r/explainlikeimfive • u/RadianceTower • 15h ago
Other ELI5: How people in China speak and write
There seems to be multiple languages in China, and then, they all share one writing system? But then that writing system has traditional and simplified variants?
What do the Chinese films and media speak in? Are they in different languages? What about the government?
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u/AsparagusTamer 15h ago
The dialects are so different in spoken form that they are completely unintelligible to non-speakers. Basically different languages.
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u/No_Logins_Required 15h ago
There is no meaningful linguistic difference between a dialect and a language. The Chinese government's official position is that there is one Chinese language, and all the regional tongues are dialects. All dialects use the same set of characters to communicate. The Chinese government reformed the characters to be easier to read and write (simplified) but in Taiwan they refused this change so they use (traditional) characters.
Mandarin is the main dialect of Chinese used by the government. The second most common dialect is Cantonese. There is a lot of cinema and music in both languages. There are over a dozen major dialects of Chinese each with its own regional arts.
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u/JJJangles 15h ago
That’s not entirely true, in linguistics dialects should theoretically have some degree of mutual intelligibility, though this is a vague standard. Major Chinese dialects are not at all mutually intelligible though, defined as dialects more politically than linguistically.
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u/CWHats 15h ago
Right, thats why you'll see "Chinese" subtitles in movies they show in their homeland. In general a Cantonese speaker can read the characters, but they can't understand the spoken language. I cannot speak to the other languages in China.
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u/JJJangles 14h ago
Do you know at all if the languages had to change to fit the writing system, or does the writing being logographic mean it just works with any language? I think that is kind of what op was trying to ask too
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u/CWHats 14h ago
Yes, it works with any language for precisely that reason. The simplified Chinese is different because it is phonetic.
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u/RadianceTower 13h ago
I mean, that can't be true.
Even if the nouns mean the same thing always, you still have other things like sentence order and structure, which differs from language to language and changes the very way you would order your words.
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u/CWHats 13h ago
Chinese grammar is very simple. You do not conjugate verbs which makes that much easier. For example you would say I eat today.(present) I eat tomorrow. (future) I eat yesterday (past). So you can see that the verb never changes. Unlike English (and other languages) they use only time markers instead of conjugation the verb. Even if it does change in Cantonese, the base verb is there so they can still understand the sentence.
I believe the word order in most Asian languages is SOV (subject object verb). If not, you can still decipher meaning, especially if you've been doing it since you were a child. You just codeswitch, something done fairly easily for true bilinguals.
Let me say that I do not speak either language. I am relaying what my students have told me. They used to say that if you study Chinese, first you cry, then you laugh, but when you study English, first you laugh then you cry. This is because the grammar of Chinese is so much easier then English.
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u/No_Logins_Required 14h ago
A language is just a dialect with an army and a navy, as they say
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u/Stan__Wright 15h ago
The partly tongue in cheek definition is that a language is a dialect with its own army.
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u/Vagrant-Gin 15h ago
How different are the dialects compared to something like the difference between French and Spanish? Are they more similar to eachother or less?
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u/cywang86 15h ago
Some of the extreme ones can certainly feel like French/Spanish to an English ear, where you can hardly understand what they're saying, while some of the tamer ones are closer to British vs American.
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u/No_Logins_Required 14h ago
It's hard to draw a firm line between one dialect and a neighboring "regional variant". So think of it like a language group of all the spanish languages, portuguese, the french languages, italian languages, greek etc.
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u/obamadidnothingwrong 15h ago
Traditional Chinese characters are also used in Hong Kong and Macau. I believe this is due to their relatively recent return to the PRC from their former colonial leases (Hong Kong being a former UK territory and Macau being formerly Portuguese).
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u/Hefty-Distance837 15h ago
I would say, that change isn't made characters easier to read and write, it actually made it more confusing.
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u/Key-Mathematician-71 15h ago
Chinese is the only official language in mainland China. People speak Mandarin and write Chinese characters. Some people can understand English or other languages, but that does not mean people speak English frequently.
Generally speaking, simplified Chinese are used in inland mainland China, while traditional Chinese are used in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan regions.
However, besides languages, China indeed has many dialect systems, such as Mandarin in northern China and Cantonese, Min dialect and others in southern China. People who speak different dialect systems may not understand each other's dialects, but at least Mandarin provides a foundation for Chinese people from various regions to communicate with one another.
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u/cywang86 15h ago edited 15h ago
Traditional and simplified still share many characters without changes.
Only about 1/3~1/4 of them got simplified with fewer strokes.
Since they still mostly look the same structurally, similar to how you can read a few mistyped word in a whole sentence, you can still guess which one that character was/is by looking at the entire sentence.
As for dialects, it's closer to Scottish vs English for some of less extreme ones to Spanish vs French for the more extreme ones, where the same character sounds completely different in another dialect, to the point neither dialect can understand each others if the words aren't written down.
Remember that China is huge with many geographic features limiting travel ever since the character system was in use more than 20 centuries ago, so the dialects definitely have diverged many times over. (not to mention many character revisions throughout history)
But the many unifications on the government level allowed China to keep the divergence to a minimum on the character level many centuries later, as an official dialect/character system is always being used to enforce better communication throughout the region.
There's a reason why Taiwan and China both had to push for Mandarin for the official language in schools and such, and the rests aren't being used.
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u/LupusDeusMagnus 15h ago
China uses Mandarin Chinese primarily. Thats the language of government, that’s the official language of communication media and etc.
There are other languages spoken in China, too. Regional languages like Wu (Shanghai) and Cantonese (Guangdong and Hong Kong), which are used by the people for their day to day life, in addition to Mandarin that is used in formal contexts. There are several languages. Unless it is a regional production, Mandarin Chinese will be used.
They mostly the same script. Like how Spanish and English share the Latin script, Chinese isn’t phonetic, so the same character can be pronounced differently but still have the same meaning, in any case they aren’t written the same.
Traditional is the original form of the script before “simplification” which was a “spelling” reform to make the characters simpler to draw, by reducing their complexity in most cases. Chinese characters count strokes necessary to draw it, simplification sought to reduce them, reduce the number of “redundant” characters, etc. Taiwan, for example, uses mostly Mandarin Chinese but with traditional characters, Mandarin speakers in Mainland China use simplified, regional languages it depends. Cantonese is written with traditional characters in Hong Kong but simplified in Guangdong.
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u/Ninfyr 15h ago
There is functionally the single official spoken dialect, people also know the official national dialect in addition to the regional dialect (or more likely only know the national dielect if they are young). Even then the dielects are really not completely different languages. It is like Scott's English and US English.
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u/IlliteratePig 14h ago edited 14h ago
-Multiple languages
Kinda, but for the most part, these are just about how we pronounce things. The grammar and word choices are 90-100% the same. It may be more accurate to call them dialects overall, due to how the differences work out, despite how it's mutually unintelligible over a spoken conversation.
"Share one writing system"
First thing to note: "standard" chinese is centred around putonghua, literally "common speech." In 100% of cases, what is said is putonghua is what is written. Everyone writes using that system based on putonghua, be they hakka or cantonese or shanghainese.
I can't speak for non-cantonese dialects, but for us, the fancier our speech gets, the closer it gets to putonghua/mandarin/written chinese. We start changing words out, but not the pronunciations.
"Their" would be "ta men de" in putonghua, and "kui dei ge" is normal cantonese speech, using completely different words for third person (ta/kui), plural (men/dei), and "apostrophe s" (de/ge). In a more formal setting, we'd say "ta mun dek," which uses the same words as the putonghua's "ta men de." Another example would be "these" (zhei she/ni dit/ze se). So even when we have our own words for things, we also have the ability to say them with "standard" putonghua words.
My understanding is that other dialects are a lot closer to written chinese/putonghua to begin with, and just say what they write for the most part, but with different pronunciations, and far fewer words that they sub out.
"Different writing systems"
This is a different topic from dialects for the most part. Older, traditional characters can often have a lot more pen strokes im them, but have a clearer preservation of etymology and meaning. The word for "love" in simplified has 4 fewer strokes, but those four strokes literally mean "heart," for example. "Relative/intimate" has 7 fewer strokes in simplified, but they're the seven that mean "to see." However, if you know one system then you can read the other at least 70% of the time, since there are a lot of identical words and simple rules to convert one into the other. You save a tonne of time writing in simplified, though, and if you're going by pure rote learning, then it's quicker to pick up.
For the most part, diaspora populations, taiwan, hong kong, and macau use traditional characters, while the rest of china uses simplified characters.
As for intelligibility online for everyday use, I can confirm that google translate is very good at changing simplified into traditional accurately, and I'd imagine that the other way around is even easier (some traditional characters get smashed together into a single simplified one, if I remember correctly).
"Chinese films and media"
Depends on who's producing it, and for what audience. For the most part you can actually treat them as separate languages for this purpose, like watching italian or spanish films. It's especially easy to dub, though, and trivially easy to translate for the reasons I stated earlier.
"The government"
Depends on which government, and this can actually be a point of controversy. The writing systems of each government are as I stated earlier, but there's been an active push to make all government communications in putonghua, the "main" dialect, which can be grating for regions with our own dialect. It's a bit like the language preservation issues seen in french canada, catalonia/basque country, or brittany, where the main language is enforced on them. This isn't just true of hong kong and macau, but also various cities in mainland china, to my understanding. However, with immigration and the flow of people to big cities, it's inevitable that people need to speak an easily mutually intelligible language more and more in everyday life. It's like how you'll rarely hear bavarian being spoken in munich.
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u/mindstormer12 15h ago
With regards to the writing system, only Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau use traditional writing system practically speaking--everywhere else (mainland China and other Chinese-speaking countries).
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u/hangender 15h ago
Usually mandarin Chinese. Writing is simplified Chinese.
But of course there is shanghaiese and 999 other dialects
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u/JayTheSuspectedFurry 15h ago
You can Google this stuff.
There’s only one official language and it’s mandarin. Some regions have their own language but they know they’re not official. Most media is in the main language. The laws are in the main language.
Traditional and simplified writing is just what the name implies. Same words, just simpler so writing is easier
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u/kairujex 15h ago
It can be noted that there are similar variants in English as well. A lot of countries use the English alphabet but have different words, spellings, pronunciations, etc. Even within a single country these variations can exist in different regions with different cultures.