When I hear someone say that they speak X languages and X dialects, I’m like, don’t sell yourself short! Call em all languages and let the nitpicky people nitpick away.
It looks as though this problem you and I had of being told to speak with "proper" vocabulary, accent and grammar or we would sound like uneducated country peasants may be a world wide phenomenon. I think that in the UK, celebrities on TV are more proud of their accents and celebrate them more now than was the case in the past. It's the slow loss of irreplaceable minority language words which I feel most disappointing. Yes, beware the ones with the armies and navies.
Speaking of which, I think it's clear that most Chinese languages should be called separate languages. Nine times out of ten when you hear a "Chinese speaker" calling them dialects, that person is a native speaker of Standard Mandarin.
The categorization of dialects always felt messy to me. I started by learning Cantonese and then Mandarin. They've always both felt like languages to me.
Some would say they’re separate dialects because the reading writing is the same (sell, save for simplified vs traditional, but that’s a whole other story. So in other words, someone from Hong Kong (Cantonese speakers) can write to someone in Taiwan (Mandarin speakers), can write to each other and understand what each is saying (since they both use the traditional writing system).
Is this because when Cantonese is written (for example in subtitles), it's written in Standard Mandarin? I notice that subtitles rarely match what the cantonese speakers are saying which means they're not really writing spoken cantonese
No, because written Cantonese is the same as traditional written Mandarin. Thousands of years ago, the imperial government decided that China needed to have one united written language (perfect for those imperial exams. The government didn’t require people to understand each other when speaking, but reading/writing? Definitely). Hong Kong and Taiwan use traditional Chinese, which was what they used for thousands of years, even in mainland, but simplified is what’s used in mainland now. I can’t read either, so I can’t tell you what is what but my parents can! They, of course, read and write traditional. Cantonese is a spoken language/dialect. Growing up, I went to CHINESE SCHOOL (okay, only for a year because the teacher was toxic and I wanted to concentrate on piano on Saturdays), not Cantonese school.
I’m from Toronto, so yeah, weekend and after school Cantonese Heritage Language classes still exist for elementary aged kids. We had a lot of immigrants (boomers) from Hong Kong come in the 80s and their many of their GenX and millennial aged children now have kids. They want the language preserved. Or the boomers are like my parents, who came for school in the 70s (more than a decade before the Joint Declaration).
When I hear someone say that they speak X languages and X dialects, I’m like, don’t sell yourself short! Call em all languages and let the nitpicky people nitpick away.
Wow!, so I speak Catalan, Valencian, Majorcan, Minorcan, Spanish, Castilian, English, American, French...
It looks as though this problem you and I had of being told to speak with "proper" vocabulary, accent and grammar or we would sound like uneducated country peasants may be a world wide phenomenon. I think that in the UK, celebrities on TV are more proud of their accents and celebrate them more now than was the case in the past. It's the slow loss of irreplaceable minority language words which I feel most disappointing. Yes, beware the ones with the armies and navies.
Speaking of which, I think it's clear that most Chinese languages should be called separate languages. Nine times out of ten when you hear a "Chinese speaker" calling them dialects, that person is a native speaker of Standard Mandarin.
The categorization of dialects always felt messy to me. I started by learning Cantonese and then Mandarin. They've always both felt like languages to me.
Some would say they’re separate dialects because the reading writing is the same (sell, save for simplified vs traditional, but that’s a whole other story. So in other words, someone from Hong Kong (Cantonese speakers) can write to someone in Taiwan (Mandarin speakers), can write to each other and understand what each is saying (since they both use the traditional writing system).
Is this because when Cantonese is written (for example in subtitles), it's written in Standard Mandarin? I notice that subtitles rarely match what the cantonese speakers are saying which means they're not really writing spoken cantonese
No, because written Cantonese is the same as traditional written Mandarin. Thousands of years ago, the imperial government decided that China needed to have one united written language (perfect for those imperial exams. The government didn’t require people to understand each other when speaking, but reading/writing? Definitely). Hong Kong and Taiwan use traditional Chinese, which was what they used for thousands of years, even in mainland, but simplified is what’s used in mainland now. I can’t read either, so I can’t tell you what is what but my parents can! They, of course, read and write traditional. Cantonese is a spoken language/dialect. Growing up, I went to CHINESE SCHOOL (okay, only for a year because the teacher was toxic and I wanted to concentrate on piano on Saturdays), not Cantonese school.
That's interesting! Thanks for sharing 😊
I don't know if there are many Cantonese schools out there.
I’m from Toronto, so yeah, weekend and after school Cantonese Heritage Language classes still exist for elementary aged kids. We had a lot of immigrants (boomers) from Hong Kong come in the 80s and their many of their GenX and millennial aged children now have kids. They want the language preserved. Or the boomers are like my parents, who came for school in the 70s (more than a decade before the Joint Declaration).