Language vs Dialect

This topic came up in conversation with the GF last night.

Chinese is quoted as being one of the 4 hardest languages in the world to learn. I assume this means reading and writing as well.

So a) what are the other hard languages (this could be as ridiculous as “how long is a piece of string”)

b) where does a language begin and a dialect end. Ok this could be a long one and i may have to read up on it. But breifly is Taiwanese a language or a dialect, or Hakanese or in fact Cantonese which i believe is recognised as a language.

Have fun with this one

Taiwanese is a patois.

AFAIK, the languages recognized as hardest to learn are English, Japanese, and Finnish.

This is the $64,000,000 question. “Chinese” theoretically should be a language family, because the components that make it up are as mutually unintelligible as any combination of European languages. However, it’s still largely, for some reason, considered a language made up of dialects, because people are ignorant (IMO). Taiwanese, though, should be considered a dialect, but not of Chinese - of Minnan, or possibly of Min (not sure of the compatibility between Minnan and Minbei). Hakka I’m not sure about. Cantonese should be a language unto itself, as should Mandarin, Shanghainese, etc.

AFAIK, the languages recognized as hardest to learn are English, Japanese, and Finnish.

This is the $64,000,000 question. “Chinese” theoretically should be a language family, because the components that make it up are as mutually unintelligible as any combination of European languages. However, it’s still largely, for some reason, considered a language made up of dialects, because people are ignorant (IMO). Taiwanese, though, should be considered a dialect, but not of Chinese - of Minnan, or possibly of Min (not sure of the compatibility between Minnan and Minbei). Hakka I’m not sure about. Cantonese should be a language unto itself, as should Mandarin, Shanghainese, etc.[/quote]

This came up on a thread a couple of months ago, dont remember the order, but Arabic was no 1, with Chinese and Japanese filling out the other two spots from memory.

the argument for chinese as a language family is based on the common system of writing … and the fact that, according to some linguistics studies, many chinese consider the languages to be of the same family (perception) …

See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialects

Taiwanese is called a dialect largely for political reasons. Mandarin and Taiwanese are mutually unintelligible and therefore not dialects. It is certainly not a patois.

you might say that mandarin and taiwanese are both dialects of Chinese, but not one of the other.

a) ask a different person, get a different answer. Basque gets my vote for one of those spots. If you’re talking mainstream languages then probably Japanese and Arabic.

b)
Can
of
worms…

OK, here’s my take. Modern linguistics as a discipline was mainly started by Europeans with scary beards. They applied definitions to languages which coincided with the political realities around them. This meant that for the most part, ‘languages’ nicely dovetailed with political boundaries, so French was spoken in France, Spanish in Spain and so on.

Chinese is complicated by the fact that (almost) everyone literate uses the same written language (which today is essentially a more codified form of Mandarin). So for non-Mandarin speakers (Cantonese, Hakka or whatever), this is like an French person only being able (or allowed) to write in Latin. So, the linguists come along and they see one written language, comprehensible from the Russian border to Vietnam and they think - it’s one language. Which it is, but that doesn’t apply to the spoken language(s) inside China. Traditional Chinese linguistics classifies speech by area, using the term fangyan (regional speech), but there is no distinction made for intelligibility. So Beijing has a fangyan that’s different to Taipei Mandarin fangyan, even though the two are mutually intelligible to a native speaker. But Hakka is equally classed as a fangyan, even though a Mandarin speaker could not understand it without learning the language.

This fangyan got translated into English as ‘dialect’, even though it doesn’t always accord with our idea of what a dialect is. This view fit in nicely with the old European linguist’s notion of languages defined by borders - China is one country, so it has one language. But it’s wrong. If we were to apply European standards of mutual-intelligibility-criteria to Chinese fangyan, we would come up with between seven and ten separate groups, which we could call languages. Trouble is, within those groups, there are dialects which are at best only marginally mutually intelligible, such as Northern Min and Southern Min (of which Taiwanese is part). An argument could well be made for saying that there are twenty or thirty Chinese languages.

Let’s take Taiwan’s situation as an easier problem. How many Chinese languages are spoken here? Most people would probably say three - Mandarin, Taiwanese and Hakka. The three are most definitely not mutually intelligible. OK, so linguists classify Taiwanese as part of Southern Min not a language in its own right, but effectively we’re just substituting one name for another here.

There’s a pretty good Wikipedia article on the dialect/language question that’s worth checking out.

The analysis I favour is that Chinese is a language family, and Mandarin, Wu, Hakka, Min, Cantonese, Xiang and Gan are languages within that family. Is Taiwanese a different language from the nothern Min spoken in the north of Fujian province? Tough call, but I’d say they’re dialects of the same language (Min).

I always thought Russian was in there somewhere.

“A language is a dialect with an army.” :s

Of course, if you’re going to say that, you should also say that French and Spanish are both dialects of Romance, and that English and German are both dialects of Germanic, and that…

of course you’re right. at least it would be fair though! :wink: