Recently, over on Asia Travel, I read the following hogwash in a blog entry on language in Taiwan:
Native Taiwanese and many others also speak one of the Southern Fujianese dialects, Min-nan, also known as Taiwanese. Recently there has been a growing use of Taiwanese in the broadcast media. The Hakka, who are concentrated in several counties throughout Taiwan, have their own distinct dialect.
Dear Asia Travel. Here's a news flash from the 21st century: Taiwanese is not a dialect. Taiwanese is a language. Hakka is not a dialect ether. Hakka is a language. All of the various languages spoken in China are languages. A language, as a witty linguist put it once, is a dialect with an army and a navy. In other words, the question of "what is a dialect" -- at least in this context -- is political.
Take that one to heart, guys.
UPDATE: Here's a piece that argues the distinction is largely a social construction (for anon below). Here's the discussion from Answers.Com.
UPDATE II: the redoubtable Botel Tobago passed along this link to an NYT article by Howard French on this issue. Says one Chinese scholar:
Yes, a nasty nationalist definition.
"No one can clearly answer the question how many dialects there are in China," said Zhang Hongming, a professor of Chinese linguistics at the University of Wisconsin who is in China doing fieldwork. "The degree of difference among dialects is much higher than the degree of difference among European languages. In Europe they call them languages, but in China we share a culture, so the central government would like to consider that one language is shared by many different peoples. It is simply a different definition."
Technorati: [Taiwan]
Do you deny the existence of all dialects altogether? That seems to me questionable. But then, how do you decide if something is a language or a dialect?
ReplyDeleteMutual intelligibility might be a start, but then I sometimes cannot understand, say, Scots English, even though I'm a native speaker of American English. Grammar can vary too -- think about how people talk in Tennessee. Not to mention Texas.
Or Jamaica.
I think you're correct that politics plays a part in the language/dialect distinction, and I agree that there are certainly multiple languages in the Chinese culture area. But to say that "all of the languages in China are languages" or that dialects don't exist seems to me to push it too far.
Maybe it'd be more accurate to think of about seven languages in China, with considerable dialectical variation.
I'd have a bit more respect for the claim that Taiwanese is a language if people actually wrote it out much like how Cantonese is written out.
ReplyDeleteWayne, the idea that the existence of a written form has any relationship to whether a particular form of speech is a dialect or a language is erroneous.
ReplyDeleteThe real test is the degree of mutual intellibility. Mandarin, Cantonese Hakka, Min (which includes Fujian and Taiwanese), Wu (Shanghaiese) and I believe a couple of others are basically mutually unintelligible, probably as different from each other as many European languages are. They are certainly all closely related, and members of the Chinese language family, and each also contains many local dialects within them. For example, Beijing and Taiwan have very different dialects of Mandarin, with noticeable difference in pronounciation and lexicon, but are still basically mutually comprehensible.
The assertion that the various languages in China are mere dialects is basically political, since unity of the written language was one of the main factors keeping the Chinese state together throughout its long history.
As for English variants such as Scots English and Jamaican, they aren't just dialects, but creoles. Truly, truly thick Scots English has large amounts of vocabulary and grammar borrowed from Gaelic, which puts it in a somewhat different category from a mere regional dialect. There are a few other well established English creoles-New Orleans creole, Singlish (Singapore English), and of course the aforementioned Jamaican patoise.
ReplyDeleteI believe I read that major Chinese dialects are like Italian to French in linguistic terms.
ReplyDeleteFor sure it's political because when foreign linguists go to China they are told that these "languages" are just dialects by Chinese linguists.
Fallacy of equivocation. Chinese propagandists use dialect in the sense Red A mentions, "Italian is a dialect of the Romance Languages." to say "Taiwanese is a dialect of Chinese." But most people are only aware of the more common usage, i.e., "Cockney is a dialect of English." So the statement is technically correct, but obviously misleading.
ReplyDeleteRE:
ReplyDeleteTaiwanese is not a (*@@�^$@* Dialect
Thanks for the suggestion.
[ http://asia.travel-chronicle.com/asia-travel/106/languages-of-taiwan/ ]
SOMEONE gets it right.
ReplyDeleteTo refine on the point, Hakka IS its own language, but has several dialects in Taiwan. However, Hok-lo-weh is, in fact, a dialect of the Min-Nan language, itself a member of the Min family .
臺灣話是有漢字寫的，按怎不是咱唐人的話？甭講鳥話咧。
ReplyDelete