Excellent article, Jingyu. Not the least for the mandarin picture and the knowledge that the western name for the language came before the fruit. Alway wondered.
Regarding regional dialects, (or languages, depending on your pov) I have a couple of anecdotes about dialect resistence. In the late 1990s, I was working in a regional city in Guangdong. Although the school obviously was supposed to teach in Mandarin, some of the classes (many of the classes) were taught in Cantonese. Local Guangdong teachers teaching local kids. However for families that had moved their from other places in China, this was difficult, and, they considered, against the national standard. So they complained at a parent-teacher evening, only to be told by the principal, this is Guangdong. We speak in Guangdong hua. Topic over.
Fast forward a couple of decades and I was living in Suzhou, based in Suzhou but travelling for work. People regularly spoke the Suzhou version of Wu. One of the places I went to was Changshu, about an hours drive from the SIP and technically within the Suzhou city jurisdiction. There the locals spoke their own version of Wu, Changshu dialect. Even Suzhou dialect speakers could not understand the Changshu dialect.
A really interesting thing happened once. While much of the dialogue between parents and teachers occurred in Changshu-ese, one afternoon a grandparent came, who was from a smaller village outside of Changshu. Her dialect and Changshu dialect were mutually unintelligible. Staff had to find a teacher who spoke a similar dialect from a village near the small village, with enough similarities to be understood. Then that teacher translated from the village dialect to Changshu dialect, which was then translated to Suzhou dialect for other teachers, and finally into Mandarin for those who didn't speak Suzhou-ese.
I wondered about the dialects and asked people. They were adamant that their children were going to grow up speaking Changshu dialect, Suzhou dialect, and standard mandarin.
That was probably about a decade ago. I wonder how it's going now. Suzhou has also had an influx of people from other places, and old locals commiserate about how their Suzhou culture is dying.
Last week, I took my granddaughter to a park nearby. A Chinese lady with a covered stroller (a baby being protected from the sun) was following her 4-year old daughter around the climbing frames, swings and slides as you do. At one point, we coincided on the same slide and she asked me about my granddaughter. She said her hair looked like she was Chinese. I said ‘yes’ she's Taiwanese.
I replied to her in Mandarin and that got us going. Soon after, she introduced me to her father who'd come over from Zhuzhou, Hunan (株洲，湖南) to be with them for a month or so and had been sitting at a distance. He was a retired highschool maths teacher and we got talking about all sorts of things. He had a very strong what must have been Xiang 湘语 accent but we were still able to communicate quite well and his daughter, who was paying attention and contributing to the conversation, was a little surprised I could maintain such long exchanges with her father about all sorts of topics.
I've checked out how the phonetic transcription of 湘语 sounds online as compared to how Mandarin sounds and I can see why I could understand him fairly well. With other dialects such as Shanghainese or Cantonese, I would struggle beyond measure!
Nevertheless. With more than 800 dialects being used across China, it takes some effort to get things ‘standardised’.
Maybe that's why the Chinese compare themselves to 一把沙子。
More relevant to this discussion and to Jingyu's article, this Chinese lady spoke very good English, even sang English children songs and also spoke excellent French. She said she loved learning languages.
A parallel might be that the purest French is claimed to be spoken in the countryside of Touraine, around the royal chateau, where local speech was influenced by long proximity to the royal court rather than Parisian street slang.
Wow! It was insanely informative, like getting a little insight into journey of this massive speech. Everything was new & really interesting for me, i have watched few C-dramas & Mandarin was very popular back in my school days in India, people used to learn mandarin,french,russian religiously. I always found this language difficult to write so i switched to sports 😂 for extra curricular activities.
However this was very insightful reading for me, Thank you so much for writing this so extensively.
Excellent article, Jingyu. Not the least for the mandarin picture and the knowledge that the western name for the language came before the fruit. Alway wondered.
Regarding regional dialects, (or languages, depending on your pov) I have a couple of anecdotes about dialect resistence. In the late 1990s, I was working in a regional city in Guangdong. Although the school obviously was supposed to teach in Mandarin, some of the classes (many of the classes) were taught in Cantonese. Local Guangdong teachers teaching local kids. However for families that had moved their from other places in China, this was difficult, and, they considered, against the national standard. So they complained at a parent-teacher evening, only to be told by the principal, this is Guangdong. We speak in Guangdong hua. Topic over.
Fast forward a couple of decades and I was living in Suzhou, based in Suzhou but travelling for work. People regularly spoke the Suzhou version of Wu. One of the places I went to was Changshu, about an hours drive from the SIP and technically within the Suzhou city jurisdiction. There the locals spoke their own version of Wu, Changshu dialect. Even Suzhou dialect speakers could not understand the Changshu dialect.
A really interesting thing happened once. While much of the dialogue between parents and teachers occurred in Changshu-ese, one afternoon a grandparent came, who was from a smaller village outside of Changshu. Her dialect and Changshu dialect were mutually unintelligible. Staff had to find a teacher who spoke a similar dialect from a village near the small village, with enough similarities to be understood. Then that teacher translated from the village dialect to Changshu dialect, which was then translated to Suzhou dialect for other teachers, and finally into Mandarin for those who didn't speak Suzhou-ese.
I wondered about the dialects and asked people. They were adamant that their children were going to grow up speaking Changshu dialect, Suzhou dialect, and standard mandarin.
That was probably about a decade ago. I wonder how it's going now. Suzhou has also had an influx of people from other places, and old locals commiserate about how their Suzhou culture is dying.
Fascinating story! Sometimes I feel that most Chinese people are actually bilingual or even trilingual.
Exactly! At least bilingual, often trilingual!!
In Malaysia, most Chinese are at least trilingual, but not unusual to find those who can speak four to five languages.
Exactly. It’s the english speaking countries that are so monolingual and they assume everyone else is!!
Last week, I took my granddaughter to a park nearby. A Chinese lady with a covered stroller (a baby being protected from the sun) was following her 4-year old daughter around the climbing frames, swings and slides as you do. At one point, we coincided on the same slide and she asked me about my granddaughter. She said her hair looked like she was Chinese. I said ‘yes’ she's Taiwanese.
I replied to her in Mandarin and that got us going. Soon after, she introduced me to her father who'd come over from Zhuzhou, Hunan (株洲，湖南) to be with them for a month or so and had been sitting at a distance. He was a retired highschool maths teacher and we got talking about all sorts of things. He had a very strong what must have been Xiang 湘语 accent but we were still able to communicate quite well and his daughter, who was paying attention and contributing to the conversation, was a little surprised I could maintain such long exchanges with her father about all sorts of topics.
I've checked out how the phonetic transcription of 湘语 sounds online as compared to how Mandarin sounds and I can see why I could understand him fairly well. With other dialects such as Shanghainese or Cantonese, I would struggle beyond measure!
Nevertheless. With more than 800 dialects being used across China, it takes some effort to get things ‘standardised’.
Maybe that's why the Chinese compare themselves to 一把沙子。
More relevant to this discussion and to Jingyu's article, this Chinese lady spoke very good English, even sang English children songs and also spoke excellent French. She said she loved learning languages.
No wonder the Chinese got so behind Esperanto -- they could see the value of a common tongue.
It was quite popular during the 80s and 90s, but now, most people have never heard of it anymore.
I was not aware of that.
I remember seeing that they offer audio guides in Esperanto at the forbidden city in Beijing!
Other than auditory clarity and convenience, were there any other reasons why the specific Luanping pronunciation was adopted?
A parallel might be that the purest French is claimed to be spoken in the countryside of Touraine, around the royal chateau, where local speech was influenced by long proximity to the royal court rather than Parisian street slang.
Fascinating stuff!
Wow! It was insanely informative, like getting a little insight into journey of this massive speech. Everything was new & really interesting for me, i have watched few C-dramas & Mandarin was very popular back in my school days in India, people used to learn mandarin,french,russian religiously. I always found this language difficult to write so i switched to sports 😂 for extra curricular activities.
However this was very insightful reading for me, Thank you so much for writing this so extensively.