It’s not mine, but it’s ours
The standard translation of Mandarin’s two first-person plural pronouns goes something like this:
- 我们 wǒmen: “we / us / our”*
- 咱们 zánmen: “we / us / our” explicitly including the person being spoken to
But here’s another use I’ve come across a lot recently: zánmen used possessively (“our”) when the thing possessed most certainly doesn’t belong to the speaker.
Imagine this scene: an interviewer from a market research firm is talking with a manager about his company’s operations. He says:
咱们公司主要从事什么业务呢？
Zánmen gōngsī zhǔyào cóngshì shénme yèwu ne?
What’s your [literally: “our”] company’s main line of work?
Personally, I can’t bring myself to use zánmen in this way. I’m sure that’s just interference from English, where “our” absolutely wouldn’t work to refer to a company that I’m not part of. But it’s a usage that seems entirely normal among the market researchers I’ve worked with — a way of bonding or demonstrating commonality of some sort. If I listened to more radio/tv, maybe I’d know this is common among reporters too?
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*Around Beijing, I’d venture to guess the lines are a bit sharper. Specifically, the use of wǒmen here generally indicates, in my experience, that you are NOT including the person being spoken to — at least in some contexts. There’s gotta be someone out there who’s studied this…
Interesting. Is this unique to market researchers? I do know that many Dutch police officers use wij ‘we’ or its unmarked variant we in a similar way when questioning people:
En wat dachten wij dat we aan het doen waren?
‘And what did we think we were doing?’
Certainly, they do not mean to imply that they were involved in committing the offences at issue.
We do that in English as well. I’ve certainly never seen that use of 咱 before though…
When interviewing teachers for my school they often refer to it as 咱们学校. Usually I hear them doing this when talking to my other teachers, but I always think to myself that it’s quite bold for them to start considering themselves already a part of the school when they’re just interviewing.
I vacillate between thinking “who do you think you are”, and appreciating that they so readily consider themselves a part of the team.
I’ve always thought that zanmen was a typical northern （长江以北） kind of thing to say; you don’t often catch more refined southern types saying it.
I’ve even heard sentences (in Beijing) like “咱们家那边不是有一家吗” when talking about a branch of a restaurant chain, even though it is clear that not all the people spoken to are part of this home/family.
I restrict myself to using 咱们 only in cases where the English equivilent would be “let’s…”. That way I feel like I’m on the safe side.
I just say 阿拉 and don’t worry about 咱们.
American doctors and nurses will often ask patients “How are we feeling today?”, which seems to be a similar use of “we,” and is usually meant to indicate sympathy and a “we’re all in this illness together” kind of spirit. I don’t know if that sort of construction is common in other English-speaking countries, or if other languages include that same kind of phrase — but I do know several Americans who are easily irritated by what they perceive as false empathy on the part of medical professionals.
The Dutch and English examples of “we when it’s not me” are certainly kind of similar to the zanmen thing. But they seem to be even more similar to each other in that there’s some kind of power difference, right? I don’t think I could imagine an American cop using the Dutch approach, though! And I agree with Ma Lina that the usage is fraught with connotations of condescension/false empathy.
Randy’s example seems very similar to what I’ve encountered and quite different from the Dutch/English examples in that it’s used without that English/Dutch power difference. At the very least it looks like Randy shouldn’t interpret it as his applicants being presumptuous :D, but more that they’re just making him feel at home with them.
The usage of 咱們 to mean “you” is included in dictionaries. Here’s an example sentence from a dictionary I have at hand: 咱們別哭, 媽媽出去就回來. (“Don’t cry. Mom will be back in a minute.”)
Ho Sun Yan: thanks for that — the usage seems almost exactly like what you could say in English, “let’s not cry, Mom will be back in a minute.”
It seems to me like this usage is a lot more like the English & Dutch discussed above, where you have someone in a position of authority using “we” to express some sort of empathy (and/or condescension). Still very different in tone from the interviewer or the job applicant using zanmen, don’t you think?
Syz: Agree. Somehow, using “we” with children and other powerless creatures makes immediate intuitive sense in a way the interviewer’s usage doesn’t (although I’m sure it makes perfect intuitive sense to him).
I couldn’t see an American cop using “we” like a Dutch cop, but I could imagine an American psychotherapist saying, “And how did we feel when…?” as a way of faking empathy.
Ho Sun Yan: What dictionary is that from?
@Kellen: This one. This dictionary was endorsed by 大山 (aka Mark Rowswell) when I bought it around 2003 at the 外文書店 in Shanghai. I swear to God they had a life-size cardboard cutout of him next to the shelf. It’s a good dictionary, though.
Haha I love that the endorsement by 大山 is simultaneously a reason to buy and not to buy the thing.
I’m really sure 大山 is a totally nice guy. All the crap us lesser Mandarin speakers throw at him is perhaps not deserved. So if you’re reading this, Mark, it’s nothing personal. Hit me up next time you’re in Shanghai. 青岛s on me.
@Kellen: Check out this. Apparently it was love at first sight (一見鍾情) when Mark laid eyes on the book. And you have to love a country in which journalists are riveted (目不轉睛) when a new dictionary is presented.
Hey, it was love at first sight for me too. I have three of them.
Yep, it is a very useful dictionary. To create it they added English translations to the 现代汉语词典 while retaining the entire original Chinese text, which was a great idea.
I just came across another example in 空鏡子, a wonderful television series set in Beijing. A man walks into a courtyard where the girl he fancies lives, and he enquires with an old lady also living there whether that girl is at home. Here’s an excerpt:
A: 對不起啊老人家，我想麻煩您一下，我跟您打聽個人。
B: 誰呀？
A: 您知不知道，咱們這院兒裡頭有一個叫孫燕兒的女孩兒，住哪屋呀？
He clearly does not live in the courtyard, but he still says 咱們這院兒裡頭. As with the other examples posted earlier, this seems to be an attempt to bond.
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XODU0OTY4MA==.html 05:00-05:15
Daan, that’s a great example — seeming to be in the category we’ve been discussing: “not condescending but bonding”. Clearly this works in Chinese beyond market research. I’m pretty confident it doesn’t work in English. Certainly not in my English. And you say that particular usage doesn’t work in Dutch, right? I wonder if it does in other languages?
I found this to be fairly interesting in connection… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majestic_plural …
it touches on the, already mentioned, “patronizing ‘we'” – and others.
Looks like Arabic may have a little bit of this too…
You’re right, Syz. I would never consider using wij or we when asking such questions in Dutch. It would be condescending and rude, especially when talking to your elders. You can only get away with it when addressing toddlers (but you’ll sound patronising), or when you’re a police officer (but people will get annoyed).
I wonder if anyone can think of any questions in which using zámen or wǒmen would be perceived as condescending, rather than as an attempt to bond.
Just heard Ira Glass (WBEZ Chicago’s show “This American Life”) use we when he wasn’t part of the we, and in a totally non-patronising manner. It felt fine, and had this post never happened, I don’t think I would have noticed it.