Controversial title, I get it. Just hear me out.
On this channel, I've talked a lot about a language I would call "Standard Mandarin"
or "Standard Chinese", which is, I think, what most people imagine when they hear the
word "Chinese": the official language of the countries of China and Taiwan.
This is a standardised version of Mandarin, first developed under the Nationalist government, and
now it's reportedly spoken by 80% of the Chinese population, as the first or second language.
So if there is a language which could ever be called "Chinese",
this is the one. But really, there are a LOT of Chinese languages,
and the naming around all this is really confusing at times...
So let's talk about Sinitic, the group of languages... or are they dialects?... or,
well, just this weird confusing STUFF which is spoken in China and by the Chinese diaspora.
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Okay, so what is "Sinitic", what is "Mandarin" and what is up with this nebulous term "Chinese"?
So you may know that linguists divide up the language of the world into genetic groups,
which are languages which share a common ancestor.
Like how French and Italian and Spanish
are all Romance languages because they're all descended from Latin.
Then a lot of these groups can be collected into major language families. At the highest level,
these are groups like the Indo-European language family, which contains not only
all the Romance languages, but all the Germanic, Indo-Iranian and Slavic languages, among others.
One of these major families is generally known as the Sino-Tibetan family. The high-level structure
of this family is quite contentious, but the biggest widely accepted subgroup is the Sinitic.
This is what is known as the group of "Chinese languages".
Now, a lot of the time, these are talked about as a single language,
saying that all these variants like Cantonese are "dialects", despite the fact that mutual
intelligibility, the ability to understand each other when speaking these variants,
between Cantonese and the Standard Mandarin we discussed earlier, is completely impossible.
Many linguists, therefore, call these variants different languages...
Hundreds of different languages, where one person speaking one Sinitic variety and
one speaking another can't understand each other.
This is precisely why, with the modernisation of the Chinese state in the 20th century,
a common language came to be created.
The Sinitic languages can be divided up into various "dialect groups" or "language groups"
(depending on your linguistic calling), and the largest of these is Mandarin.
This originated in northern China and is now
spoken across the north and south-west of the country.
And the Beijing dialect was selected to form the
basis of this new standardised national language - hence, "Standard Mandarin",
or, since it is used for communication throughout China, "Standard Chinese".
"But K!" I hear you ask. "Then why not just call this language 'Chinese'? We
already have other names for all these other languages!"
Well, for me, the thing is that a lot of these other
languages still have relevance - but a waning one.
The national language policy of China is to spread Standard Mandarin... and I think
it's important to recognise the richness and diversity of languages within China.
I don't think there's anything wrong with calling this language "Chinese", inherently - it's just
when people who don't know much about China hear that word, it strengthens this idea that there's
this one unitary language of China. Which is a reality we haven't quite come to. Yet.
But then I hear all this - and I think of Italian. We call it "Italian". Why do we do that?
It's just one dialect, or one language,
(depending on your linguistic calling) of a whole net of varieties spoken on
the Italian Peninsula, originating in Tuscany, especially based on Florentine.
Should we start calling it "Standard Tuscan"? "Standard Italian"?
The lack of knowledge about minority languages, and the bundling of different
dialects under one national label isn't just a problem in China - it's a global problem.
It's a problem of the nation-state.
But to be fair, in China we have 1.3 billion people,
hundreds of millions of whom have native languages which are non-Mandarin Sinitic
varieties - so there's something to be said for that as well.
But at the end of the day, that's just the scale on which these arguments play out;
it doesn't actually have an effect on the argument itself.
I don't know what we should call Italian.
I don't think calling Chinese "Standard Mandarin" is going to do much to help dying Hakka dialects.
But I do hope that maybe you understand a little better now why there are all these words being
thrown around when talking about Chinese, and that they do - kind of - mean different things.
And then you also have to consider... all this boils
down to the question of "what is a language?"
Mandarin and Cantonese are mutually unintelligible. For a lot of speakers,
Swedish and Danish are not.
You can change the way you speak to make it easier for others to understand. Sometimes people
from the US can't understand a thick Scottish accent. Sometimes intelligibility is asymmetric.
Where does the line between language and dialect go?
Maybe there isn't one, and it's more of a fuzzy little spectrum.
Anyway, onto the real purpose of this video: I swear that joke I made about Mandarin being
a stupid name for Standard Chinese was funny it was really well thought out and really -