indonesian, even chinese Indonesian also can fluently speak Indonesian.
I think u must be liv in kalimantan Island right?
"Is Chinese a language?" The answer to that question is weird. Chinese languages are written using a meaning-based writing system, rather than a sound-based writing system. This is a kind of writing system that was much more common in the ancient world than now, with hieroglyphics and the Mayan and Aztec scripts also being examples, but in China it has persisted, in part because when you use a meaning-based writing system, it is possible for two people who speak different languages but use the same meaning-based writing system to communicate with each other in writing, which in a land as linguistically diverse and topographically rugged as China is exceedingly useful. With such systems, it could be said that the written language and the spoken language are actually completely separate, in part because it is possible for two people to share one and not the other, and in part because the sound of the language does not effect the writing, and so Chinese is a written language, but not a spoken language.
BY THE PRINCIPLE OF CHINESE CHARACTERS, THE READING VOICE IS DEPENDED ON WHICH KIND OF LANGUAGE YOU SPEAKING. THEREFORE, THE CHINESE CHARACTERS CAN ALSO CALL THEIR READING VOICE IN ENGLISH, SUCH AS :
馬、虎、水、火
YOU CAN DIRECTLY CALL THEM IN ENGLISH
馬=HORSE
虎=TIGER
水=WATER
火=FIRE
Olly, very educational and informative. Thank you.
Linguistic diversity in China is so interesting, but so under-recognized.
Wu is almost unknown outside of China, in spite of the fact that it has >$80m native speakers. That’s even more than French! And it’s not as if it’s a language spoken in some backwater area, it’s the native language in Shanghai, one of the world’s largest and most economically important cities.
french is spoken by far more people than 80 million
@@sofitocyn100 total speakers, yes, but native speakers (L1) is about 80 million
Except its speakers are also ageing :( and it's not as widely used in diverse contexts as french is...
Cause Wu itself has shit tons of languages, Shanghainese can't have a conversation with Hangzhounese. Wu itself is not just one language, is like 5 languages.
He also made a mistake, he should have at least try to analyze the phonology of Gan. Gan has 9 languages, not 9 dialects XD
Such a good video ! Thank you so much 👍👍
A very great video.
I am a Hakka born and grow up in Indonesia, my ancestral hometown is Huizhou in Guangdong province. I speak Hakka and Mandarin
Huizhou mana ko?
@@liongkienfai104 淡水
In India , They have 22 official language and we have 18k+ spoken language (approximate) ,
Most Chinese "dialects" have millions of speakers more than most medium-size countries... It is pure politics that mandarin became the national language and not one of the widespread southern languages like hokkien or Cantonese.
11:14 “Did you know that China has one tropical zone?” I think you mean Hainan (海南), but you went on talking about Hunan (湖南). One could say part of Guangdong (广东), Guangxi (广西), and Yunnan (云南, famous for Xishuangbanna) is in the tropical zone, but definitely not Hunan (湖南). ❤️
海南 is ‘hoi nam’ and not hainan
@@ghostland8646 just depends on spelled in Cantonese or Mandarin
@@AllenYangZzz canto
That was extremely intresting, thank you for making a video on the topic, very informative
Olly, good job! There's so much to unpack here! I'll just touch on a few points included in this video (and skip the ones not mentioned in this video).
1. Geographic China is the size of western Europe plus. So if Europe has so many languages, it would be natural to assume that there are as many languages inside geographic China. (In fact, during several periods in Europe, there was a single official language required to be spoken / written for official business. In geographic China, Mandarin has been that since 1644, the start of the Qing Dynasty, and has survived as such.)
2. Since Chinese writing is basically a drawing, to say that "Chinese" is one language, because the speakers of different dialects share a single writing system, is a bit faulty. Imagine if Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan all use drawings instead of phonetic letters as written language. Then instead of perro, cane, cachorro, and gos, there would just be a single drawing of a dog. Could we then say that Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Catalan are different dialects of the same language, because they use the same drawing??
2. Min is the most ancient among all languages in China mainly due to the topography of the region in which it has been spoken. The mountainous southeastern portion of geographic China kept Min speakers well isolated from the rest of geographic China. After Middle Chinese moved into southeastern China, it evolved separated there into modern Min.
3. "Mandarin" is not a Mandarin word, nor is it any other Chinese language word. It is a Malay word meaning "official". It was used to describe the language used by officials of the Qing Dynasty (headquartered in Beijing) doing business in the South China sea, different from the typical Cantonese spoken by southern Chinese. The reason why your map of Mandarin-speaking region is so vast has to do with the speed at which the Qing officials was able to spread it within geographic China. (Qing is the last dynasty of China, during a much more modern time, with more advanced transportation.) As these Qing officials spread Mandarin, it picked up local influence. The Mandarin that is the official language of the People's Republic of China today is a unified version of the original northern dialect.
4. Historically, the Great Wall acted as a hard barrier, creating a "cul-du-sac" in terms of the migration of Chinese languages within the boundaries of geographic China. Albeit, tradespeople from the north took their languages through the gates along the Great Wall for centuries, thereby influencing the northern Chinese dialect (ie Mandarin), Mandarin is sort of an "extremity" when it comes to Chinese language evolution in geographic China.
你懂汉字么？“普通”来自马来语单词？"普通“这个词的含义是”普遍“和”通用“的组合。
Chinese is a language, a macrolanguage. It can also be defined as a group of languages or dialects--there's no broad consensus, just like Scots language, Standard German & Bavarian...etc.
Mandarin 官话 is also known as Standard or Official Chinese, that's spoken in imperial court of Ming and Qing dynasty. Following the tradition, Mandarin was made national language in 1912 by KMT party (Republic of China). That's why it is also Taiwan's national language. Mao merely continued the same policy in 1950.
China was unified in 221 BC under Qin dynasty (famous for Terracotta army). That was when Chinese script was standardized. But because Chinese script is non-phonetic, doesn't guide pronunciation, spoken form vary regionally despite sharing the same script.
The variation of written forms before qin dynasty was very much due to the wartime during 春秋战国… language can evolve pretty fast both in calligraphy and phonetics…phonetic is the worst form in preserving the essence of a language.
Mandarin was not made national language in 1912. Instead, a commitee was convened and literally voted on how each of the 6500 characters should be pronounced. Due to the composition of the commitee, quite a few characters had a more southern sound, especially from Zhejiang. This system passed in 1913 was known as "老國音".
However, it was soon discovered that this new system is highly impractical, primarily due to the fact that nobody can speak it properly, let alone teach it. The teachers themselves are making mistakes due to it largely being different from all the exisiting dialects. Therefore in 1923, a new commitee was formed, and settled on the Beijing standard on the practical standpoint that in 1920s China, Beijing had the largest number of teachers, and an excess can be sent elsewhere to teach Mandarin. This new set was named "新國音".
So no. KMT didn't follow "tradition", but out of practicality.
Finally someone who knows what he's talking about.
this makes 0 sense, would you say Latin is a "macrolanguage" and everyone in Europe speaks Latin, with their own dialects?
The imposition of Mandarin was extremely harsh, it was one of the most unusual languages in China at the time.
I always tell my students that I am ethnically Chinese, and I speak Cantonese as my first language being from HK. Just like you ask an Indian, you dont say they speak Indian as India has so many different languages with Hindi is the main one with other languages like Tamil, Urdu Pashtun etc.
Qi xin . Lei Yao beng.
Iam from northeast india butidont know hindi😄😄
As a Taiwanese, I think you got the history that Standard Beijing Mandarin in 1955 became the national language WRONG
After the Republic of China was established in 1912, there was more success in promoting a common national language. A Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation was convened with delegates from the entire country.[34] A Dictionary of National Pronunciation (國音字典; 国音字典) was published in 1919, defining a hybrid pronunciation that did not match any existing speech.[35][36] Meanwhile, despite the lack of a workable standardized pronunciation, colloquial literature in written vernacular Chinese continued to develop apace.
Just wonder, how long it took you to research this subject. My goodness, what an excellent video👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻!. Thank you👍🏻😁.
It's really a high quilty reference and documents to teach my kids know more my mother country.
One thing that keeps me away from the idea of learning Chinese or Cantonese is the tone system. As a 50-year-old person whose listening ability is beginning to decrease, would I be able to really learn Chinese?
If 90 year old chinese people are functioning members of Chinese society, you probably can to.
Unless you're actually getting deaf you should be able to recognize the tones even with a audition aid.
There’s only one way to find out! Don’t let it stop you.
The "9-tone" system in Cantonese was a traditional analysis, which now deemed redundant by most of the modern linguists (in fact, more accurately, 6 tones). It's easy to learn, with easy grammar, no tense, no word forms (i.e. go, went, gone; mouse, mice). Anyway, don't let the "tones" scare you! Even if you can't get the tones right, people will understand you. Contexts are always more important than tones.
I'm older than you. I'm low-intermediate in Chinese, and if I could start over I would ignore tones completely. Spoken sentences in natural speech do not have the pitch pattern you would expect from memorized tones in isolated words. It is far more complicated than that. It is similar to English: inFLATed, HAPpy, reDUNdant.
Chinese itself is a written language but a varieties of spoken languages.
Then there's Dungan, which is a Chinese language, but it's spoken outside China and written in Cyrillic.
The Dungans are descendants of Hui Chinese from Northwest China who fled China during 1870s-1880s due to a failed rebellion and settled in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Their language is derived from 19th Century Mandarin Chinese dialect spoken in Ganzu Province and is written in Cyrillic alphabets. Dungan language is influced by Russian and Turkic languages and incorporate loanwords from them. It is reported that there is varying degree of mutual intelligibility between Dungan and various Mandarin Chinese dialects and the Dungans are able to understand Central Plains varieties of Mandarin Chinese.
Southern Min people here, glad to see you mentioned our language(however i can barely understand the min language in video, we have different accents... so many.
I speak Cantonese, Mandarin and Polish. In my humble opinion I consider “Chinese” a similar term to “Slavic”. Slavic languages include Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Slovak and etc. Many of them have so similar pronunciation and grammar, the only difference is perhaps the writing system - some use latin alphabet while some use cyrillic alphabet. Apart from languages, they have also similar cultures. The same like Chinese, it can be seen as a comprehensive term to describe different group of people: Cantonese, hakka, hokkien, Shanghainese, Manchurian, and etc. Their languages have similar grammar, writing system, pronunciation but they are not at all the same exact language. Same with their cultures.
as someone who speaks polish as well... I beg to differ. To me if I didn't spend time learning and studying Russian it would sound almost completely foreign to me, like a monolingual Anglophone trying to parse French. Slavic cultures' similarities are also not exactly comparable to Chinese cultures, even the northern vs southern china divide is so large without touching on particular ethnicities like nomadic Manchus/Mongols.
hehee thx for your opinion but are you sure manchurian and han words are similar? how similar? in what way?
@@cao6496 sorry i shouldn’t include manchurian or mongolian or tibetan etc
A prevailing thought about the province I was born in, Jiangxi (江西), is it has the most complex dialect system. There is a saying that notes this phenomenon: "A different dialect every 5 kilometers" (十里不同音). Due to the lack of necessity of speaking my hometown dialect, I am not able to speak my hometown dialect but can understand what elders are saying.
Note that my hometown is Jingdezhen (景德镇), and the dialect spoken is yingyi (鹰弋片).
Shangrao yanshan
yingyi itself is a language of gan. I analyzed all those 片 just to find out, if you hold a intermediate conversation with someone from nanchang, both of you can't understand each other. same goes for other Gan 片
I think this is similar to the Philippine's linguistic identity...our national language is Filipino and the Philippines has two official languages, English and Filipino, but Filipino is mostly based on Tagalog and doesn't really contain much words from other Philippine languages that claims to be our "national" language which is technically just Tagalog, this makes millions of Filipinos and other people to think that languages such as Tagalog, Cebuano, Ilocano, Hiligaynon etc. are just dialects of the Filipino language and that erases so much of the diverse and complicated linguistic history of the Philippines dating back to when we were never one country and pre-colonial influences...It's also important to mention that the term for the "Filipino" language only came about in the past 20th century or so and these islands had to endure this complicated problem until today...You can check up on google or any search engine and most of these languages that Filipinos themselves think of as "dialects" are in fact LANGUAGESs. The four languages that I've just mentioned are part of the World's top 100 languages, so we really need to recognize these languages more... check up on google or any search engine and most of these languages that Filipinos themselves think of as "dialects" are in fact languages...
What you're describing is nothing new, it has always happened in history that minority languages become "dialects" and only one language is recognized as the main one. For example in Italy, where I was born, there are so many regional languages but they are considered dialects of Italian, even though all those regions were not a single country before and each of them has its own culture
6:14 oh my god that was so beautiful i almost cried, I'm Polish so like no way i can understand literally anything, but for some reason this singing really touched me lol
I’m currently in university and taking Simplified/Mandarin courses. I love Chinese it’s such an interesting language but the hardest thing for me is all the different dialects and writing forms. My professor was from the northern part of the Beijing province so we are being taught the Beijing dialect and simplified script, which is great if you want to go to China. But I’ve always planned to live in Taiwan where they use the Traditional writing system for Chinese. It’s difficult because now I am learning both Traditional and Simplified writing, and I sometimes forget which one is which and write the wrong characters in class.
But are you really writing a "wrong" character, or the other correct one ?.. (maybe the better of the 2 if it's the one that correspond to a 2000 year usage)
@@qrsx66 yes you’re right, it’s technically correct since they have the same meaning but since it’s a simplified class it’s automatically counted wrong on an exam if I write the traditional scripts instead of the simplified. I see how when I didn’t give the context it sounds like I’m implying that traditional is “wrong” and I by no means believe that. In some ways traditional makes more sense since the characters were made to look like the words they where representing. (I hope that makes more sense)
Actually, nobody really writes anything nowadays. We type everything.
My Chinese professor was from the north too! I learned to say 哪儿 "na ER," with that R sound that the video spoke about. 😂
I am a native speaker from Taiwan. Nowadays we rarely write Chinese by hand. When we enter Chinese with keyboards, it doesn't really matter they are simplified or traditional because we enter with Pinyin. You type what you pronounce in forms of alphabets. For native speakers, we can read both simplified and traditional. In the rare occasions of writing a note by hand, we are writing more and more simplified characters as a way of shorthand writing.
I’ve been doing some research; ethnologue lists around 300 different languages in China
Many people know Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Wu, Hokkien… are not mutually intelligible, but many people don’t know is even in the same language/dialect, it’s not always mutually intelligible. Take Mandarin (官話) as an example, people mistakenly think all Mandarins are the same, they are mutually intelligible, but actually, different varieties of Mandarins may mutually unintelligible. If you speak Putonghua or if you are studying Putonghua, you’ll have difficulty to understand other varieties of Mandarin. For example Once I went to Weifang, they speak Mandarin too but the different variety of Mandarin (Jiaoliao Mandarin), I heard two people chatting on the bus, and I couldn’t understand what were they talking about.
普通话也不是用一个小地方的方言变体，普通话之所以是普通话的基础源自7成的官话母语者，恰好借用了滦平的口音。
as a native chinese, as far as I'm concerned chinese is a single language.
think of english. you have american english, british english, austrilian english, indian english, etc. it's all the same language just spoken with some minor differences in dialect and word choices. same thing with chinese.
it's just that the britsh colonization period ended fairly recentlty so everybody still sound simular to british english. give it another thousand year and everybody's english will sound very different just like chinese.
The splitting as mostly ended now, due to social media letting people hear English accents and terms from other dialects
I learn a lot outside common linguistics. Thank you
I am Taiwanese. I always wander why SE Asian Ethnic Chinese call Minan as Hokkiien. They said they are Fujianese. Yes or no. Most of their ancestors came from southern Fujian, or Minan, but they like To overgeneralize to fujianese. In dialect. For political correctness, in China, its called Minan. In Taiwan, its called Taiwanese. The complicate part is Fujian has so many dialects just like you said. They are like the foreign language. Se Asian countries have many Fuzhou descendants. Fuzhou dialect is total different dialect. According to Wikipedia, Fuzhou is so different. It cannot even be dialect, its different language.
Therefore calling Minan as Hokkien is rude n confusing. I visited my Indonesia friend. He n i either communicated in English or Mandarin. One day, we were with other ethni Chinese. He wanted to speak personal stuff. He said lets speak Hokkien. I started to talk Taiwanese. He had no ideas, back to Mandarin. He speaks Xinhua. Where that was, he only know its in Fujian. I can't understand a word.
For some reasons, SE Asian ethnic Speak Minan, they sound like Taiwanese. They were mistaken as Taiwanese. There are some differences. SE Asia Minan is influenced by Malaysia or Indonesia. Taiwanese borrowed a lot vocabulary. Over all, SE Asian dialect are very closed to Taiwanese.
However, Taiwanese is much different than Minan dialect in Fujian, China, except Xiamen. On internet, i heard Quanzhou, Zhangzhou, Jingjiang n other Minan dialect. Excuse for poor language skill dialects, i have hard time understanding those dialects. Ok, they are easier than Cantonese. Bare in mind, most Taiwanese ancestors came from Zhangzhou, Quanzhou, JingJiang n other Minan regions. My mom father came from Jingjiang to Taiwan in 1930. I learn 50% of Taiwanese from my mom side. I have hard time understanding Jingjiang dialect. I guess my grandfather intermingled in Taiwanese style. My father grand father came from some Minan part. None of them speak thecway other Minan speak in Fujian, China. Xiamen is different. Watching Xiamen program, i have no problem. One day , my parents were talking. Someone was shcking n happy my parents were from Xiamen. My father corrected her n said they were from Taiwan. Weird, we live LA neighborhood with lots of Taiwanese.
In certain part of southern Zhejiang province, they speak some flavor of Minan. How different i have no ideas. I have seen any from China. However, many of them escaped to Taiwan in 1949 n 1950s. They have less difficulty adapting Taiwanese culture. Their dialect are very similar to Taiwanese. Then there is Teochow dialect. According to Wikipedia, its part of Minan dialect family. Taiwanese can understand some, but the difference is too big. Making conversations between Taiwanese n Teochow is mission impossible.
Lets put this way, i have less difficult time in Minan flavir dialect.
I can guess some Teochow dialect.
Other tons of Fujian or Hokkien dialect, to me, they are foreign languages. I probably understand Cantonese more than Fuzhou n other non Minan Fujian/Hokkien dialects.
Oh, Teochow is Canton province.
Thats another misconception. HKER Cantonese can not go much far. I don't know how far. I am not from hong Kong. Taiwanese can understand Teochow better than Hker even its still difficult. TaShan, where many of ancestors came to USA to build railroad. The dialect is different than HK Cantonese. How many Cantonese flavors, i have no idea. Canton/Guangdong is abbreviated as Yue. Even calling Yue dialect is confusing.
I am beginner in history. There were couple major migration because of wars. Initially, they moved to Jiangsu, Wu, Huan. Then couple wars happened, they moved to further South to Guangdong or Fujian. Some are Hakka. Some are Minan n Cantonese. Thats reason Minan n Cantonese families contain many ancient Chinese. In Northern part, many Han have been killed by wars or starvation . The death tolls were huge. There were many era. They were replaced by nomad inaders f4om Manchuria, Mongolia, southern Siberia or central Asia. The surviving Han people intermingled with Nomad languages. It is my guess that Northern Chinese dialect drift away from ancient Chinese. After Manchu conquered China, Manchu came up Mandarin dialect or Beijing dialect. Of course, Manchu has its own languages which is totally different than other Han dialect. Well languages experts can explain tge evolution of Mandarin better.
Hakka sounds pretty 😍
Interesting. Never bore traveling all over China. Each region has its own uniqueness.
Thank you Olly for the great introduction to the Chinese language! I first heard of you when I read your Short Stories in Spanish and later the World War I and II series in Spanish. They were wonderful! Mandarin is my mother tongue and I also speak Taiwan Hokkien and Cantonese. I feel that Mandarin is the Chinese language most distant from its old Han origin because it was influenced by Mongolian and Manchu the most. Hokkien and Cantonese have kept a lot more ancient Han vocabulary that you can see on ancient Chinese literatures.
China's political centers have always based in the North, therefore Mandarin (or Northern Han) has always been used as the 官話, the official language or the franca lingua of the governments. One interesting fact, the dialects of the two southern cities: Hangzhou is a quasi-Mandarin and Nanjing is Mandarin, which is totally distinct from the areas surrounding them. Hangzhou, Zhejiang was the capital of Southern Song Dynasty. The Songs escaped the Jing nation (a Manchu people) invasion from Kaifeng Henan. Nanjing was the capital of various dynasties resettled from the North.
The word Chinese is the limitation of the English language.
"Chinese languages" are unified by script, which was the very idea in the first place of a unified script.
But the various so called dialects are de facto spoken languages in their own right
And that's before the minority languages are added in.
Good vid.
Woww that was a lot of new information! Thank you Olly, I appreciate all the efforts in doing this video! My mind is blowing lol
Cantonese and Hokkien are my favourite Chinese languages, though I have more resources for Mandarin.
Canto is cool.
Han Chinese is a fake ethnicity. In reality the Chinese race ended long ago when the Mongols swept all of China and throughout Asia during the Yuan Dynasty. It's like saying Germans and Italians are the same people. What we call as "Han Chinese" is nothing but a nefarious lie concocted by the machinations of the evil CCP. There's no such thing as "Chinese" as the race doesn't exist anymore.
The reason isn't that complicated it's because China expanded and grabbed a lot of lands around it. In the Warring States period roughly 2,500 years ago, the Sinitic peoples most lived on the Central Plains around the Yellow River region, whereas South China at that time was the homeland of Kra-Dai, Hmong-Mien, Austroasiatic, and Austronesian peoples, West China was the homeland of Tibeto-Burman, Turkic, and Indo-European peoples, and the Northeast of China was the homeland of Mongolic, Tungusic, Koreanic, and Japonic peoples. Throughout the next 2 millennia China gradually expanded in all directions and grabbed other peoples' lands and assimilated many of the surrounding groups, forming the nation of China that we know today.
By the way, I'm a Chinese polyglot myself, my mother tongue is Mandarin, but over the years I've learned many words and phrases of some of the other languages in China, such as Cantonese, Hainanese, Cuengh/Zhuang, Li/Hlai, Miao/Hmong, and Dai/Tai Lue.
Yup china brutally expanded out of their own border, the great wall of china to claim territories colonised by Manchurian dynasty as theirs.
That's how Cantonese emerged: some Kra-Dai language users around 1000 years ago chose to speak Middle Chinese, with their Kra-Dai features kept till today.
@@user-rc8kd9vn1q Agreed, both genetically and linguistically the Cantonese have a lot of connection to neighboring Kradai peoples like Zhuang, Ong-Be, and Hlai.
You could just say Baiyue for all those people in South China. And no, Japonic belonged to the Yangtse civilization not Liao civilization.
@@GL-iv4rw There's no reason to believe and no evidence whatsoever to show that Japonic belongs to the Yangtse civilization. You need to check some new research and papers about this subject. According to recent genetic research, Japonic people are mostly composed of 3 components, a Neolithic Yellow River or Lower Yellow River component closely related to Neolithic Shandong, a Neolithic Amur River or Bronze Age West Liao River component, and some residual Jomon.
Malaysian Chinese here;- Hakka on my father's side. Hokkien on my mom's side, speak Cantonese to friends and Mandarin with aunties/uncles/shopkeepers.
大家好！我是墨西哥人、我从今年二月到现在都在学中文、我学习中文因为我想去中国旅游、我爱中国菜！
厉害了，老哥~~！！😳👍
精诚所加，金石为开
Cantonese is historically said to have "9 tones," but if you actually analyze it, it's 6 tones plus 3 "checked" tones. (Tones that end in k, p and t) The 3 checked tones can be said to fit into the 6 tones, and recently, that's exactly what a lot of scholars do. Just Google it and you'll see that nowadays you're taught 6 tones.
I think it's simpler than that. As a musician, to my ears it sounds like there are actually 3 tones in a high and low register. 1 and 4 sound like falling tones one high, one low, 2 and 5 rising, one high, one low and 3 and 6 sound like flat mid-tones, one high one low.
Fascinating video. I love how music is part of a lot of the local culture. I love music. It was fascinating for me to hear that every region has a genre of "opera." So beautiful and colorful. 🥰
You're right! The 9-tone approach was much influenced by the traditional Chinese Qieyun and somehow has lots of redundant analysis. What's more fascinating is, Cantonese shares lots of similarities from its non-Sinitic neighbor Zhuang (also w/ 6 tones, or "9 tones" if analysed using Qieyun) in Guangxi, and even Vietnamese (w/ 6 tones) and Thai (w/ 5 tones). I would say the substratum of Canto, Zhuang, Viet, Thai is very similar, or even of the same origin.
Yeah, I've seen in the Google, there are 302 languages in China! Chinese is not a language, it's a language family, it's also called Sinitic language family, like Germanic, Romance or Slavic language family.
As a native Cantonese speaker, I'm proud of you Olly, you speak my mother tongue very well ! I'm currently learning Hokkien and planning to learn more Chinese languages, such as Shanghainese or Hakka.
Han Chinese is a fake ethnicity. In reality the Chinese race ended long ago when the Mongols swept all of China and throughout Asia during the Yuan Dynasty. It's like saying Germans and Italians are the same people. What we call as "Han Chinese" is nothing but a nefarious lie concocted by the machinations of the evil CCP. There's no such thing as "Chinese" as the race doesn't exist anymore.
其实是屁股问题。
@@denntamirt 你那么懂，觉得德国人看得懂挪威人的报纸吗？
Brah as an ethnic Chinese person who has suffered much due to being a member of my race, cheers for a most educational video on Chinese 'dialects'!
Han Chinese is a fake ethnicity. In reality the Chinese race ended long ago when the Mongols swept all of China and throughout Asia during the Yuan Dynasty. It's like saying Germans and Italians are the same people. What we call as "Han Chinese" is nothing but a nefarious lie concocted by the machinations of the evil CCP. There's no such thing as "Chinese" as the race doesn't exist anymore.
languages*
🤣.. By the way, the single ethnicity of Chinese is also questionable. I would consider "ethnic Cantonese", "ethnic Min" and "ethnic Wu" a better way of referring to the groups, because of the de-facto difference of their cultures.
@@user-rc8kd9vn1q Chinese = fake ethnicity
That is like Spanish and Italians still calling themselves "Latin"
China = fake country
What's called "China" should be called Mandarin Empire instead
@@user-rc8kd9vn1q Chinese is the nationality, i think you meant ethnicity of Han is pretty vague, which i agree, it was used by the northern nomads to refer to all peoples of China proper and did not see common usage by Han Chinese themselves until the Qing dynasty. before then people used their city/towns/provinces to self-identify amongst each other in the nation. the difference in culture if you want to split hairs can also be diverse enough to split cities but is all unified by the belief: Hua people of the Xia, decedents of the Flame and Yellow Emperor unified by the mandate of heaven.
Saying people speak Chinese in China would be like saying Europeans speak the European language. There are many different but similar languages in Europe with many languages of Europe coming from a distant common language. So if someone generalizes China as being of one language, just tell them that would be like saying Europeans only speak one common language.
Or saying people speak Indian in India 😂
there may not be the same words. Fore example the clip on the word umbrella, the Cantonese speaker speaks a single syllabus word "遮“ which in standard Mandarin, carries the meaning on "shielding someone or something". This word is used by the cantonese speakers to refer to umbrella
It's true that the same character can be used differently. And another question ist, how or why did Cantonese come to use 遮 to name umbrella(s) instead of 伞 ?
@@chen-zhuqi4594 That’s how languages naturally develop. Maybe when umbrellas originated people simply called them ‘covers’ 遮, then in some regions they invented a more specialised word 伞 which gradually spread as the new standard. But in Guangdong, far from the linguistic fashion of the capital, be it Luoyang, Chang'an or Beijing, they preferred to use the old word for centuries.
My everlasting question is how to learn Chinese using stories when you know no kanji? How Krashen’s comprehensible input theories work in relation to idiogram wrtiting systems?
Well stories is just the content, of course you need to learn the meaning of the hanzi and its pinyin (to learn pronunciation) until you learn the hanzi and you recognize it.
You need to learn to read Chinese characters. Hard, but necessary.
The first step in learning pinyin (phonetic Chinese). You gradually learn written characters as you learn vocabulary. It's the same as English: learn the word sound, the word meaning, and how to write it. All at the same time.
Better to learn Japanese, some Mandarin is already included.
Han Chinese is a fake ethnicity. In reality the Chinese race ended long ago when the Mongols swept all of China and throughout Asia during the Yuan Dynasty. It's like saying Germans and Italians are the same people. What we call as "Han Chinese" is nothing but a nefarious lie concocted by the machinations of the evil CCP. There's no such thing as "Chinese" as the race doesn't exist anymore.
I'm a mixed Mancunian and Shanghainese. I try real hard to keep Shanghainese alive
Well, to be fair, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese were also using the same writing system and it wasn’t designed to be the same, people who went to school for an office in the government would learn the official spoken language, which often differs from their local dialect, and spoken languages often didn’t match the written version due to high rate of illiteracy before the literature was simplified.
Japanese writing is way more interesting as it’s combined both Chinese and Hebrew characters, but the speaking has a lot common with Hebrew and not really many with Chinese.
Dialect is a French word used by French people to diminish the prestige of regional languages in France.
@@Tomiagisiha_Aisingiorohebrew? Are you smoking weeds?
@@xenxx1192 Google Japanese Hebrew similarities. You will know mate
Bitch plz, the high rates of illiteracy isn't caused by the "hard writing system", it's mainly caused by economics.
That classroom footage was cuteness overload.
So is China as diverse as Europe in terms of language? You have Spanish with many dialects, entire families of language, and even some mysteries like Basque.
yeah it is
If it's not a country, then they would be called different languages like the European ones.
@@user-rc8kd9vn1q They are. Watch the video to find the names.
I would say it's more diverse and less diverse at the same time.
It has more absolute diversity in term of number of languages spoken.
But Europe has more relative diversity because each of the European language has a good chunk of locutors and none dominate the landscape.
In China, only Mandarin dominates and the others have smaller chunks, and shrinking.
(and I personally deplore and hate this situation)
@@56independent And here are many more names if you go into detail for each branches.
Hakka is a language group that matntain the tradition of Tang and Song official language from the middle China, so it is more close to mandarin than Cantonism. There folk songs also are from ancient Chinese music tradition too
仅仅认为语音差别大就认为是不同语言也太西方中心主义了吧？表音文字语言和表意文字语言本身就不能用同样的标准来划分。表意文字语言因为本身不承载发音必然会随着时间、物理距离的变化而发生非常大的变化。但其含义却能千百年、跨越数千公里不发生变化。
I'm not sure about that last part... Ideograms don't carry pronunciation but they don't really carry meaning either. Sure, there are radicals and components that allow one to sometimes understand what the character means (with loads of exceptions), but meanings change from on region to another.
Without Qin Shihuang, people in different parts of China could not communicate well and had to translate, because before the Qin Dynasty, there were seven major countries who wrote and spoke differently, and countries needed to communicate with each other
Loved this video, and as a native Mandarin speaker (from Tianjin) I have to say most of this is accurate. However there is one mistake I would like to raise, Luanping’s dialect is *not* actually the basis for standard Mandarin, nor is it the purest. Standard Mandarin is actually a semi-conlang, as in it’s based on the vocabulary of northern Chinese dialects and pronunciation of Beijing dialect (part of the larger Beijing Mandarin dialect group) but also imported southern vocabulary and formalized. Beijing dialect is actually the original phonetic system that standard Mandarin is based off, not Luanping. However it’s possible Luanping dialect sounds closer to standard Mandarin than the Beijing dialect by chance, considering both Beijing and Luanping dialects belong to the Beijing Mandarin group of dialects.
Also, on the title of the video, is Chinese a language? Well both yes and no. Because of the different ways “language” is defined in English and in Chinese, there’s some discrepancy. In English we mostly refer to languages as those with official recognition and are used by people with distinct identities, thus the saying “a language is a dialect with an army”. Like how the Slavic languages developed into Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Slovak, Bulgarian etc., it’s because each of these nations developed separate identities that both united speakers of each dialect and distinguished from their neighbors, formalizing their dialects into separate languages. In the opposite way of Chinese, most people from Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina and Serbia consider their tongues as separate languages rather than one single “Serbo-Croatian” language. But in China, because the people speaking different tongues never developed different ethnic or national identities, they’re more inclined to call Chinese a single language and the subdivisions dialects, instead of the scientific classification of Chinese as a family of different languages. And within Chinese, the definition of “language” is not fixed. Some people call the Yue language(s) as 广东话, meaning Guangdong speech, while it’s also correct to call it 粤语, literally meaning Yue language. A language within a language. Even for sub-dialects for example Henan dialect that belongs under Mandarin, you can say either 河南话 meaning Henan speech, or 豫语 meaning Yu language (Yu being the abbreviation for Henan). But nobody says Guangdong language, Henan language. No one says Yue dialect, Yu dialect - these terms sound weird and obviously incorrect. Some unexplainable things that just show how inconsistent Chinese is as defining what’s a language :P
I speak Cantonese (from my parents coming from Hong Kong), Hakka (my ancestry) and Mandarin (from learning).
The amount of diversity in China always blows my mind, its beautiful. I never get tired of learning more about china's history, I feel like it's literally never ending! Although mandarin is taught, which is great and allows everyone to communicate with each other, many keep their cultural roots speak their dialect. My grandparents speak hakka and I can understand most of it when it's spoken but it's a shame I cannot speak it 😔 thank you for such an informative video!
Same here, my husband is Teo chew and his mother is Cantonese, I m hokkien so basically we speak mandarin if I m involved, if not they will speak in hakka, and if between mother in law and father in law the will use Cantonese crazy right?
@@Rosie-et5fg 是在新加坡吗？😂😂
@@vr4759 nope msia and I m from indonesia 😁
Never mind ! we spent 9 years and only learned the outline of the history !
@@Rosie-et5fg I wish I had such family, it's so interesting!
Exactly! I have a friend who can speak mandarin, Cantonese, and fuzhounese :>
As a middle age Malaysian Chinese, Cantonese is my mother tongue and Mandarin is my second language. I'm well versed in both.
The sad fact is that Chinese dialects are dying here in Malaysia. Chinese parents here are not teaching their kids of their dialects anymore because Mandarin is considered the 'future Chinese language' and the most widely spoken Chinese presently. This is also happening in Guangdong province China - the hometown of Cantonese.
That is simple, learning takes time, and time is money. If you have the time, you can learn as many languages as you want. But not everyone has that kind of free time, so they make the more economical choice.
It's also because the parents might have been English educated and can't pass on their mother tongues that well, and the schools only teach Mandarin
Northern province of China also have lots of different dialect, lots of small village have different dialects even they only a mountain away.
the great thing is basically everybody in major cities in China speaks Mandarin, so there's no problem understanding each other
well CCP did force mandarin on everyone when they declare it as the national language of china, so people have no choice but to learn it... cantonese was once the national language of hong kong but now has been replace by mandarin upon it being return to china..
China is a multi-ethnic, multilingual and multilingual country, with 56 ethnic groups, more than 80 languages and 30 written languages. The Han people have their own language and characters. Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family, is the official language of China today, and is also one of the common languages in the world. The "National Spoken and Written Language Law of the People's Republic of China" promulgated on October 31, 2000 determined that Mandarin is the national common language. Chinese dialects are usually divided into nine major dialects: northern dialects, Wu dialects, Hunan dialects, Gan dialects, Hakka dialects, Cantonese dialects, northern Fujian dialects, southern Fujian dialects, and Puxian dialects. There are several dialects and many kinds of local languages distributed in each dialect area. Among them, the northern dialect with the largest number of users is divided into four sub-dialects: Northern Mandarin, Northwest Mandarin, Southwest Mandarin, and Xiajiang Mandarin. --From Baidu Encyclopedia
Chinese "dialects" are separate languages, Cantonese and Mandarin are less related than even French and Spanish. Han people have their own language family, the Sinitic languages--not just one language.
Excellent video!! So much information!! I can confirm most of what Olly says (though he knows more than me).
I just loved the linguistic diversity of China. It's not something that you can get easily in English, maybe if you go to Scotland or Appalachia or time travel to Shakespeare you get the same feeling. I've spent time near Shanghai where the people speak a variant similar to Shanghaiese and usually can't understand things but it will sound familliar but I can't piece anything together. Then one day the stars aligned and I understood a speaker clearly for about... three sentences. It was a funny feeling. You go a couple hours north and the people speak Mandarin and I can understand, but I need up to four listens to understand. You go south and Mandarin becomes more of an asset to learning to understand rather than something that helps you. I stand a chance when I hear Mandarin influenced Southern Languages. A little bit.
In Hong Kong I realised that Cantonese is really similar to Mandarin. Except in sound. The most important part.
Very educational video. Happy to see that was made by a Westerner. Cuz many foreigners have mixed up this concept when we talking about Chinese and Mandarin. 🤣🤣🤣
Cantonese is my mother language. I can speak and listen to Mandarin. For Hakka, I only can listen but can't speak. The more interesting thing is that there are several types of Hakka depending on which area you lived in. My parents can speak 2 types of Hakka, esp my Mum, who is Chinese Indonesian. Her Hakka sounds a bit Cantonese, which is very easy to understand. This dialect is very common for those Chinese Indonesians who lived in West Kalimantan in Indonesia.
Support your video! 😊😊
😅My city is a small city in China. There’s 7 languages in my city, each town has one, people come from different town CANNOT understand each other, we have to communicate with official language- Mandarin or Cantonese
Brilliant Olly!!This is why I call them the Sinitic Group of Languages.Because in reality, that is what they are.The language difference in China is so great that without Putonghua, communication in China would be impossible and I dare say Hazardous.
Han Chinese is a fake ethnicity. In reality the Chinese race ended long ago when the Mongols swept all of China and throughout Asia during the Yuan Dynasty. It's like saying Germans and Italians are the same people. What we call as "Han Chinese" is nothing but a nefarious lie concocted by the machinations of the evil CCP. There's no such thing as "Chinese" as the race doesn't exist anymore.
Yep. It's absurd how whole language groups with several branches and dozens of mutually unintelligble languages and hundreds of dialects are commonly referred to as dialect.
我很喜欢中国的人 。我19岁。我学了中文在中学，所以我的中文普通。
I am from Malaysia, I speak Mandarin, Hokkain, Cantonese, Hakka, Bahasa Malaysia & English! :D
The concept is China is kind of like Europe, and mandarin is the simplified language to communicate through the whole country, kinds of like English, but simplified to frequently used words