Re:My Country Isn’t a Nation
by DiogenesKynikos on Friday July 02, 2021 @06:47AM
(#27709923)
Mandarin is not the only Chinese language. It's the standard dialect, but there are a range of other dialects and languages spoken in the country that derive from Old Chinese, and which share a significant cultural heritage. This gets even murkier, because Chinese is not written phonetically, so even people who do not speak a common language or dialect can still communicate using the common writing system.
All this is to say that Chinese identity is not as closely bound to speaking Mandarin as one might think.
I haven't been able to find a good English source for the percentage of Indians who are fluent in Hindi, but it looks like it's around 53-70%.
Source:
- http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-09/08/c_136594961.htm
- https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=14771
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilingualism_in_India
Edit: I mention this because the Oxford definition of a nation is "a country considered as a group of people with the same language, culture, and history, who live in a particular area under one government"
I think this applies to the United States. I don't know how well it applies to India or China, or even to most European states before the 20th century.