Why are Mandarin and Cantonese considered dialects?
Cantonese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family of languages, and like its more renowned relation, Mandarin, it developed from Middle Chinese. While Mandarin (or Putonghua) is the official spoken language across Mainland China, Cantonese is the spoken language of choice in Guangdong province.
What are the two main dialects in China?
The official dialect of China is Mandarin, also call “Putonghua”. More than 70\% of the Chinese population speaks Mandarin, but there are also several other major dialects in use in China: Yue (Cantonese), Xiang (Hunanese), Min dialect, Gan dialect, Wu dialect, and Kejia or Hakka dialect.
Is Cantonese mutually intelligible with Mandarin?
They are both tonal languages, though the tones are different and they are not mutually intelligible. As such, they cannot really be referred to as dialects because a Cantonese speaker cannot understand a Mandarin speaker and vice versa. In fact, this is the case with many of China’s “dialects”.
Is Cantonese the same as Middle Chinese?
Cantonese is not the same as Middle Chinese, but a descendant. In fact, all today’s dialects are its descendants. You see: Cantonese is from a language which all other dialects (including Mandarin) are from, so Cantonese is a dialect of Chinese, not a new language.
Is Javanese a dialect of Cantonese?
But, Javanese is called as a dialect when someone speak Indonesian language with Javanese accent. But, for Cantonese (or any other languages listed above), although you speak Cantonese, Chinese will considered it as a dialect, not a language. You know that, Cantonese and Mandarin is ‘completely’ different each other.
What are the differences between the different Chinese dialects?
You should know, all dialects are different. Mandarin Chinese is not a natural language. It grabs pronunciation from Beijing dialect, vocabulary from all the northern dialects, grammar from the articles written by great writers during the New Culture Movement. Modern dialects have only one root — Middle Chinese.
Is there really only one Chinese language?
Conversely in generalit is useful for the notion of Chinese unity, that there is only one “Chinese”, although in fact there are many spoken languages within the peoples considered Chinese, that are considered separate languages.