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Can someone explain why Cantonese is considered as a dialect of Chinese, instead of a language? It is also for any language exist in China, both land and Taiwan (Cantonese, Hunanese, Fujianese, Taiwanese, etc.).

AFAIK, dialect is differ from language. Just like in Indonesia: Javanese, Sundanese and Madurese is considered as a language, not a dialect. But, Javanese is called as a dialect when someone speak Indonesian language with Javanese accent.

But, for Cantonese (or any other languages listed above), although you speak Cantonese, Chinese will considered it as a dialect, not a language. You know that, Cantonese and Mandarin is 'completely' different each other.

mrjimoy_05
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    Just on a somewhat related account, the English Wiktionary considers Mandarin and Cantonese separate languages. I believe the rationale behind this decision is the fact that they belong to separate topolects. Even Wu is considered a separate language. – deutschZuid Feb 26 '13 at 12:19
  • http://lgsinchina.wikispaces.com/file/view/Dialects_of_Mandarin_and_Southern_Chinese.gif/137794125/306x303/Dialects_of_Mandarin_and_Southern_Chinese.gif – deutschZuid Feb 26 '13 at 12:21
  • I'm so glad that you asked this question, some arguments here are quite instructive! – Leo supports Monica Cellio Feb 27 '13 at 22:07
  • 别担心，只需要能听懂普通话，会说普通话就行了，作为一名中国人，有的方言我都听不懂。 –  Mar 25 '13 at 16:05
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    Is Yiddish a German dialect? (Germans can't understand it although the upper stratum are all German words) If yes, then I'd be inclined to the idea that Cantonese is a dialect of German – user58955 Jan 05 '14 at 02:38
  • 因为在书写时，广东话和普通话的区别很小。双方实际可以通过笔谈的方式交流。/Because when written, Cantonese and Putonghua have almost no differences. – Joseph S WU Jan 06 '14 at 04:18
  • Cantonese is a dialect of Chinese just as much as the Standard dialect, Mandarin, is a dialect of Chinese. Usually, the term "Chinese language" usually refers to what is regarded as the standard dialect (for that particular area). In Hong Kong, asking for someone to speak in "Chinese" would imply you wish them speak in "Cantonese"; one would request them speak in "Putonghua" otherwise. – Henry Chan Jan 12 '16 at 18:10
  • This might be a bit provocative and perhaps only half related to the question... However after reading the other answers and comments (of which I think many are excellent), I felt this was missing from the whole picture: The last few years there have apparently been mass protests in HK against the Mandarinization of the Cantonese language-or-dialect and culture. This obviously doesn't at all answer whether Cantonese is a dialect or a language, but it complements answers along the lines "Chinese politics favors unity" (true), "because it's not a separate country" (true), and the comment in Chin – Toerndev Mar 30 '13 at 20:14

9 Answers9

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From Wikipedia:

There is no universally accepted criterion for distinguishing a language from a dialect.

My hunch is that in general Chinese politics favors unity, whereas European politics favors separation, thus speakers of Dutch and German would hate to think that they were speaking dialects of the same language. Conversely in general it is useful for the notion of Chinese unity, that there is only one "Chinese", although in fact there are many spoken languages within the peoples considered Chinese, that are considered separate languages.

Note that (accoring to WP) the distinction is so unclear that some linguists consider "Dialect" and "Language" to be synonyms, and that a dialect can also be a language. Thus "Hokkien is a language that is a dialect of Chinese" would not be an illogical statement.

jsj
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    +1 for the wiki ref. – NS.X. Feb 23 '13 at 10:42
  • When you say "Chinese". It usually means Mandarin. There are so many dialects of Chinese, you even can't know which is the traditional one. – Mike Manilone Feb 23 '13 at 10:43
  • I'd also say, there are still many languages in China which are not considered as dialects of Chinese, such as Zhuang, Tibetan. – Mike Manilone Feb 23 '13 at 10:58
  • @MikeManilone Those languages aren't closely related to the languages usually called "Chinese", and they're also not associated with the Han ethnic group. – Stumpy Joe Pete Feb 23 '13 at 19:54
  • But I just only think that if its favors unity, then a country that has more than one language exist in it should called the language as a dialect? – mrjimoy_05 Feb 24 '13 at 02:19
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    @StumpyJoePete Yes, so "all languages in China are dialects of Chinese" is wrong. – Mike Manilone Feb 24 '13 at 03:03
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    It's a generalisation. I'll edit accordingly. – jsj Feb 24 '13 at 04:52
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    @MikeManilone I agree. I think the underlying idea is 1 ethnic group : 1 language. So all the Chinese languages are "dialects", but all the minority languages are languages. – Stumpy Joe Pete Feb 24 '13 at 20:48
  • European politics does not favour separation. Look at all the countries, like France---possibly the most notorious example, that forcibly stamped out any non-standard language, dialect or variation ... What you're very right about is that all this is just politics, driven by political aims. It has not much to do with linguistic reality (other than trying to change it). – Szabolcs Mar 18 '13 at 03:19
  • Sort of true. Arguably, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are not three different languages, they are just three variants of an underlying Scandinavian language... – user58955 Jan 05 '14 at 02:40
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In this case, I think the quote "A language is a dialect with an army and navy" best describes the situation. Since the mainland government considers linguistic unity to be in favor of their ruling, they will consider any spoken variety of Chinese to be a dialect, no matter how different it is from Mandarin (excluding minority languages).

6

No, they're not completely different, but similar in some ways. You should know, all dialects are different.

  • Mandarin Chinese is not a natural language. It grabs pronunciation from Beijing dialect, vocabulary from all the northern dialects, grammar from the articles written by great writers during the New Culture Movement.
  • Modern dialects have only one root -- Middle Chinese. Middle Chinese (中古漢語) is the lineal descendant of Old Chinese (上古漢語). Cantonese is also from Middle Chinese.
  • Although the written form is different. The original characters are the same. The new characters are only made to show the pronunciation of Cantonese.
  • Northern dialects of Chinese lost the entering tone (入聲). For example, 力 is pronounced as "li4" today in Mandarin, but it's "lik" in Middle Chinese. Many southern dialects still have entering tone.
  • Cantonese is not the same as Middle Chinese, but a descendant. In fact, all today's dialects are its descendants.

You see: Cantonese is from a language which all other dialects (including Mandarin) are from, so Cantonese is a dialect of Chinese, not a new language.

Mike Manilone
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    The same could be said for Portuguese and Spanish, or German and Dutch, or Sweedish and Norwegian: Common root, original characters the same :) – jsj Feb 23 '13 at 10:48
  • @trideceth12 Europe is divided into several parts, so they don't want to say "my language is a dialect of XX language". – Mike Manilone Feb 23 '13 at 10:50
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    @MikeManilone That sort of undermines your answer that "Cantonese is a dialect of Chinese" for objective, non-political reasons. – Stumpy Joe Pete Feb 23 '13 at 19:58
  • @MikeManilone: Such a great explanation, thanks! :) – mrjimoy_05 Feb 24 '13 at 02:17
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    With this reasoning you can say that almost all European languages are in fact only one language. Both by how to grew, see: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/IndoEuropeanTree.svg and by how they are written (they almost all use the same characters). The characters only define a language for a very small part. Grammar, pronunciation, ... are as important. – BertR Feb 25 '13 at 16:49
  • With this reasoning, one can also say that Mandarin is a dialect. – Henry HO Jan 12 '16 at 07:06
  • What this answer quotes as "Mandarin Chinese" as an unnatural dialect is specifically referring to Putonghua (普通話) or National Language (國語), which are themselves standardized dialects of Mandarin Chinese. Mandarin Chinese consists of many other dialects, such as 北京話, which is well known for it's strong use of 兒化. – Henry Chan Jan 12 '16 at 18:19
  • Min Chinese actually descends from Old Chinese but not Middle Chinese. – kwaalaateimaa Apr 04 '21 at 01:20
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I had asked a similar question, comparing the actual similarity of Cantonese and Hakka. You can look it up if interested. user3306356 's answer inspired me to answer this question.

In my opinion, Cantonese is not a dialect but in-fact a language.

It works by using the standard for mutual intelligibility. " If two languages are 80% intelligible (or more) with each other, then they are dialects of one language rather than two separate languages."

I would like to draw your attention to the two tables below:

I will assume 'Chinese' to be speakers in Beijing and 'Cantonese' to be speakers in Guangzhou.

enter image description here

While Guangzhou listeners could understand 63% of isolated words from Beijing speakers, Beijing listeners could only understand a mere 34% of isolated words in the Guangzhou dialect (i.e Cantonese).

It gets more interesting here, while looking at comprehension of entire sentences:

enter image description here

Guangzhou listeners were able to understand 93% of spoken sentences from Beijing speakers. Wow! It exceeds 80% and is tempting to consider Cantonese as a dialect.

Beijing speakers were able to understand 3% of spoken sentences from Guangzhou speakers.Yes, just 3%.

The results are summarised below, for sentences: enter image description here

According to the 80% test, because the two languages are less than 80% intelligible with each other, Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese are two separate languages.

So while Guangzhou speakers (Cantonese) can understand Beijing speakers (Mandarin) very well, the converse is not true. With scores exceeding 90%, Beijing speakers and Guangzhou speakers can understand each other very well- showing that there is not much diversity of Mandarin and Cantonese in itself.

udidosa
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The thing that unifies Mandarin and Cantonese is the common Chinese script. For instance, in both Mandarin and Cantonese, 不 means "not."

The character is pronounced "bu" in Mandarin, and "but" in Cantonese, and while they are pronounced differently, they are recognizable versions of each other, even in sound, and have the same meaning linked to the character.

Tom Au
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    English and Finnish are also unified by a common script. – Stumpy Joe Pete Mar 12 '13 at 22:52
  • @StumpyJoePete: I meant, where a given character means the same thing in both Mandarin and Cantonese. That's not true in English and Finnish, where words are "spelled" differently, even if they use the same alphabet. – Tom Au Mar 13 '13 at 01:34
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    The similarity can be pretty superficial though. Common words are very different, and many morphemes don't even have equivalent characters. – Stumpy Joe Pete Mar 13 '13 at 02:43
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    To give an example in 上海话:侬今朝下半天有辰光伐？. 侬 doesn't mean anything in MSM (and the morpheme is unrelated to 你). 今朝 and 辰光 aren't words in MSM, even though they're made of existing characters. 下半天 is in the dictionary, but I've never heard anyone say it. 有 is the same. And 伐 is just a phonetic representation of the shanghainese morpheme (also written w/the uncommon character --that' 口＋伐 if it doesn't show up). So... not sure how useful the common script is in terms of mutual intelligibility. – Stumpy Joe Pete Mar 13 '13 at 03:32
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    Besides, the choice of 不 as an example is a bad one, as no/not is different in Madarin and Canto 不 vs 唔... – dda Mar 14 '13 at 17:10
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In reality, these two languages are not mutually intellegible. Cantonese is not considered another language per se, because Chinese characters unify these two languages in writing. In the absence of Chinese characters, they will be considered different languages today.

I cannot think of other group of languages that experience such phenomenon. For example, a person fluent in Mandarin can comfortably read content from Hong Kong and adjacent areas. We can say the same about people from Hong Kong reading material from the mainland and Taiwan.

Now, take Spanish and French, which share the same alphabet. Without experience, however, it is much more difficult for a monolingual, native speaker of one of these languages to grasp the full meaning of the text in the other language.

deutschZuid
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jll90
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    The formal writing in HK and Taiwan is heavily influenced by Mandarin though. If they just wrote down what they would say in their dialect, it would not necessarily be easily understood (e.g.,侬今朝下半天有辰光伐？) – Stumpy Joe Pete Mar 31 '13 at 03:04
  • You're right about that. But in standard writing the message would be easily understood across the two languages. – jll90 Mar 31 '13 at 03:33
  • Just saying that it's more like diglossia than multiple dialects sharing the same writing. – Stumpy Joe Pete Mar 31 '13 at 06:47
  • @StumpyJoePete Written Chinese and colloquial Chinese has long been separated, for at least 1500 years. Despite however different the vernacular languages are or whether they are mutually intelligible, the written language have always had a uniform standard. It was 文言文 before the language reform in early 20th century, which replaced the writing standard by 白话文. – user58955 Jan 05 '14 at 03:08
  • 白话文 is based on 官话 though, the language of the officials. All government officials were required to learn it to overcome the intelligibility issue -- of course the 官话 in different dynasties were different. The latest 官话 is very similar to today's standard Mandarin, but not exactly the same. – user58955 Jan 05 '14 at 03:17
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    @user58955 What you are describing is diglossia. People speak in one language (their native 方言), and they write in another (previously in 文言文, now basically in formal Mandarin). If Spanish and French speakers had continued writing in Latin since Roman times, the situation would be the same--they would be "written the same", even though the languages were wildly divergent. – Stumpy Joe Pete Jan 05 '14 at 22:01
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    Indeed. I always think that it's a problem with the phonetic writing system -- if Chinese adopted phonetic writing system, today's China would look like Europe... China really is a country unified by the writing system, not other things... – user58955 Jan 06 '14 at 15:38
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I think that the basic concept is all they use same character system (Cantonese or other dialect uses few new introduced words), from about B.C. 230 year, Qin dynasty uniform character script and units. Most of these dialect uses same characters. So Cantonese is dialect, but Man滿/Yi彝/Zhuang壮/Zang藏 are new languages.

Daniel Yang
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Because it truly is a dialect. Cantonese sounds very different from Mandarin, cuz they differed for a long long time. So called "Chinese" (by "Chinese", I mean people) thousands years ago didn't include people in today's Guangdong, Guangxi, Guizhou.

Matt
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  • Cantonese sounds very different from MSM? What is MSM? – mrjimoy_05 Mar 28 '13 at 06:04
  • @mrjimoy_05 should be Mandarin. My bad. Edited. – Matt Mar 28 '13 at 06:14
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    This sounds like a great argument why Cantonese should be considered "a totally different language", not that it "truly is a dialect"... – Stumpy Joe Pete Mar 28 '13 at 06:55
  • @StumpyJoePete Maybe it is a great argument whether it's a different language or dialect. But since Guangdong & HongKong (where people speak Cantonese) are parts of China, I think most people in China would regard it as dialect. I think I understand what u mean by "a different language" - Cantonese is anti-foreign: lots of Chinese don't understand Cantonese. But I think it's ok, for China has tons of dialects which cannot fully understand by people from other provinces. Shanghai dialect, which I speak myself, cannot be understood by people beyond Zhejiang & Jiangsu (they're close to Shanghai). – Matt Mar 29 '13 at 09:54
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    The whole topic of this thread is "Why is Cantonese considered only a dialect instead of a separate language?". Westerners think that two things that are so different must be different languages. Your argument for why they are not different languages was "because they're so different". In the comments, you've presented a perfectly reasonable explanation: all Han languages in China are considered dialects of Chinese for political reasons. Your actual answer doesn't make sense though. – Stumpy Joe Pete Mar 29 '13 at 17:23
  • Also, what does "Cantonese is anti-foreign" mean? PS, outside of China, many countries speak more than one language (e.g., Swiss people speak German, Italian, French, and Romanche; Belgians speak Flemish and French). – Stumpy Joe Pete Mar 29 '13 at 17:27
  • This is a very advanced research topic and arguments like 'because they sound different' is simply not a compelling enough argument. In addition, involving stereotypes and politics really doesn't help with giving your answer any credit. – deutschZuid Mar 29 '13 at 21:15
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It is dialect indeed. Most usage of the cantonese is similar to mandarin. If a mandarin speaker watch a Cantonese channel for sometimes, he can grasp most of the detail.Like me I watch football match on UUSEE and I can understand most contents of the commentator mean. And I have not turned to any Cantonese classes before.

frame99
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