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Can someone explain why Cantonese is considered as a dialect of Chinese, instead of a language? It is also for any language exist in China, both land and Taiwan (Cantonese, Hunanese, Fujianese, Taiwanese, etc.).

For long as I know, dialect is differ from language. Just like in Indonesia: Javanese, Sundanese and Madurese is considered as a language, not a dialect. 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.

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Just on a somewhat related account, the English Wiktionary considers Mandarin and Cantonese separate languages. I believe the rationale behind this decision is the fact that they belong to separate topolects. Even Wu is considered a separate language. –  deutschZuid Feb 26 '13 at 12:19
I'm so glad that you asked this question, some arguments here are quite instructive! –  Nannuo Lei Feb 27 '13 at 22:07
别担心，只需要能听懂普通话，会说普通话就行了，作为一名中国人，有的方言我都听不懂。 –  user2638 Mar 25 '13 at 16:05
Is Yiddish a German dialect? (Germans can't understand it although the upper stratum are all German words) If yes, then I'd be inclined to the idea that Cantonese is a dialect of German –  user58955 Jan 5 at 2:38
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9 Answers

up vote 9 down vote accepted

From Wikipedia:

There is no universally accepted criterion for distinguishing a language from a dialect.

My hunch is that in general Chinese politics favors unity, whereas European politics favors separation, thus speakers of Dutch and German would hate to think that they were speaking dialects of the same language. Conversely in general it 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.

Note that (accoring to WP) the distinction is so unclear that some linguists consider "Dialect" and "Language" to be synonyms, and that a dialect can also be a language. Thus "Hokkien is a language that is a dialect of Chinese" would not be an illogical statement.

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+1 for the wiki ref. –  NS.X. Feb 23 '13 at 10:42
When you say "Chinese". It usually means Mandarin. There are so many dialects of Chinese, you even can't know which is the traditional one. –  Mike Manilone Feb 23 '13 at 10:43
I'd also say, there are still many languages in China which are not considered as dialects of Chinese, such as Zhuang, Tibetan. –  Mike Manilone Feb 23 '13 at 10:58
@StumpyJoePete Yes, so "all languages in China are dialects of Chinese" is wrong. –  Mike Manilone Feb 24 '13 at 3:03
It's a generalisation. I'll edit accordingly. –  trideceth12 Feb 24 '13 at 4:52
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No, they're not completely different, but similar in some ways. 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. Middle Chinese (中古漢語) is the lineal descendant of Old Chinese (上古漢語). Cantonese is also from Middle Chinese.
  • Although the written form is different. The original characters are the same. The new characters are only made to show the pronunciation of Cantonese.
  • Northern dialects of Chinese lost the entering tone (入聲). For example, 力 is pronounced as "li4" today in Mandarin, but it's "lik" in Middle Chinese. Many southern dialects still have entering tone.
  • 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.

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The same could be said for Portuguese and Spanish, or German and Dutch, or Sweedish and Norwegian: Common root, original characters the same :) –  trideceth12 Feb 23 '13 at 10:48
@trideceth12 Europe is divided into several parts, so they don't want to say "my language is a dialect of XX language". –  Mike Manilone Feb 23 '13 at 10:50
@MikeManilone That sort of undermines your answer that "Cantonese is a dialect of Chinese" for objective, non-political reasons. –  Stumpy Joe Pete Feb 23 '13 at 19:58
@MikeManilone: Such a great explanation, thanks! :) –  mrjimoy_05 Feb 24 '13 at 2:17
With this reasoning you can say that almost all European languages are in fact only one language. Both by how to grew, see: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/… and by how they are written (they almost all use the same characters). The characters only define a language for a very small part. Grammar, pronunciation, ... are as important. –  BertR Feb 25 '13 at 16:49
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In this case, I think the quote "A language is a dialect with an army and navy" best describes the situation. Since the mainland government considers linguistic unity to be in favor of their ruling, they will consider any spoken variety of Chinese to be a dialect, no matter how different it is from Mandarin (excluding minority languages).

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The thing that unifies Mandarin and Cantonese is the common Chinese script. For instance, in both Mandarin and Cantonese, 不 means "not."

The character is pronounced "bu" in Mandarin, and "but" in Cantonese, and while they are pronounced differently, they are recognizable versions of each other, even in sound, and have the same meaning linked to the character.

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English and Finnish are also unified by a common script. –  Stumpy Joe Pete Mar 12 '13 at 22:52
@StumpyJoePete: I meant, where a given character means the same thing in both Mandarin and Cantonese. That's not true in English and Finnish, where words are "spelled" differently, even if they use the same alphabet. –  Tom Au Mar 13 '13 at 1:34
The similarity can be pretty superficial though. Common words are very different, and many morphemes don't even have equivalent characters. –  Stumpy Joe Pete Mar 13 '13 at 2:43
To give an example in 上海话:侬今朝下半天有辰光伐？. 侬 doesn't mean anything in MSM (and the morpheme is unrelated to 你). 今朝 and 辰光 aren't words in MSM, even though they're made of existing characters. 下半天 is in the dictionary, but I've never heard anyone say it. 有 is the same. And 伐 is just a phonetic representation of the shanghainese morpheme (also written w/the uncommon character 𠲎--that' 口＋伐 if it doesn't show up). So... not sure how useful the common script is in terms of mutual intelligibility. –  Stumpy Joe Pete Mar 13 '13 at 3:32
Besides, the choice of 不 as an example is a bad one, as no/not is different in Madarin and Canto 不 vs 唔... –  dda Mar 14 '13 at 17:10
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Because it truly is a dialect. Cantonese sounds very different from Mandarin, cuz they differed for a long long time. So called "Chinese" (by "Chinese", I mean people) thousands years ago didn't include people in today's Guangdong, Guangxi, Guizhou.

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Cantonese sounds very different from MSM? What is MSM? –  mrjimoy_05 Mar 28 '13 at 6:04
@mrjimoy_05 should be Mandarin. My bad. Edited. –  Matt Mar 28 '13 at 6:14
This sounds like a great argument why Cantonese should be considered "a totally different language", not that it "truly is a dialect"... –  Stumpy Joe Pete Mar 28 '13 at 6:55
@StumpyJoePete Maybe it is a great argument whether it's a different language or dialect. But since Guangdong & HongKong (where people speak Cantonese) are parts of China, I think most people in China would regard it as dialect. I think I understand what u mean by "a different language" - Cantonese is anti-foreign: lots of Chinese don't understand Cantonese. But I think it's ok, for China has tons of dialects which cannot fully understand by people from other provinces. Shanghai dialect, which I speak myself, cannot be understood by people beyond Zhejiang & Jiangsu (they're close to Shanghai). –  Matt Mar 29 '13 at 9:54
The whole topic of this thread is "Why is Cantonese considered only a dialect instead of a separate language?". Westerners think that two things that are so different must be different languages. Your argument for why they are not different languages was "because they're so different". In the comments, you've presented a perfectly reasonable explanation: all Han languages in China are considered dialects of Chinese for political reasons. Your actual answer doesn't make sense though. –  Stumpy Joe Pete Mar 29 '13 at 17:23
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This might be a bit provocative and perhaps only half related to the question... However after reading the other answers and comments (of which I think many are excellent), I felt this was missing from the whole picture:

The last few years there have apparently been mass protests in HK against the Mandarinization of the Cantonese language-or-dialect and culture.

This obviously doesn't at all answer whether Cantonese is a dialect or a language, but it complements answers along the lines "Chinese politics favors unity" (true), "because it's not a separate country" (true), and the comment in Chinese saying "don't worry, if you can just speak and understand Mandarin you'll be fine" (often true, but not if you live in Canton).

To my knowledge the Taiwanese also generally consider themselves having their own culture and language, and probably don't see Taiwanese as a Chinese dialect. But I'll try asking the next Taiwanese person I meet. :)

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It is dialect indeed. Most usage of the cantonese is similar to mandarin. If a mandarin speaker watch a Cantonese channel for sometimes, he can grasp most of the detail.Like me I watch football match on UUSEE and I can understand most contents of the commentator mean. And I have not turned to any Cantonese classes before.

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In reality, these two languages are not mutually intellegible. Cantonese is not considered another language per se, because Chinese characters unify these two languages in writing. In the absence of Chinese characters, they will be considered different languages today.

I cannot think of other group of languages that experience such phenomenon. For example, a person fluent in Mandarin can comfortably read content from Hong Kong and adjacent areas. We can say the same about people from Hong Kong reading material from the mainland and Taiwan.

Now, take Spanish and French, which share the same alphabet. Without experience, however, it is much more difficult for a monolingual, native speaker of one of these languages to grasp the full meaning of the text in the other language.

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The formal writing in HK and Taiwan is heavily influenced by Mandarin though. If they just wrote down what they would say in their dialect, it would not necessarily be easily understood (e.g.,侬今朝下半天有辰光伐？) –  Stumpy Joe Pete Mar 31 '13 at 3:04
You're right about that. But in standard writing the message would be easily understood across the two languages. –  jll90 Mar 31 '13 at 3:33
Just saying that it's more like diglossia than multiple dialects sharing the same writing. –  Stumpy Joe Pete Mar 31 '13 at 6:47
@StumpyJoePete Written Chinese and colloquial Chinese has long been separated, for at least 1500 years. Despite however different the vernacular languages are or whether they are mutually intelligible, the written language have always had a uniform standard. It was 文言文 before the language reform in early 20th century, which replaced the writing standard by 白话文. –  user58955 Jan 5 at 3:08
白话文 is based on 官话 though, the language of the officials. All government officials were required to learn it to overcome the intelligibility issue -- of course the 官话 in different dynasties were different. The latest 官话 is very similar to today's standard Mandarin, but not exactly the same. –  user58955 Jan 5 at 3:17
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I think that the basic concept is all they use same character system (Cantonese or other dialect uses few new introduced words), from about B.C. 230 year, Qin dynasty uniform character script and units. Most of these dialect uses same characters. So Cantonese is dialect, but Man滿/Yi彝/Zhuang壮/Zang藏 are new languages.

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protected by Community Apr 1 '13 at 9:47


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