"Mandarin isn't a Dialect"
Copied from a 1997 letter to the editor of the New York Times:
Mandarin Isn’t a Dialect
Published: July 08, 1997To the Editor:
In your July 1 front-page story on the handover of Hong Kong to China, you say that China’s President, Jiang Zemin, delivered his speech ”using a Mandarin dialect as alien to Hong Kong’s Cantonese-speaking people as . . . English.”
Mandarin is no dialect. China has almost countless dialects, and Cantonese is one of them. But Mandarin is the standard Chinese language and the only one that can be rendered accurately in Chinese characters. President Jiang’s use of it in this moment was appropriate and inevitable, even if he might as well have been speaking English — or Greek — as far as much of his audience was concerned.
WENQING CHEN
New York, July 2, 1997
Emphasis my own. Steve and I have been going over this topic for what must be years now. The question is,
Can fangyan be “accurately rendered in Chinese characters”?
In some cases we do see fangyan-specific characters (覅，侬，甭⋯) or fangyan-specific words (阿拉是上海宁), but what about all the words that don’t have such clear representation? In 2010 I presented a paper on this topic as it relates to historical records of Shanghainese. Substitution, inserting new characters, There are different ways to handle fangyan. What about Mandarin? Are there any cases where we can clearly agree that the use of characters is inaccurate? Is 卡拉OK the official term, and if so, does the use of romaji-like elements render it inaccurate?
I’m leaving this to you guys. Love to hear your thoughts.
Hmm, “accurately render in Chinese characters” – if this phrase can be applied to Mandarin, then it really can be applied to any other dialect as well (oops, did I just call Mandarin a dialect?).
As readers of Sinoglot probably know, there are tons and tons of characters such as “這” and “那” which, in Classical Chinese (文言文), do not have the meanings that we associate with them – namely, “this” and “that”. Go check out zdic.net and see for yourself what they “really” used to mean.
So, they might have a 100 years of usage now, but they’re no more or less “accurate” than “嘢” in Cantonese or “寧” (or “儜”) in Shanghainese. This is the part where a linguist will shout “propaganda”.
Also, even within the Chinese community, people do know that “北方方言” refers to “Mandarin” and that does have the word “方言” (dialect) in it, doesn’t it?
1997? Geez and I thought *I* was behind the times…
What if Mr. 五毛 had written “in a standardized way” rather than “accurately” — would you agree?
Coincidentally I’m working on a Phonemica recording right now that is a (sub?)dialect of Mandarin and has at least one word that my collaborator, a Peking University prof, believes is unrenderable in Chinese characters. Maybe I’ll do a followup post once I check a couple things with him.
The real root of the problem is that *no* written language is the same as its corresponding spoken language, nor should it be. And if you heard me say that out loud, you would know if I was serious about this or not.
The meaning of “dialect” in non-technical English discourse is not the same as its meaning within linguistics. For many English speakers, “dialect” by definition refers to a non-standard form of speech, in direct opposition to the sanctioned standard. According to this understanding of the term, newscasters on American television networks do not speak “dialect”, Parisian French speakers do not speak “dialect”, and Modern Standard Mandarin speakers do not speak “dialect”. Because the standard form of the language is taught in school as a written language, the identification of the spoken standard with the written standard is natural and normal for ordinary language users.
Misunderstandings of the type reflected in this letter often result from the fact that “dialect” has multiple senses and is assumed to mean different things by different people. For this reason linguists should take care when using the term “dialect” in settings involving non-linguists; the term “variety” is more resistant to misunderstanding.
If you want to call Cantonese a dialect then Mandarin must also be a dialect. I prefer to call Cantonese a language (like the United Nations does) and therefore correspondingly Mandarin is also a language. I feel the main problem is actually the word 方言; it needs to be much clearer in what it describes.
I don’t think 方言 is a problem. Instead, the problem is how it’s constantly linked to English “dialect”. In a conversation between two Chinese people (even linguists), I doubt 方言 causes any discomfort. It’s probably only among people trying to translate it 1:1 that get bothered.
Actually, it’s nothing to do with whether a language has a written form or not.
Western linguists (Trudgill, Crystal) who write about these things define a dialect as “any variation of a language” including its standard variations. So Mandarin is a dialect, according to the people who study these things.
Chinese linguists define 方言 as “any variation of a language except for the standard”. Wenqing Chen was just mistranslating 方言 into “dialect” when the words don;t actually mean the same thing in the different languages. Singaporeans make this same mistake all the time in English, because their government pounded the idea into their head “Speak Mandarin, not Dialect”