Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-23975037

by tareqak • 13 years ago

52 65 13 years ago

bbc.co.uk

afreak• 13 years ago

Of the 70% of the population who can speak Mandarin, many do not do it well enough, a ministry spokeswoman told Xinhua news agency on Thursday.

Keep in mind that there are many dialects of Mandarin and what this ministry is referring to is the fact that people do not speak the Beijing dialect well, which is the national standard.

speeder2• 13 years ago

He said that 70% do not speak Mandarin, and most of these do not speak "well".

I guess only the "speak well enough" is related to dialects.

The other 30% I think he is referring to people that speak cantonese, and all other interesting languages that exists there, including the mongolian languages (almost everything in China west of the great wall, was originally part of mongolia, like Tibet for example... and thus they have not much to do with China actually, specially Han people).

I hope someday people will figure a way to keep mongolians peaceful without erasing their culture or resorting to extreme tyranny.

flanbiscuit• 13 years ago

I knew China had different languages but wow there are quite a lot of them

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_China#Spoken_langu...

cwhy2• 13 years ago

Han people take part of about 91% percent... This 70% may refer to the "standard" mandarin, more like comparing to accents of the same language.

abayer4• 13 years ago

Tibet is not Mongolian - they've now got connections in terms of their religious background, but Tibetan is part of the Sino-Tibetan language family, while Mongolian is, unsurprisingly, in the Mongol language family (or if you accept the Altaic hypothesis, it's also part of the larger Altaic family with Turkic and Tungusic languages).

And what's more, take a look at the current state of Mongolia some time - it's a functioning democracy with pretty decent respect for civil liberties and no tendency to invade their neighbors. Yes, there's a long history of semi-nomadic tribes coming out of Central Asia and invading the civilized cultures along the edges of the Eurasian steppes, but that pattern wasn't unique to the Mongols (various Indo-European, Turkic, Tungusic (i.e., Manchu), Magyar and other peoples have played that role over the millennia), and that's been a thing of the past since horse archers became ineffective in war (i.e., once firearms were widespread).

jamesli5• 13 years ago

"Keep in mind that there are many dialects of Mandarin and what this ministry is referring to is the fact that people do not speak the Beijing dialect well, which is the national standard."

Strictly speaking, 1) there are many dialects of Chinese, not Mandarin. 2) the language many Beijing people speak is not a dialect. It is an accent. Cantonese is a dialect. Wu Chinese is a dialect. Beijing Chinese is an accent. It is definitely not the national standard, although it is the closest to the national standard, compared to other accents.

abayer4• 13 years ago

Generally, linguists would disagree with that - Cantonese is not mutually intelligible with Mandarin, so it's not a dialect, it's a different language, as are Wu, Hakka, etc... There are fairly profound differences between these languages in their spoken form. It is true that they all share a single written language, and a common language ancestry, but Cantonese (the spoken language) is at least as different from Mandarin (the spoken language) as Spanish and Portuguese, or Dutch and German.

a8da6b0c91d• 13 years ago

What is the reality of Wu on the ground in Shanghai? Do you hear both Mandarin and Wu often, or mostly just one? Which one? I assume everybody can actually speak and understand Mandarin?

melling• 13 years ago

I see 400 million potential customers that I didn't have before. :-)

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h4-chinese-lite/id689851382?...

I'll have audio in 2-3 months. Now I just need that cheaper iPhone for emerging markets.

jarek• 13 years ago

And to compete with the Chinese state, which has always made an enormous effort to get its subjects to speak a common language. But iPhone!

schuke• 13 years ago

I think you mean Beijing accent. By Chinese standards if one speaks Mandarin with an accent as heavy as Scottish accent is to English, she is deemed to speak Madarin not well enough.

newman3142• 13 years ago

But I like the Scottish accent! Understanding someone from Arberdeen is tough though.

cwhy2• 13 years ago

So you prefer them to communicate using English, a language that is even more unrelated?

w1ntermute• 13 years ago

Waiting for tokenadult to comment on this...

niuzeta• 13 years ago

who's that and why?

ihsw• 13 years ago

According to his profile[1] he seems to be somewhat of an expert on Chinese languages.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tokenadult

snake_plissken• 13 years ago

Mandarin is a very interesting language because there are hundreds if not thousands of dialects across China that can vary substantially. For a while I lived in China and could speak the Beijing dialect well enough to get to know someone and engage in small talk about the NBA. I took a train trip from Beijing to Lanzhou which is like 1500 km west. My buddies and I got off the train and couldn't understand a lick for the first 2 days.

Then there's southern China which speaks Cantonese, which is about 100 million people give or take.

weu• 13 years ago

It's worth noting that China has a 90% literacy rate so while they speak may not speak Mandarin they still have some ability to read (and of course use their local dialect): http://world.time.com/2013/08/15/what-the-word-toad-can-tell...

saraid2163• 13 years ago

I recently went and saw The Grandmaster, and one of the more interesting subtleties I noticed was that the Northerners were speaking in Mandarin while the Southerners were speaking in Cantonese. That isn't noted in subtitles anywhere.

(I'm ethnically Chinese, grew up in a household speaking Cantonese, and took some lessons for Mandarin.)

jamesli5• 13 years ago

Many people think Mandarin and Cantonese are basically the same language, or Cantonese is an accent of Mandarin. It is understandable since the majority of early Chinese immigrants were from Canton Province (or Guangdong Province), where Cantonese is the dominant language.

Cantonese is a dialect, with very different sound system, although it shares the same writing system with Mandarin. The difference between their sound systems could be larger than that between English and German, or between Russian and and Bulgarian. It makes sense if one considers the size of China. It is as big as Europe sans Russian. There are as many dialects in China as languages in Europe. In some remote parts in East China, the people in the towns next to each other could not understand each other's dialects. So a common writing system was enforced more than 2000 years ago so that people could communicate with each other in writing.

Native Cantonese speakers is less than 5% of total population in China. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language. It is mostly spoken in Canton and Hongkong. A helpful analogy (not accurate definitely) is to think of it as Spanish in the scope of Europe. A native Mandarin speaker will not understand Cantonese if he doesn't study it, just as a native English speaker will not understand Spanish without study.

contravert• 13 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an...

616c2• 13 years ago

Good point. As someone who lived in Nanning (not Nanjing, Nanning is the province across is the one above the Vietnamese border, across from Guandong/Hong Kong), it is intriguing to me how few people know they border on almost completely separate languages.

I took time to learn Mandarin, and could string sentences together. I could not even say thank you in Cantonese, once, without others laughing at me. The Cantonese-speaking kids I knew just say just give up.

Then I moved onto Arabic, that is another fun story.

zsj888• 13 years ago

Nanning is actually not a province. It's the capital of Guangxi province.

bryze• 13 years ago

An excellent summary. Trying to get everyone in China to speak Mandarin would be like getting everyone in Europe to speak English. It will never be 100% unless you obliterate other languages.

taway20122• 13 years ago

Hmm, if Cantonese is as different from Mandarin as Spanish is from English, why do you still call it a "dialect" of Mandarin?

zasz• 13 years ago

Because it's mentally and politically convenient for people to consider China to be one entity.

SeanLuke2• 13 years ago

He didn't say that. Cantonese is not a dialect of Mandarin. Mandarin and Cantonese (and many others) are both dialects of Chinese.

Chinese is traditionally only written. A Chinese person would speak in his local dialect, but read and write in Chinese. The local dialect typically had a different vocabulary and grammar from written Chinese. Since these dialects aren't written, only spoken, they're dialects.

Largely due to politics, over the last two centuries written Chinese has gradually shifted such that nowadays its grammar and vocabulary have a one-to-one correspondence with a particular dialect, namely Mandarin. But that wasn't always the case. Indeed, most ancient written Chinese poems don't rhyme in Mandarin: but they rhyme in many older dialects (like Cantonese).

Now stuff like Tibetian: that is a language, separate from Chinese and with its own writing system. This is not the case for Cantonese (and 40 other major dialects in China).

jl6• 13 years ago

While it makes me uncomfortable to think of anyone being forced into a new language, I like the idea that this increases the number of people who can talk to each other.

jccc• 13 years ago

People in the western world have been able to talk to each other culturally, economically, etc. without necessarily speaking English.

But the Communist Party might have a better time influencing culture/economy/policy/ideology across all of China with more people speaking the official language.

maaku2• 13 years ago

“A dialect is a language without an army or navy.”

Chinese dialects are totally separate languages, in some cases only distantly related. A Mandarin speaker with no previous exposure to dialect X would find it incomprehensible. It'd be like calling Swedish and Portuguese dialects of the common language “Euro-nese” (as was once the case with 'vulgar' Latin before we started calling it French, Spanish, Italian, etc.)

The Chinese government calling these languages 'dialects' is Orwellian new-speak that makes “language unity” sound like speech therapy instead of the linguistic genocide that it is (a practice which, to be fair, predates both Orwell and Mao).

saraid2163• 13 years ago

Except that the Chinese writing system is basically the same across all dialects. This is one of the most remarkable oddities of the Chinese language. This isn't true of the various Romance languages, which will cheerfully include random additional letters all over the place.

And nevermind that Swedish is descended from Germanic whereas Portuguese is descended from Latin, so your comparison is closer to Cantonese with Hindu.

maaku2• 13 years ago

No, the Chinese written language is not common to all sino languages; most local languages are not written down, ever. People write in Mandarin. A century ago, people wrote in classical Chinese, which is an entirely separate literary language. When you go to Shanghai or Chenzhou you see signs, books, advertisements, etc. written in Mandarin, not the local languages of Shanghainese or Dzao Min. There are some exceptions -- Cantonese and Yi come to mind -- but these are very specific historical exceptions.

I purposely chose Swedish from the Germanic language family to prove a point. When this topic ever does get brought up, people usually make the comparison to Latin and the romance languages in Europe, harkening back to a time when all written communication was in Latin, and the vulgar or Germanic languages were spoken only. But would you seriously claim that Latin was the written form of Old German? Or that the Latin literary culture of the time was inclusive and representative of Germanic cultural norms?

Many (most, depending on how you count) of the local and minority languages in China are only distantly related to Chinese, in the same way that Swedish and Portuguese are both Indo-European languages. What we call China was a culturally, ethnically, religiously, and especially linguistically diverse place when it was politically unified by Qin Shi Huang 2200 years ago. Many of those languages still exist today, in the same regions. But thanks to 2,000 years of linguistic suppression these languages have no written form or literary culture, and very few people are even conscious of the loss.

shawn-furyan• 13 years ago

This is the point that I found disappointingly lacking in the article. Most Westerners have very little familiarity with China's diversity, and this article would have been a great way to introduce some of that nuance to the uninitiated. To wit, it's not just Tibet, who's conflicts with Beijing have been very well publicized, but many other parts of China that are ambivalent about integration into Beijing society. China is far from monolithic, but this article fails to dispel the common assumption that it is.

newsign3• 13 years ago

India is also in similar situation where many dont speak Hindi - its like a Britain or American cant speak English ... being multi dialect/language country shouldn't be an excuse of not being able to speak the national language - i guess past and present government is to be blamed...

kyllo3• 13 years ago

That's because Hindi is no-one's native language, it's an artificial language that was invented by a committee.

Mandarin is almost the same situation, except that it is very very close to the native language of Beijing and Northeast China. So it's almost like they're forcing the entire country to learn Beijing dialect.

redditmigrant• 13 years ago

Hindi is the native language of 180 million people (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindi), most of who live in India.

While Hindi being the national language might have been the decision of a committee, the language itself is not artificial.

newsign3• 13 years ago

Artificial language? :) it is not a language cooked in someone's kitchen :-) it was widely spoken before independence - though Sanskrit would have become more acceptable ...

dragonwriter3• 13 years ago

That's because Hindi is no-one's native language, it's an artificial language that was invented by a committee.

More accurately, Modern Standard Hindi (like Modern Standard Urdu) is a committee-standardized register of the Hindustani (also known as "Hindi-Urdu") language. (prior to standardization, "Hindi", "Urdu", and "Hindustani" all referred to the same language, apparently.)

Mandarin is almost the same situation, except that it is very very close to the native language of Beijing and Northeast China.

Hindustani has 240 million native speakers.

singlecomment172• 13 years ago

LOL, I'll bite.

The second sentence is a fallacy: it's NOT like a Britisher or American not being able to speak English. It's like a Spaniard not being able to speak Italian. Before unification each part of India was its own political entity.

Also read up on the debates in the constituent assembly. There were heated debates on the topic of Hindi as "national language", "only language" etc.

Also, I am pretty sure you are not aware of this, but the national education/language policy of the 1960s said that Hindi speaking areas will learn a non-Hindi language in school in addition to English. The so-called three-language formula of 1968.

It might be worth reflecting on why the three-language formula is not being adhered to.

singlecomment172• 13 years ago

Related: http://www.thehindu.com/features/friday-review/official-lang... "Official language or national language?"

And: http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2010-01-25/india... "There's no national language in India: Gujarat High Court"

tokenadult• 13 years ago

A lot of the commenters aren't believing what this news report says. But the news report kindly submitted here matches the facts of an earlier news report from China, reporting that "The survey of half a million people shows that 53.06 percent of the population can effectively communicate orally in mandarin."[1]

[1] http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838...

In other words, hundreds of millions of persons in China cannot have a telephone conversation with one another, or ask for directions and get a comprehensible answer if they travel to each other's home regions, and so on. National common language promotion in China still has a very long way to go (although of course it is farther along in the younger generation than in the older, and farther along in urban areas than in rural areas). For this issue of national policy, the relevant issue is whether or not people can understand one another when they have a conversation. Many, many, many groupings of citizens of the P.R.C. would include people none of whom have a common language mutually understood by any other person in the group.

By contrast, Taiwan has been much, much, much more successful, much earlier in history, in making Modern Standard Chinese (Mandarin) a common language in a region where historically "Taiwanese" (the Taiwan dialect of Southern Min Chinese) was the majority language and Hakka was a significant regional minority language. After 1949, when the defeated Nationalist forces retreated to Taiwan, perhaps 10 percent (mostly soldiers) was added to Taiwan's population, but not all of those persons were speakers of (mutually understandable) Mandarin either, yet Mandarin was thereafter treated as the sole national language in Taiwan. My wife grew up speaking Taiwanese to her parents (who spoke Japanese to each other, because of their prewar education in occupied Taiwan, then a colony of the Japanese empire), and Mandarin to her siblings and classmates. I met her in 1982. She spoke perfectly adequate (Taiwanese-accented) Mandarin as young adult, and she often impressed visitors from the P.R.C. to the United States in the mid-1980s when we were both students with the quality of her Mandarin. My nieces are now generally more proficient in Mandarin than in Taiwanese, although both languages are still used among our relatives in Taiwan. (Mandarin and Taiwanese are cognate Sinitic languages, but no more similar than English and German are, and certainly NOT mutually comprehensible.) Taiwan achieved much more rapid spread of Mandarin by having a stronger economy in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and thus much more use of personal telephone calls and radios and televisions and much more internal travel. China still has a lot of catching up to do.

The book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by John DeFrancis

http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci...

does a lot to disentangle the issues of speech versus writing, and dialect versus language, that are discussed in several of the interesting comments that preceded my comment here.

Here's an example of how you might write the conversation

"Does he know how to speak Mandarin?

"No, he doesn't."

他會說普通話嗎？

他不會。

in Modern Standard Chinese characters. Contrast that with how you would write

"Does he know how to speak Cantonese?

"No, he doesn't."

佢識唔識講廣東話？

佢唔識。

in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters. Even the traditional Chinese character writing system doesn't bring about mutual understanding among people from all parts of China.

Sagat• 13 years ago

I'm currently trying to learn Mandarin. Thanks for posting.

Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin

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