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A comment on Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin. Parent comment

Re:Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin by abayer on Friday September 06, 2013 @01:26PM (#6341541)
Ok, then the linguists I read tend to be splitters rather than lumpers. =) This is particularly drama-prone in re: the Chinese languages/dialects due to the tendency for Beijing to attempt to cast all speakers of Chinese languages as in fact speakers of a single language, as part of their attempts to create a single unified Han identity.

But in the end, I really believe that if it weren't for the common written language, no one would ever think of Cantonese as being just a dialect of the same language as Mandarin - the differences between the two spoken languages are so massive.

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Re:Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin by jamesli on Friday September 06, 2013 @01:58PM (#6341715)
It involves more than linguistic characteristics to distinguish language from dialect. One can argue for both cases.

I personally prefer to think of Chinese as a language family. It would be a much larger, and very interesting, topic. For the discussion on this thread, I use "dialect" other than "separate languages", since Cantonese, We Chinese, etc. are described as dialects in most materials I read.

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