It's been a long time since I have blogged, which I apologize for. I've been busy of late, both doing a lot of traveling and with work having picked up, so I haven't really felt like blogging in my spare time.
In the time since I last blogged, I have visited Hong Kong for a weekend, headed to Fuzhou for an International Psycholinguistics of Chinese conference, and headed to Beijing for the better part of a week to visit some friends and celebrate Thanksgiving with a veritable gaggle of Oberlin alums. And I will shortly be heading out on a trip with my family and girlfriend (9 of us in total) on a whirlwind tour through Japan and China. But this blog is not about any of those items.
It is, instead, about languages! Because they're awesome. Especially non-Indo-European languages, because they're completely different from English or the Romance languages that most of us Americans are exposed to.
So I learned Mandarin starting in college, which made moving to China significantly easier. In Guangzhou, however, Mandarin is not the only language around. Guangzhou used to be known in English as Canton and this part of China is the epicenter of Cantonese-speaking in the world. On a day-to-day basis, I don't really run into much Cantonese. I live out of the center of town, near the university, and most of the people living here are not from Guangzhou or even Guangdong (the province of which Guangzhou is the capital). They are 外地人 (wàidìrén), or outside-land-people, people from, well, not here. And nowadays all education in China is conducted in Mandarin, so everyone speaks Mandarin. If I were living in the old city center, there would be many more people who use Cantonese as their day-to-day language, but even they speak Mandarin nowadays. However, a lot of native Cantonese speakers have a very strong accent when they speak Mandarin, which is similar to the accent found elsewhere in Southern China. Specifically, they drop h's from initials (sh-, zh-, and ch- are all pronounced as s-, z-, and c-, the sibilant sounds), interchange the final -n and -ng (sometimes they add a g, sometimes they drop it), and will often pronounce the initial n- as an l-. This made understanding people's Mandarin very difficult at first (the Mandarin you're taught as a foreigner is very standard Mandarin with a slight Beijing accent), though I've gradually gotten better at it.
After moving to Guangzhou, I started to learn Cantonese. It's completely different and, in my opinion, pronouncing the sounds is much harder. There also more tones: either 6, 7, or 9, depending on who you ask. The understanding I've reached is that, technically, there are nine tones, but in modern Cantonese, the 8th and 9th have merged with the 3rd and 6th respectively, and in Hong Kong Cantonese, the 7th has merged with the 1st. So I'm only trying to learn 6 tones, because less is more.
Now the interesting question with Cantonese is whether it's a dialect of Mandarin or a completely different language. And it's kind of a tricky question. In Chinese, Cantonese and other similar languages are all referred to as 方言 (fāngyán) or "place-languages". One attempt at translating this into English is topolect, which I'll use throughout this post. Because neither dialect nor language is entirely appropriate.
Two dialects (like American and British English, or Texas and Cockney if we want to look at even smaller groups) may have different pronunciations, different word usages (bathroom vs. washroom, bloody), different spellings (color vs. colour), and even new grammatical constructions (y'all as the second person plural in Southern American English), but the big thing is that they're mutually intelligible. Every once in a while you may hear a word you don't get, or don't usually hear in that context, but I can pretty much completely understand an English-speaker regardless of where they're in the US or from what Commonwealth nation they're from.
Two different languages, on the other hand, are not mutually intelligible. They may have a lot of overlap in vocabulary (English and French or German) and very similar grammar (all Romance languages), but while you may be able to catch a word here or there, you won't really be able to understand someone speaking another language.
So what makes the Chinese topolects different? It can be kind of hard to say, really. If you were to ask me, while speaking English, I would probably call them all different languages. If we're speaking Chinese, they're definitely 方言. It's partly a political issue, rooted in ethno-nationalism: all languages that the Han Chinese speak are Chinese, because all Han are Chinese. But it's not just an artificial categorization invented by the Communist Party to make people more nationalistic. I had this conversation with a Cantonese friend of mine earlier this week, and the way he phrased it is this: Cantonese and Mandarin are not mutually intelligible, at all, so if you just look at the pronunciation, they're completely different languages. But Cantonese is written using Chinese characters, and when it's written, a Mandarin speaker who knows no Cantonese will understand the text to a pretty good degree. There are some differences (系 instead of 是 for "to be", and 唔 instead of 不 for the negative), but for the most part (and especially for more complicated words), a Mandarin speaker could read a Cantonese text.
That's clearly not true for closely-related languages: I can read French, but a text in Spanish or Portuguese or Italian is complete gibberish as far as I'm concerned. A Mandarin speaker might not understand everything in a Cantonese text, but I can't understand ANYTHING in a Spanish text. So that complicates the classification.
Classification is further complicated by the fact that Cantonese is special among Chinese topolects. No other topolect has a literature and press scene of materials written in that topolect: Cantonese is the only one that is not just a spoken language. And this is because of Hong Kong. All other topolects are just learned by people at home from their parents and are not written. But because Cantonese is, and has been, the dominant language in Hong Kong, there are books written in Cantonese, newspapers written in Cantonese, textbooks produced in Cantonese. So if you spoke Techeow, Shanghainese, Shanxi-ese, or any of the other many Chinese topolects and dialects and I asked you to write out how you would say something in your language, you'd look at me funny and say, "that's impossible." And while most Cantonese-speakers in Guangzhou can't write Cantonese either, Cantonese-speakers in Hong Kong can.
Speaking of Hong Kong, the language environment there is fascinating. Because it's next to Guangdong, most people's native language is Cantonese. Because it was British, there's a large amount of English in the city. Because it's now a part of the People's Republic of China, there's an increasing amount of Mandarin being spoken there. So you have this confluence of Cantonese, Mandarin, and English that is really, really cool.
Mandarin, like French, doesn't really borrow words from other languages. They take foreign words (like email), and China-fy them, making email into 电子邮件(diànzǐyóujiàn), literally "electronic-mail". Hong Kong Cantonese, on the other hand, borrows English words all the time: "sexy", "okay", "cute", "email", and "cheese", are all used in proper Hong Kong Cantonese. A lot of times, Hong Kong native Cantonese speakers will have better spoken English than spoken Mandarin. And, unlike the mainland, people are not that impressed when a foreigner speaks Chinese, either Mandarin or Cantonese.
My favorite interaction involving languages in Hong Kong was while I was walking down the street, looking at the vegetables being sold along the side of the road (because looking at food markets is one of my favorite things to do while traveling), when I saw what looked like a bitter melon. It looked very different from the ones I had seen in Guangzhou though, so I asked the stall owner, in Mandarin, what vegetable it was. She just kind of stared at me, confused, so I asked her, in Cantonese, whether she spoke Mandarin. She said she did, so I asked her again, in Mandarin, what vegetable it was and she responded to me, in Cantonese, that it was a bitter melon from Taiwan (really, it was much uglier than your normal bitter melon). I thought this back and forth of Cantonese and Mandarin was just the coolest thing.
I'm afraid I don't have a good conclusion to the question of how to classify Cantonese, but it's a very interesting point to discuss and think about: it seems to occupy a middle ground between a separate language and a mere regional dialect, but for someone who loves classifying as much as I do, that does not feel completely satisfying.
I apologize for the ramblings on language as opposed to a photo-filled discussion of the cool places I've been, but I'm sure there will be more of those in the future. Though I do have another post about the ties between Vietnamese and Chinese that came out of a conversation with a friend living in Hanoi this year that I'd love to write...
In the time since I last blogged, I have visited Hong Kong for a weekend, headed to Fuzhou for an International Psycholinguistics of Chinese conference, and headed to Beijing for the better part of a week to visit some friends and celebrate Thanksgiving with a veritable gaggle of Oberlin alums. And I will shortly be heading out on a trip with my family and girlfriend (9 of us in total) on a whirlwind tour through Japan and China. But this blog is not about any of those items.
It is, instead, about languages! Because they're awesome. Especially non-Indo-European languages, because they're completely different from English or the Romance languages that most of us Americans are exposed to.
So I learned Mandarin starting in college, which made moving to China significantly easier. In Guangzhou, however, Mandarin is not the only language around. Guangzhou used to be known in English as Canton and this part of China is the epicenter of Cantonese-speaking in the world. On a day-to-day basis, I don't really run into much Cantonese. I live out of the center of town, near the university, and most of the people living here are not from Guangzhou or even Guangdong (the province of which Guangzhou is the capital). They are 外地人 (wàidìrén), or outside-land-people, people from, well, not here. And nowadays all education in China is conducted in Mandarin, so everyone speaks Mandarin. If I were living in the old city center, there would be many more people who use Cantonese as their day-to-day language, but even they speak Mandarin nowadays. However, a lot of native Cantonese speakers have a very strong accent when they speak Mandarin, which is similar to the accent found elsewhere in Southern China. Specifically, they drop h's from initials (sh-, zh-, and ch- are all pronounced as s-, z-, and c-, the sibilant sounds), interchange the final -n and -ng (sometimes they add a g, sometimes they drop it), and will often pronounce the initial n- as an l-. This made understanding people's Mandarin very difficult at first (the Mandarin you're taught as a foreigner is very standard Mandarin with a slight Beijing accent), though I've gradually gotten better at it.
After moving to Guangzhou, I started to learn Cantonese. It's completely different and, in my opinion, pronouncing the sounds is much harder. There also more tones: either 6, 7, or 9, depending on who you ask. The understanding I've reached is that, technically, there are nine tones, but in modern Cantonese, the 8th and 9th have merged with the 3rd and 6th respectively, and in Hong Kong Cantonese, the 7th has merged with the 1st. So I'm only trying to learn 6 tones, because less is more.
Now the interesting question with Cantonese is whether it's a dialect of Mandarin or a completely different language. And it's kind of a tricky question. In Chinese, Cantonese and other similar languages are all referred to as 方言 (fāngyán) or "place-languages". One attempt at translating this into English is topolect, which I'll use throughout this post. Because neither dialect nor language is entirely appropriate.
Two dialects (like American and British English, or Texas and Cockney if we want to look at even smaller groups) may have different pronunciations, different word usages (bathroom vs. washroom, bloody), different spellings (color vs. colour), and even new grammatical constructions (y'all as the second person plural in Southern American English), but the big thing is that they're mutually intelligible. Every once in a while you may hear a word you don't get, or don't usually hear in that context, but I can pretty much completely understand an English-speaker regardless of where they're in the US or from what Commonwealth nation they're from.
Two different languages, on the other hand, are not mutually intelligible. They may have a lot of overlap in vocabulary (English and French or German) and very similar grammar (all Romance languages), but while you may be able to catch a word here or there, you won't really be able to understand someone speaking another language.
So what makes the Chinese topolects different? It can be kind of hard to say, really. If you were to ask me, while speaking English, I would probably call them all different languages. If we're speaking Chinese, they're definitely 方言. It's partly a political issue, rooted in ethno-nationalism: all languages that the Han Chinese speak are Chinese, because all Han are Chinese. But it's not just an artificial categorization invented by the Communist Party to make people more nationalistic. I had this conversation with a Cantonese friend of mine earlier this week, and the way he phrased it is this: Cantonese and Mandarin are not mutually intelligible, at all, so if you just look at the pronunciation, they're completely different languages. But Cantonese is written using Chinese characters, and when it's written, a Mandarin speaker who knows no Cantonese will understand the text to a pretty good degree. There are some differences (系 instead of 是 for "to be", and 唔 instead of 不 for the negative), but for the most part (and especially for more complicated words), a Mandarin speaker could read a Cantonese text.
That's clearly not true for closely-related languages: I can read French, but a text in Spanish or Portuguese or Italian is complete gibberish as far as I'm concerned. A Mandarin speaker might not understand everything in a Cantonese text, but I can't understand ANYTHING in a Spanish text. So that complicates the classification.
Classification is further complicated by the fact that Cantonese is special among Chinese topolects. No other topolect has a literature and press scene of materials written in that topolect: Cantonese is the only one that is not just a spoken language. And this is because of Hong Kong. All other topolects are just learned by people at home from their parents and are not written. But because Cantonese is, and has been, the dominant language in Hong Kong, there are books written in Cantonese, newspapers written in Cantonese, textbooks produced in Cantonese. So if you spoke Techeow, Shanghainese, Shanxi-ese, or any of the other many Chinese topolects and dialects and I asked you to write out how you would say something in your language, you'd look at me funny and say, "that's impossible." And while most Cantonese-speakers in Guangzhou can't write Cantonese either, Cantonese-speakers in Hong Kong can.
Speaking of Hong Kong, the language environment there is fascinating. Because it's next to Guangdong, most people's native language is Cantonese. Because it was British, there's a large amount of English in the city. Because it's now a part of the People's Republic of China, there's an increasing amount of Mandarin being spoken there. So you have this confluence of Cantonese, Mandarin, and English that is really, really cool.
Mandarin, like French, doesn't really borrow words from other languages. They take foreign words (like email), and China-fy them, making email into 电子邮件(diànzǐyóujiàn), literally "electronic-mail". Hong Kong Cantonese, on the other hand, borrows English words all the time: "sexy", "okay", "cute", "email", and "cheese", are all used in proper Hong Kong Cantonese. A lot of times, Hong Kong native Cantonese speakers will have better spoken English than spoken Mandarin. And, unlike the mainland, people are not that impressed when a foreigner speaks Chinese, either Mandarin or Cantonese.
My favorite interaction involving languages in Hong Kong was while I was walking down the street, looking at the vegetables being sold along the side of the road (because looking at food markets is one of my favorite things to do while traveling), when I saw what looked like a bitter melon. It looked very different from the ones I had seen in Guangzhou though, so I asked the stall owner, in Mandarin, what vegetable it was. She just kind of stared at me, confused, so I asked her, in Cantonese, whether she spoke Mandarin. She said she did, so I asked her again, in Mandarin, what vegetable it was and she responded to me, in Cantonese, that it was a bitter melon from Taiwan (really, it was much uglier than your normal bitter melon). I thought this back and forth of Cantonese and Mandarin was just the coolest thing.
I'm afraid I don't have a good conclusion to the question of how to classify Cantonese, but it's a very interesting point to discuss and think about: it seems to occupy a middle ground between a separate language and a mere regional dialect, but for someone who loves classifying as much as I do, that does not feel completely satisfying.
I apologize for the ramblings on language as opposed to a photo-filled discussion of the cool places I've been, but I'm sure there will be more of those in the future. Though I do have another post about the ties between Vietnamese and Chinese that came out of a conversation with a friend living in Hanoi this year that I'd love to write...
