Talking language classification in Chinese
Last week I gave a talk on the Wu language and what I predict as the most likely future. Not really knowing my audience going in, I decided it was best to keep things a little simple and explain some things that may be taken for granted.
Some of these things, as I explained them:
· 方言 does not mean dialect¹
· 地方话 means topolect, but still not dialect
· Wu (吴语) is a language, bitches²
One of the comments I got before the talk began was that people were a little surprised by someone speaking about Wu in English. Something about it being strange. My response was that it’s maybe easier to talk about Wu in English than in Mandarin. In large part it’s because of the political situation regarding language in China, and in part it’s about vocabulary.
I’d like to address the last of those three points: Wu is a language. It’s without question not a dialect of Mandarin, but then translating 汉语 as “Mandarin” is problematic as well. I’ve been wading through a few Chinese language forums, some on Wu and some not, and many of them talk about 汉语方言, which includes Wu, Cantonese, Min, Kejia, Gan et cetera. In other words, Sinitic languages. It makes some sense, since the people who speak those languages are Han³.
I see it like this:
Sino-tibetan – family
Sinitic – macrolanguage
Wu – language
Shanghai⁴ – topolect family
Puxi – topolect
This isn’t something I can easily say in Mandarin. Again in large part due to the political situation and the propagation of that wretched word 方言, but again mostly because of vocabulary. I’ve tried different ways to explain it, creating different terms, but of course they’re not well known so the term is useless as a term, as it would need to be explained in each conversation.
Maybe we can come up with something here that would be an acceptable and hopefully standardised (here) set of terms to match the above structure. Or, just maybe, these exist and have just eluded me all this time. I’ll leave it to the comments.
1. Maybe we’ve covered this here, maybe not. If not, I’ll address it as I see it in another post and we can argue about it there.
2. For the sake of the presentation, at any rate.
3. I’ve heard Han, as an ethnic group, defined as “everyone else”. That is, everyone who isn’t part of the 55 other groups. Go back a little and the Han in Shanghai would have not been Han but Wu.
4. In this case including the Qi-hai region, Chongming Island and all of the Shanghai municipality
Maybe we can come up with something here that would be an acceptable and hopefully standardised (here) set of terms to match the above structure. Or, just maybe, these exist and have just eluded me all this time.
I can pretty definitely say that there isn’t such a structure, and can with a heap of confidence sadly say that the likelihood of creating such a structure is shared with snowballs in hell.
However, that wouldn’t stop us from creating a specialized Sinoglottal set of terms. Maybe it would catch on.
I’m quite sure we don’t need to invent new terms exclusively to discuss Sinitic languages. Mair (the inventor, or at least popularizer, of the term “topolect” pretty much chalked it up to political pressure in a language log comment once).
Re-appropriating the term “topolect” to not mean 方言, which is what Mair and others do is at least a start, but I’m not sure why we need it at all.
Sino-tibetan – family
ok? Macro-family?
Sinitic – macrolanguage – really? why? Maybe sub-family. or just family. (The family of Sinitic languages of the Sino-tibetan Macro-family).
Wu – language
fine.
Shanghainese⁴ – a dialect of Wu, a group of Wu dialects, or a dialect family.
Puxi – a local/regional variety/variant of Shanghainese (a dialect or local variety of Varaiant of Shanghainese.) Or perhaps just a sub-dialect (of Shanghainese).
The issue is, should we make Wu a language or a Language family. It seems it’s probably makes more sense to call Wu a language family, or a language group, Shanghainese a language, and Puxi a dialect of Shanghainese. But I’m not so sure about that. It seems like you either pick a standard dialect, like standard German, and then that standard becomes “the language”. Otherwise, what does it mean to say you speak 吳語? If I’m correct, now it would imply you speak a language that is a member of the 吳語 family, not some standard 吳語. But saying you speak German now implies standard German. Only speaking a regional language of Germany, or a dialect of German (whatever we want to say), you might still say you speak “German” but I think that’s where you get to the crux of the problem. You either say German is Standard German, or German is all the langauges/dialects of the German people. I’m done here. I hope others will have useful comments, but I’m sure there’s a suitable system that can be adapted (or already has been adapted) from the lingustic community for use with Chinese languages.
Ok one last thing. Let’s take french, and latin at the same time.
French now means Parisian French or all spoken varieties/dialects of French (including Parisian French). Parisian French has become the standard “dialect” of the French language. Colloquially we call Parisian French a language, but it’s really a dialect. French is a more accurately called a language (or a language or a language/dialect family). The Romance Language family would be the macrolanguage, or the macrofamily. And then Indo-European would be the family (or macro-family/super-family). I feel like this is probably less useful than I had hoped.
transliterationisms: Oh my god, I got an email saying you commented. So the CIA thing didn’t work out then?
Unfortunately I’m on my way out the door and can’t comment on your comment just yet. I will in a couple hours.
Sino-tibetan – language macro-family, super-family
Sinitic – language family, or micro/sub-family
Wu – language
Shanghainese – dialect family, dialect group (a collection of Wu dialects)
Puxi – a dialect of Wu, (or a (Shanghainese) dialect of the Wu language) (A variety of the Shanghainese dialect of the Wu language.)
Is a language a single thing you can speak or a group of languages/dialects that can be spoken?
Perhaps the way to avoid the “dialect” term is to say, “I speak Puxi, a vareity of the Wu Language.” But in truth, parisian french is a dialect of french. (the dominant variety/dialect).
I was thinking after this post you’re probably going to get blocked as if we all worked for the CIA.
@Transliterationisms–unless I’m completely missing something (which is likely), the problem isn’t that we don’t have a perfectly good set of English words to describe these things–it’s that Chinese people insist on not using them when they talk about Chinese languages. So the problem lies exactly in the “Wu-language” line. I’ve never seen a Chinese linguist use the word language to talk about Wu or Cantonese or Mandarin or what have you. It’s always dialect, despite the fact that Mandarin speakers can’t understand Wu, and so on (although every now and then I hear someone claim otherwise). This is one of my pet peeves, but alas, I am a lone laowai and there is no chance anyone will ever listen to me. Somebody, I am too lazy to figure out who, once said something about a language being a dialect with an army and a navy — maybe that applies here in reverse.
I have no issue with using “dialect”, though I’ve avoided it here because “topolect” is more precise for what I’m talking about, namely a dialect tied to a region instead of to an age group or gender.
What Katie says is mostly what I’m thinking, though the “army and a navy” quote (Max Weinreich said it but wasn’t likely the first) is one I disagree with strongly. Yes there is some truth that having a government behind a language gives it validity, the statement itself is grossly incomplete.
I also strongly oppose calling Shanghainese a language, though I know Julen has proposed something similar. I think for all factors relevant to the discussion of Wu, Shanghainese sits clearly (in my mind) in the “dialect of Wu” camp.
But then this post wasn’t meant to be about Wu specifically. It’s just an example. I simply don’t know enough about Cantonese to give a similar example.
If the problem is getting Chinese people to use more useful terms, it’s not a problem at all, because it’s not solvable. I was under the impression that we were shooting for the much simpler goal of getting a common set of terms to use when discussing these issues, on this board, in chinese and english. I commented on Kellen’s english terms, and proposed reccomendations myself. Finding the chinese equivalent of these terms isn’t a problem. We say Wu is a language and correctly translate it as 吳語是一種語言. And the chinese speaker will say 吳語是一種方言。It’s a political issue which I don’t think this site needs to or can deal with, same with the term ‘topolect’, unless it seeks to avoid being harmonized.
Ok, about the term “topolect”. Glancing at the Mair paper proposing the term, he did accomplish what he set out to achieve, an English translation of the term 方言 that was as ambiguous and “troublesome” as the chinese term is. I don’t think we need to apply it to other cases where the linguistic terms for the rest of the world are set in stone. The argument in favor of “topolect” due to it’s associations with a piece of land, as opposed to a certain age group, cultural group, etc, seem not to have bothered linguists in all the other countries around the world. It would seem odd that we have to repapropriate an intentionally difficult and ambiguous word for something that the linguistics profession already a standard vocabulary for, just because it’s china.
“A dialect tied to a region”, as far as I know is generally called either a “dialect/variety/form”, “local dialect/variety/form” or “regional dialect/variety/form”. Once again, not sure why the term ‘topolect’ is useful.
Next. If “Shanghainese” is a dialect of Wu, in same way that Parisian French is a dialect of French, what do we call Puxi? Is Shanghainese both a dialect and a group of dialects mutually intelligible with (or related in some special way to) Shanghainese? Or should we say Wu is a large language family, Shanghainese is a small language family, and Shanghainese (a specific dialect the family) and Puxi are both separate languages. I think I need to better understand the relationship between Puxi and Shanghainese, and what exactly we are talkign about when we say Shanghainese.
Here‘s more about that quote.
Oh, it’s obviously a political issue.
Suppose for a second that the Roman Empire had not fallen and that throughout the centuries up until the present, Europe had been mostly politically united except for punctuated periods of civil discord and interregnums.
There is no doubt that Europeans would then refer to French, Italian, Spanish, etc. as “dialects” of Latin.
And as I understand it, the diversity of “Chinese”/”Sinitic Languages” is similar to Romance, yes?
The reason the Latin example doesn’t work is that if the Empire still existed and they still spoke Latin, the vulgates wouldn’t have become what’s now French, Romanian, Spanish etc.
The usual family designation is Sino-tibetan, but that’s broader than I think it should be. That’s why I said family and macrolanguage separately.
And as I understand it, the diversity of “Chinese”/”Sinitic Languages” is similar to Romance, yes?
I think many people would argue no.
The Latin example could very well have worked. If I understand correctly, the Iberian b/v merger was already occurring during imperial Roman times (Something about an author quipping that in Hispania “bibere vivere est”)
Maybe it would be better to draw the opposite analogy. Suppose that China maintained empires off and on throughout the sinitic-speaking world with constant promotion of 文言文 and 官话, followed by a solidification of a nation state with 普通话 as the official language. If, instead, China had been less unified in history, and eventually broken into a number of nation-states that roughly coincide with ethno-linguistic lines. Then maybe these states would have different official languages that correspond with what in the real world are thought of as 方言.
Of course, that’s a simplistic example. You’d probably have nations with multiple official languages on equal footing, as in Switzerland, or one language that is official and others that are official in their own regions, like Spain (and Taiwan after some recent events). You also might end up with dialect continua that currently exist being divided politically (ala German and Dutch — I know, I’m slowly drawing away from the Romance analogy — it’s just complicated).
China was less unified in history, or am I missing someting? Or you mean now, if they were multiple contries? Then yes you’d have a country speaking Wu, one with Jin and a few with Mandarin dialects. But they’re not, and that’s the point. At least not how they’re categorised today.
I meant today. Sorry, I was trying to work around my phrasing to get my point across and failed. What I meant was that if in the modern era China had broken into separate countries, the differences between the languages would be more salient in the minds of the public. People like to connect a language with a nation, even though there is almost never a one-to-one relationship between nation and language.
That said, people might still think they are one language because of the shared history (look at the situation with Arabic, another situation where “dialects” are actually quite different and possibly mutually unintelligible, but people still stick to a shared “standard”).
All this is pretty much moot, but imagining these scenarios might help us understand why the perception exists. China has a long history of unity (at least in people’s minds, periods of disunity are often downplayed), and today has one language that is considered the national language. The fact that the national language is closely related to a number of local languages, and that it is the only written standard (or at least one of a very few), combined with the shared history and cultural traits of much of the populace make the whole situation muddy in people’s minds. Thus, people think that there is one “Chinese language” and it’s “dialects”, even though that is clearly not true.
People like to connect a language with a nation, even though there is almost never a one-to-one relationship between nation and language.
Indeed they do. That’s in large part from political concerns.
Arabic, another situation where “dialects” are actually quite different and possibly mutually unintelligible, but people still stick to a shared “standard”
Not sure this holds water. The “standard” really is a standard, so no quotes needed. الفصحى is actually an agreed upon, Qur’anically based formal language, similar to 文言 were 文言 ever standardised. Meanwhile I’ve never come across a dialect (other than in Morocco and around there but those are more creoles than dialects, and native speakers of Arabic would agree to this) that wasn’t 80% intelligible or more. It took me a week of learning about the Egyptian dialect to manage in Egypt, with an otherwise Levantine Arabic background. I’ve been doing Mandarin for two and half years and I still haven’t the slightest idea about Cantonese except the 4 phrases I’ve learned.
As for unity, people give me things like “in China we’re used to having kings so we listen to authority, not like you Westerners” except Europe was Kings and Emperors all the way down. I think it’s simpler. It shoudl be “In China we had a communist government that closed the country to outsiders and propagated tales of how much we love nationalism, so now we’re more nationalistic.” As you said, periods of disunity are often downplayed.
I’m not sure there’s much need for explanation beyond that.
@GAC that wasn’t really directed to you, by the way. Sorry if it came off grumpy.
No problems. I appreciate the correction on Arabic, since I don’t have any personal experience (other than listening to speakers, which didn’t tell me much since I don’t have any understanding in the first place), nor as much knowledge as you have on it. And yes, the periods of disunity are downplayed and not nonexistant, but since we are talking about people’s perceptions here, it’s the perception of a continuous history and shared culture that matters. I’ll agree with you that Chinese nationalism was achieved largely through propaganda, but that has effects.
Now, whether or not it is possible to work through those barriers and get people to talk about Chinese languages in a more scientific way, I don’t know. I think it’s important that people have some linguistic education, but being neither a linguist nor an educator I feel it’s somewhat outside of what I should be personally concerning myself with.
it’s the perception of a continuous history and shared culture that matters
Absolutely. Whether from propaganda or truth, the people think this is the case now.
I think at this point we’re saying the same thing
“I think at this point we’re saying the same thing”
Some of the best discussions end up that way.
People like to connect a language with a nation, even though there is almost never a one-to-one relationship between nation and language.
Arguably, this has been the basis of almost all post-Versailles nationalism. We all know that
Nation != Ethnic group != Language
And yet, we’ve had about a hundred years of civil wars premised on this idea.
In a way, it would be nice if that were true, and if it were true that people in one area all spoke the same language. Then we could draw border lines very easily without making everyone upset (well, as upset). Unfortunately, it’s not the reality now and it never has been at any point in history.
I think for the most part, at least in Africa, the borders were drawn specifically in order to cut language/ethnic groups down the middle. Civil war by design, no?
What about the word kouyin 口音 ?
It seems that it can both mean accent and dialect.
That can be quite confusing in a conversation, as the distinction between someone who speaks Mandarin with a strong accent, or speaks a complete different dialect is not clear.
Raphael: I’ve only ever heard 口音 as accent, never dialect. Do you have an example of it as dialect?
I’ll second Raphael on hearing “口音” to mean what a linguist would call dialect or maybe even language. Just the other day the kid cutting my hair said something like “他们的口音那么重我自己根本就听不懂”.
OTOH, maybe this happens in English too but we just don’t notice it? If you take a rough translation of the sentence above, “their accent is so thick I really can’t understand” — it doesn’t sound at all improbable
I’ve heard English “accent” used to refer to dialects (or dialect features that go beyond pronunciation/phonology). I don’t think I’ve heard the same thing of 口音, unless perhaps people were referring to dialects of Mandarin as 口音. In both cases I’d say it’s more general ignorance than anything specific about language perception in either place.