Chinese Dialects and Accents

China does not have a singular language but a family of related languages. For historical reasons, these languages are referred to as Chinese dialects, but like so many other things in Asia, this doesn't mean what it means in the West. Chinese dialects are often quite different, and can be as far apart as German is from English. In fact, they're more akin the Romance languages than any two dialects of the same language in terms of mutual intelligibility, but their use of the same writing system and shared cultural identity put them over into the "dialect" category for the sake of convenience. The debate is not helped by the Chinese habit of referring to a dialect as the language of whatever particular place they hail from, regardless of actual geo-linguistic differences, or the fact that the Chinese word that we translate into dialect (方言 fāngyán) actually means something slightly different.

The Standard and most popular dialect is Mandarin Chinese, spoken in Beijing, with close to 1 billion speakers (it's also the basis for Pinyin, the transcription system we're using on this page). Others variants include Cantonese (around Hong Kong), Xiāng and Gan (spoken in the Hunan province), Wú (around Shanghai), Hakka (dispersed around southern China) and Mǐn (Fujian and Taiwan).

It should be noted that the various dialects generally do not have their own writing systems. In the Imperial era (everything before about 1912), literary Chinese (a somewhat archaic form of the language) was the standard written language due to the needs of bureaucracy and administration and other factors. After the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty, both the Nationalists and, later, the Communists used the Beijing dialect (Mandarin, if you can believe the coincidence) as the basis of a standard national language, and modern written Chinese reflects that. At best, you'll find that certain places (particularly, Hong Kong and the ROC) still use classical character forms (繁體字 fán tǐ zì) for historical/political reasons, but the majority of the country writes with a version that was aggressively simplified in the 1950s and '60s (简体字 jián tǐ zì).

While Mandarin is the official language of the country and taught in all the schools, people will still sometimes use the local language among family and friends. A traveler who is not obviously foreign (i.e. anyone from East or Southeast Asia, or of East or Southeast Asian descent) may need to frequently explain that he or she only speaks Mandarin. Fortunately, only the oldest generations lack knowledge of Mandarin, though not knowing the local language puts a traveler at a distinct disadvantage, whether it be in understanding locals (elements of local dialects will creep into the Mandarin spoken in a given region; this is such an issue that most local news broadcasts will subtitle interviews in standard Mandarin for the benefit of non-locals) or in reading printed matter (a lot of places other than Beijing have dialects that vastly differ from Mandarin, such that writing down what is said in Chinese characters will leave non-locals confused).

The existence and mutual incompatibility of these dialects plays a role in Chinese humour, usually as a result of what happens when a word has completely different meanings in two dialects. Lennier might be referencing this when he mentions a word, N'kai, that appears in every Minbari dialect and subtongue but never means the same thing twice. Possible meanings include sand, father, and boot. In a real world example, some Mandarin dialects refers to shoes as hai-zi, which sounds remarkably similar or identical to child in standard Mandarin.

Cantonese, spoken in Guangdong Province, Hong Kong and Macau, is probably the best-known dialect outside of China. Hong Kong's status as a point of contact with the English-speaking world has resulted in several Cantonese phrases passing into English, such as dim sum. English even uses the a translated version of the Cantonese name to refer to the city itself (In true Cantonese it would be "Heung Gong"). In Mandarin it is written the same (香港), but pronounced Xiãnggǎng.

The Cantonese dialect is generally not accepted as a written language, even in Hong Kong. It is seen as slang/spoken language, and the public exams require you to write basically in "Mandarin" vocabulary. Despite this, it is also the only Chinese dialect with an actively used written form, even it's only used in the colloquial. Interestingly, vocabulary unique to Cantonese can be divided into two types. The first kind is your normal type, with words basically deviating and changing over time in pronunciation and meaning. These words basically have no written form, although they have kind of been "invented" or taken from homophones which is common enough for you to recognize. The second type is that the slang is actually an archaic way of saying something. These actually have a written form, but the characters are so obscure that only Chinese majors know them. They are still treated as casual/spoken form, and can't be written in formal settings. In terms of spoken language, a problem nowadays is inaccurate pronunciation (naan yaum, literally "lazy sounds"). Some common examples are saying l- instead of n- and mixing up the ending sounds -n and -ng, which is why there are oral tests in the public exam syllabus that is particularly asinine about this.

It should be noted that Cantonese itself carries a semi-nationalistic pride among its speakers, to the level that the language, by itself, caused an extremely thorny controversy in 2010. Nevertheless, Cantonese is only the third-largest variety of Chinese: Wu Chinese, spoken around Shanghai in Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, has about six million more speakers (77 million vs. 71 million).

The dialect generally referred to as Taiwanese is closely related to Southern Min, spoken across the strait in Fujian. And that province is itself noteworthy for having almost a dozen dialects associated with it. Taiwan itself is home to 26 languages, none of which are related to the Chinese languages; they instead form all but one of the branches of the Austronesian language family. The last branch? Malayo-Polynesian: Malay, Indonesian, Filipino/Tagalog, Maori, Tongan, Samoan, Hawaiian.... The peoples who spoke these 26 "Formosan" languages are not ethnic Chinese, but most have long lost their ancestral tongues and speak Taiwanese Southern Min or Mandarin.

Regional accents are nearly impossible to describe in writing, but here's an example. The people of Beijing are known for adding an '-er' sound to the end of sentences. This is not done by saying 'er,' but rather by twisting the last word just a bit. Another example: in Shanghai the local dialect is missing a sound that exists in Mandarin; locals will often drop this sound from their spoken Mandarin, thus conflating some sounds. Sichuanese Mandarin changes "zh", "ch", and "sh" (which sound like the "-dge" in "fudge", the "ch" in "chug", and the "sh" in "shore", respectively) to "z", "c", and "s" ("c" in Mandarin is roughly "ts"); this can make for all sorts of confusion for someone unfamiliar with the dialect, especially with regard to numbers (if you're not listening to tones carefully when talking to someone from Sichuan, the words for 4 and 10 can sound almost identical).

Just for fun:

A freight carrier active in China and/or Taiwan once aired a commercial showing one of its competitors trying to tell an old lady that he had a package for her. She did not understand the message in Mandarin, so the hapless delivery guy is forced to stand there repeating the message a few dozen times. The company that made the commercial naturally has their delivery guy walk right up and use the right dialect.

Hu Jintao (the current guy) is actually the first leader of the PRC to speak "normal" Mandarin as his birth tongue. Mao Zedong never learned to speak Mandarin at all-- despite the government wanting you to believe so, as non-Mandarin-speaking leaders are now Banned in China.

A Chinese joke: once a teacher walked into the classroom and asked the boy, who was on duty that day, how many pupils there were. The problem was that the teacher and the boy spoke different dialects. So, when the boy reported that there were 31 pupil in the class, the teacher heard that there was 1 pupil killed in the class.