Chinese Isn't (Really) A Language... 

In the Balkans we have the opposite issue. Many Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, and even some Montenegrins all claim to speak different languages and we have all separately attempted to manufacture additional differences, such as Croats making up new words (some of them say "Zrakomlat" which means "air-beater" instead of "Helikopter") or Montenegrin adding some new letters that nobody actually uses. It might make a good video but then again perhaps the comments section would be too much of a nightmare to justify making it.

i think we should discover a new language and name it chinese

Imagine a Chinese person living somewhere in remote area of southern China. So they are able to speak: - some dialect of their village which is not mutually intelligible with neither Mandarin or Cantonese - Standard (Guangzhou) Cantonese - Standard Mandarin ...at the same time. So this person actually knows THREE languages, but one might say 'they only speak Chinese'.

That fuzzy line between what is a language and what is a dialect arises to me quite often. When an old swiss friend of mine starts talking in switzerlandish and I can understand 50% of what he's saying, sometimes less than that. The other half composes of words completely obscure to me. But we call it a German dialect. I'd rather say its another language.

"A language I would call Standard Mandarin, or -" STANDARIN! "Standard Chinese..."

As someone whose great-grandparents emigrated to Hawai`i 110 years ago speaking Hakka, this interests me. My grandmother was bilingual (oral only for Hakka) to speak to her parents, my mother only knew a handful of words to speak to her grandparents. I speak NONE. Similarly for the Portuguese side of my mom's dad's family where my great grandparents came from Madeira to Hawai`i 150 years ago. I also speak no Portuguese.

I wish you'd gotten into the additional complications posed by the writing-system making the question of mutual intelligibility in Chinese's case more complicated, because whether two speakers can understand each other doesn't necessarily correlate to whether two writers can, and a country where that's the case, without resorting to diglossia is pretty much unique to this one case.

Just wanted point out that Min is actually a group of languages that are not mutually intelligible. (Speaking as a native Pu-Xian Min speaker myself)

Taiwanese here. In today's age, we speak mostly Mandarin. Hokkien being the second most common, and there's also Hakka and various other languages. A funny thing is that many Taiwanese, when speaking in Hokkien and don't know what a certain word is in Hokkien, they fill it up with Mandarin words. Or just throw in Hokkien words in Mandarin in casual conversations. Plus the amount of Japanese loan words (some of which are loan words itself) in Taiwanese Hokkien. We jokingly called this mix 臺灣國語 (Taiwanese National Language).

I do think this is also partially due to the disconnect between non-native English speakers and native English speakers, because in English it would seem weird to use the term 'standard French' or 'standard Spanish', in such countries, depending on the region a person is from, those terms could very well be used. From my own personal experience growing up speaking a 'dialect' of our national language, it's quite common for us to refer to the national language as 'standard' instead of just its name, even though you would never use such a term in English.

4:34 Kinda of a Philippines moment right there, not learning the standardized Tagalog ("Filipino") is seen as unpatriotic and it is displacing the use of other native languages, and now other languages are declining since parents are unwilling to pass them down and are confused as being low-grade "dialects" of "Filipino." Massive threat to the linguistic diversity of the Philippines, funny how they present Filipino as "our" native language during Buwan ng Wika (Month of Language) while stepping on our actual native languages

In the narrow context, Chinese usually refers to one language, the standard Mandarin. But in its wider context, Chinese refers to the Sinitic language family. For example, Cantonese is considered another type of Chinese language/dialect, alongside Mandarin. And I think the confusion of the term "dialect" stems from the rough translation of the Chinese word, 方言 (regional speech). Unlike the English meaning of "dialect", the word 方言 includes all forms of non-standard regional languages, including dialects, languages under the same family, and even languages unrelated to the family in the geographical sense (Eg. Mongolian is one of the regional speech of China). But people tend to translate the term as dialect for simplicity sake, but this confuses western linguists due to misunderstanding. And this led to some debate saying that Cantonese is not a dialect but a language. I agree it is wrong to say Cantonese is a Mandarin dialect, but I think it is not completely wrong to say Cantonese is a Chinese dialect, since I would perceive this statement as "Cantonese is a variety of the Sinitic language family". (But it seems that the statement "Dialect of a Language family" is nonsense apparently in English context. I was only intentionally misusing the term as an example) Hence, one way to solve this confusion or debate when discussing about Chinese languages, is to not use the term "dialect" at all. "Topolect" would be more suitable to translate the term 方言.

Where's the line between language and dialect you ask? There isn't one, we all just speak a dialect of Haida.

yeah, so basically if the "Chinese" language is to be called "Standard Mandarin" for the sake of preciseness, maybe you should also do this: French × Standard Île-de-Français ✓ German × Standard Misnian ✓ Italian × Standard Tuscan ✓ Spanish × Standard Castillian ✓ Russian × Standard Moscovian ✓ Japanese × Standard Adzuma* ✓(?) English × Standard Insular Saxon ✓ *archaic and poetic name of the Eastern part, in which Tokyo is located, of Honshu, the main island of Japan.

As a Chinese who major in Chinese lit in uni, I can say Chinese really isn't a "language" but a series of writing systems. And that's where East and West divided: Chinese is a culture circling around its writing, but European or Western cultures love their phonocentrism. We don't understand different dialects and that's okay. Because we don't talk, or at least we didn't talk to each others before modernization kicked in. We wrote, and that's why a "Chinese" system can exist.

As a person who's very passionate about the italian regional languages and the regional dialects of italian I do call the standard dialect "Standard italian". Jokingly it's also sometimes called "doppiese", meaning "dubber-ese"

Reminds me of the time someone I know from Hong Kong was arguing with an actual Italian about whether Italian as a language exists, With the Italian saying it does, While the Hong Konger (Is that a word? Idk what people from Hong Kong are called.) was saying it doesn't. To this day some friends and I joke about how Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Portuguese, Occitan, Romansh, And any other Romance languages, Aren't actually languages, Because they're actually just dialects of Vulgar Latin.

Mainlander Cantonese with HK family (who's since moved abroad) here: Part of the reason why the terminology is as confusing as it is is that calling all of the various tongues spoken by Han anything other than "dialects" in China is hugely politically loaded. Calling them "languages" implies a secessionist mindset from the unitary Chinese nation and is a surefire way to get invited for tea (Translation: State Security wants to talk to you) As much as I cherish my native Cantonese tongue and am immensely proud of speaking it, I honestly have no problem with the "dialect" nomenclature. Still, I do have a problem with people seeing the Chinese language as solely Mandarin. In the end, both I and my Mainlander/HK Cantonese friends and relatives have come up with a reconciliatory way to explain this: "You write Chinese (although Modern Standard Written Chinese is based on a Classical Chinese-influenced form of Mandarin, writing in the vernacular of each respective dialect is 85-90% legible to a non-speaker), but you don't speak it. You speak Mandarin, Cantonese, and so on."

I'm Italian and I feel like it's fine to call Italian "Italian" just because it genuinely is the mother tongue of almost all Italians and most Italians speak it at least as well as their local language. So it is one unifying language. Also the standard was created from a 14th-to-16th century variety, so "Standard Tuscan" doesn't really work, Tuscan has diverged from the standard now (although it's the one regional variety, together with the one of Rome, which some consider not to be a separate language from Italian). What I take issue with is when people call "Italian" things that aren't the Italian language 😐 People say that the concept of dialect is different in Italy than in English, which is traditionally true but it shouldn't be because speakers are confused enough with the sociolinguistic situation, they should at least be informed that they are bilingual. It's important that Italians are taught about what linguists say and not what it's always been said. So "Italian" is both the standard language of Italy and the varieties that emerged from it after it was spread throughout the state. Everything else should be called a language in its own right, in light of where linguists believe to be the boundaries of those different languages. Not everyone thinks we should label things scientifically for people who are not scientists (or linguists in this instance), but I feel like it's necessary in this case, because linguistic diversity in Italy is actually in danger. Estimates say that Sicilian will die in 2/3 generations (disappearing from a lot of areas much earlier). Much of the North has lost its languages altogether.

Interesting parallel to how Spanish is referred to Castillian within Spain, due to the presence subgroups with a strong cultural/language identity. It would be a real shame to let the non-Mandarin dialects and traditions to die out.

thank you for this video. my great grandpa only spoke hakka and my grandma only remembers a little. as my great uncle has gotten older, he's forgotten his english and now only speaks hakka. i would love to learn hakka to help keep this language alive longer but there's almost no resources, at least not many that i can find. it bothers me as well that people call mandarin "chinese" because it blocks out the fact that china used to be much more diverse in its languages and still is

It is recommended that you learn about ancient Chinese and middle ancient Chinese, so that you can understand why there are so many dialects in China. In fact, even in the north, the dialect of Shanxi is obviously different from other northern dialects due to geographical isolation. The vast majority of the differences between the various dialects of Chinese and Mandarin are due to the fact that those dialects retain some of the characteristics of Middle Chinese.

As it has been famously stated: "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy." (I don't remember who said this)

As a person who speaks Cantonese, I'd even say that standard Chinese is not only standard Mandarin, for us , that only covers the spoken part. When talking about standard Chinese we often also mean the written standard Chinese too. Canto has a vastly different grammar and vocabulary, and a lot of people in Hong Kong actually, in casual settings, like texting, would just text each other by writing Canto, but in non-casual writing we use standard written Chinese. Here's the funny thing though, written Chinese is standardised to cater standard Mandarin, which meant that a lot of the words that we use in Canto, we don't actually know how to write them, we use words that sound the same haha, and we often add a lot of actual english words too.

Its also very interesting that in Chinese, or more precisely, in almost all Sinic languages, “中文”，which actually means the writing system we use, resembles Sinic languages; while “汉语”, which ACTUALLY means Sinic languages, is rarely used😂

The border between languages, is as clear and obvious, as that between species. With species the border is being naturally able to produce fertile offspring, and with languages, the border is mutual intelligibility ...and sometimes, the border is fuzzy. In both cases. And in the exact same ways. For example, with languages you have dialect spectrum. In biology, that's called ring species.

I think that's a thing for a lot of languages. I can atleast say that about German. I've grown up only speaking standard German and some "dialects" like Bavarian and swiss German are basically unintelligible unless they are written down, that somehow makes it easier to understand. These dialects basically feel like Dutch, it's very hard to understand but if it's written down you can figure it out

As a Taiwanese who is tired of explaining that I speak Chinese but am not Chinese, this video is very helpful. I really don't understand why I can't express the fact that my language is different in English.

I've always thought of Chinese (Sinitic language family) as akin to "Romance" while each Chinese language would be akin to a specific romance language. So the equivalent to Cantonese would be Italian. It works in my head, because there are many dialects of Cantonese which form a continuum which gradually becomes less intelligible the further you get from Guangzhou (Canton). But due to the fact that the Canton dialect is considered the prestige dialect, most of the speakers of the other dialect try to emulate the prestige dialect when talking to outsiders. Likewise, I assume that Italian is based on the Florentine dialect, but a Sicilian would try (but fail) to speak like a Florentine when a Milano visits. I'm basing this on not much apart from the fact that I speak a dialect of Cantonese spoken near the Vietnamese border, and can mostly understand standard Cantonese but can't speak it. I also speak Mandarin to a basic conversational level as well, but that was learned separately.

Mandarin Chinese is the ‘Lingua Franca’ of China from Qing Dynasty to present. You can trace Ming Dynasty Lingua Franca (Ming Mandarin Chinese) from a recorded Korean-Chinese pronunciation dictionary. Tibetan and Hainanese root word (check it out yourself, use the numbers 1-10 for simple comparison) are like the Scottish to English, because they become isolated during to 2000 years separation, it just happened Tibetan adopted the Indo scripts during the 5th century

the "Standard Tuscan" thing is a very good point

I guess I can say that mandarin isn't a “language” either，if you consider it a group of language. I speak both standarin and central plain mandarin，therefore I can say I have two mother tongues

I think we need a new world to describe these kind of Language-Dialect blurs and what to call them individually

Norwegian is also a prominent example. There is no "Norwegian". There are two OFFICIAL written languages, Norsk Bokmål [NB] and Norsk Nynorsk [NN]. And then there are the spoken languages, the so-called dialects. And when you learn Norwegian, in most cases you learn bokmål. But you don't speak bokmål, but oslodialekten. Often a dialect is very close to a written language. What makes the "Norwegian" language really difficult is that you have to adjust to many different dialects when listening to it, some of which are more difficult to understand than others. That's why I now say: I'm learning bergensdialekten. (Dialect spoken in Bergen)

Omg thank you so much I love all these differences between Mandarin and other Chinese languages! Aaaaaa

I love your video,help me a lot in understanding chinese even I am a chinese myself

nice video, love from China. 吴语、粤语、官话事实上都是在中古汉语的基础上对发音进行简化，或者说，偷懒；因此南方的方言在声母上、前后鼻音上有所简化，而北方官话则舍去了入声调。有一点作者没有提到的是，最开始民国政府推行过一段时间的“老国音”，一套融合官话与吴语的语言标准，来作为官方语言；但由于这种“人造”的语言大家学起来都有困难，最后仍然被官话的一种（也就是后来的普通话）取缔。Hope you could make more videos about comparing different languages!

I am a native spanish. If we speak slowly, I understand portuguese and italian people who don't speak spanish. If I have to read an informal text from some regions of south america (I'm european), I can have trouble understanding some aspects if I can't ask the meaning of some words to the writer

I think a difference is that Napolitano and Milanese are still included when, in English, we say "Italian." We mean the full continuum, not just the more "prestige" Tuscan variant (thanks Dante). However, when we say "Chinese," it usually does exclude the minority tongues.

Chinese = The variety of language that most people in China CAN speak Italian = The variety of language that most people in Italia CAN speak Danish = The variety of language that most people in Dania CAN speak Irish = The variety of language that most people in Ireland used to be able to speak Folk definition of ‘language’ has more to do with border and nationality than with mutual intelligibility. It’s zoom-out rather than zoom-in.

Damit Klein! I was halfway through a script about "Language vs Dialect" using Chinese and Italian as an example...

Ironic, I was just at a family gathering today and told my family about the difference of Mandarin vs Chinese. I'm learning Mandarin on my own and so they got a bit confused so I explained all the dialects of China. It's crazy I just saw this after getting home.

In Thailand we use the same method with China. As we have mainly 4 languages spoken in each area with a ton of different dialects, we put it together and make the different languages become dialects, and then make the dialects become accents. Language is a very diverse thing and hard to distinguish the color and spectrum, it doesn't depend solely on nature but also politics.

was WAITING FOR THIS ONE

My take is that they're all Chinese. Mandarin is Chinese, Hakka is Chinese, Cantonese is Chinese. They're all Chinese languages spoken by Chinese people.

Looking forward to your comments on classical Chinese 文言, Classical Chinese is almost every Chinese high school student's nightmare.

That sponsor actually sounds really cool! I was born a Canadian and I enjoy learning French, however in school they do not do a good job of teaching it (as in, we never really learn how to actually speak it, moreso write it). As well, because my family came from Germany, I would love to learn German. And especially, I would love to help other people learn English. It sounds like such a cool idea!

Love it when you talk about Chinese as always 🔥

I am a native Cantonese speaker. I want to raise my kids to be able to speak the language too. However, I do understand the decline in popularity is simply a result of the globalisation of the world we live in. While it is sad to have a language that forms a part of your identity slowly die out, it simply the course of history. It may not happen in my life time, but it will happen eventually. One day a new global language will be made, and new languages will be born out of that language as a base.

Even Mandarin itself is not a single unified language or maybe a dialect. There 8 subgroups of Mandarin: 1. Beijing Mandarin 2. Northeastern Mandarin 3.Jiaoliao Mandarin 4. Jilu Mandarin 5. Central Plains Mandarin 6. Lower Yangtze Mandarin 7. Lanyin Mandarin 8. Southwestern Mandarin Different varieties of Mandarin may not mutually intelligible, for example, a person who speak Dalianese (Jiaoliao Mandarin) cannot understand Lower Yangtze Mandarin and Lanyin Mandarin. Mandarin is known for the “retroflex consonant” but this feature doesn’t not apply all varieties of Mandarin. For example, Dalianese doesn’t have the retroflex sh ch zh and r, instead they are s, ts, z and y. For example chī ròu (to eat meat) in Standard Mandarin, but cī yòu in Dalianese; rén (man, person, people) in ST Mandarin, but yín in Dalianese

In a strict linguistic sense, I believe Chinese is best thought of as a language family, composed of several distinct languages. (Traditional characters with Pīnyīn ahead. I'm American born and raised w/ family in Taiwan). Much like how Greek has different words for "love", Chinese has several words that get translated as "language." 文(wén) refers to a writing system, as well as the body of classic literature that was written using such a system. Since there is a standardized writing system used throughout China (even if that standard has evolved over time), Chinese is often called a single "language." On the other hand, 語(yǔ) and 話(huà) refer to the spoken word. As your video points out, there are many varieties of Chinese that are not mutually intelligible. Mandarin and Cantonese are as different as French and "Standard Italian," both derived from Latin but indisputably different languages today. 語(yǔ) is closer to the linguistic definition of a "language" (the English word comes from the Latin "lingua," which means tongue) which can be further broken down into several variant 話(huà), best translated as "dialect". Chinese also speak about foreign languages in the same way. For example, if a Chinese university student were to major in French, they would typically say 我學法文 "I study French (writing)." However, if they were to simply tell someone that they can speak French, they would say 我會講法語 "I can speak French (speech)." 我會講法文 would be incorrect, because you can't "speak" a 文. So why is 語(yǔ) almost always translated as "dialect" instead of "language?" I believe the main reason is purely POLITICAL. Chinese leaders have a very long history of preoccupation with territorial integrity and political unity (not without reason). To be able say that the country is unified by a single "language" is a powerful political tool. Even though the 文(wén) these days is diverging in certain claimed territories (traditional vs simplified characters).

Duolingo only has "Chinese" if you want to learn from English, so I installed another app to learn Cantonese (the Chinese language I actually wanted to learn), I am amazed with how different they are, even in the written form. People often act as if "written Chinese" is the same across the various languages in the family but that's a big lie.

For the sake of completeness, I'll note that a lot of academic writing just uses "variety" or "speech variety" as a cover term if "language" is contested or inappropriate. It simplifies many things and avoids having to become involved in endless debates. Also, remember: an army is just a dialect with a navy and a language. Think about it.

Danish/Norwegian/Swedish endeavour could be compared (maybe?) to what happens between Portuguese/Galician/Spanish where Danish and Portuguese can understand both while Spanish understands only Galician and Galician understands both (although closer to Spanish.) Both cases seem to be parts of a dialect continuum. Spain has some languages in itself (let alone Basque) while Portugal has no dialects. Well, Galicia belongs to Spain... More on Chinese comparisons there's German, with several dialects but only one deemed as oficial, based on the dialect spoken in Hannover, either named as High German or Standard German. I like to emphasize Standard German and Mandarin but I never say Castilian -- only Spanish. That's how crazy things are inside my head.

didn't really go into much detail tbh Sinitic -> Guan (Mandarin as a branch) -> Northern(?) Mandarin -> Beijing Mandarin (basis of Standard Chinese) -> Yue -> Yuehai -> Cantonese -> Siyi -> Taishanese -> Wu -> Su-Hu-Jia -> Shanghainese -> Suzhou -> Min -> Southern Min -> Taiwanese (properly called Taiwanese Hokkien) -> Fujian Hokkien -> Teochew -> Eastern Min -> Fuzhounese -> Northern Min -> Gan -> Hakka -> idk grouping -> Meixian Hakka

Hi. I'm a native Cantonese speaker and Chinese American. I actually can't speak Mandarin (I took 1 year of classes but ended up having to move schools to where the classes weren't as good so I ended up taking Spanish instead), but here's my experience with the two dialects. Cantonese is really quite a different linguistic tradition with its own set of slang and at the same time not intelligible to a Mandarin speaker. I understand they share a writing system, but there are even words in each dialect that do not have equivalents in the other. The speakers even have subtly different cultures. It's not unrecognizable to the other, but they are clearly distinct. I find it such a shame that the Chinese government wants to erase the rich linguistic and cultural traditions of Cantonese, especially when Cantonese was once a coequal dialect with Mandarin. It's just that the politics of Cantonese have become largely rooted in a people with different politics than Mandarin speakers. Cantonese speakers in the south of China have long been exposed to the culture of the outside world through port cities such as Guangzhou and Hong Kong. The simple fact is, people are easier to control when they are under a unified culture and erasing heterogeneity has been a key part of the the agenda of CCP. Hong Kong dialects of Cantonese embrace English loanwords and phrases and its culture has permeated through its food and media (Hong Kong dramas). The plurality of overseas Chinese immigrants spoke Cantonese for the longest time and its traditions have left a lasting impact on Chinatowns throughout the entire world. Cantonese isn't just a language that some people, but represents a type of Chinese language that is adapting to the changing and globalizing world. I liken Cantonese and Mandarin to a younger and older sibling. Mandarin has expectations foisted upon it and has the responsibility of being the "standard Chinese" and upholding the cultural integrity of all of China. Cantonese is a younger sibling without much expectation and experiments with their expression while being largely forgotten about. There isn't a single homogenous Chinese culture and people shouldn't be ashamed of saying "Yeah I'm Cantonese!" anymore than someone should be ashamed of their Midwestern traditions. Nor should someone's US East Coast traditions be seen as somehow more "standard" than someone's Midwestern traditions.

One day in 7th grade social studies the teacher was talking about civilizations and he asked ironically "¿quienes hablan mandarín?" ("who speaks Mandarin?"), and one classmate said "los mandarinenses" ("the Mandarins" said wrong). The teacher told him to repeat that bc he hadn't quite heard him, and then said if he had responded "las mandarinas" ("the tangerines") he would've given him a 0 in an assignment.

From a geopolitical aspect, it make sense to call the language used by the ruling government after the nation/country. It strengthens the influence of the government's region as the capital and the "center" of the nation. Also, calling the non-official languages within the nation state "dialects" would make more sense for the government. It is to assert national and political sovereignty over those regions instead of academic problem of mutual intelligibility. Note that the government's official language does not necessarily mean the majority of the nation speak it. Just as long as the government has strong influence over the region, it can call a language only a small group speak the official language and other majorly spoken languages a dialect. A good case study is Taiwan. When Republic of China (government controlled by the party KMT) fled to Taiwan where the majority of people speak Tai-gi (a Taiwanese language mixing Hokkien, indigenous Taiwanese languages, Hakka, and even Japanese). Within 3 generations, fluent Tai-gi speakers dwindle now it is projected Tai-gi will die in 50 years. Assuming faster for other languages such as Hakka, and indigenous Taiwanese. ROC do so by only allow mainland Chinese to be in government agencies and education; enforcing a "no dialect" movement in school similar to "Welsh Not" in Wales; call Tai-gi "Taiwanese Hokkien" to make the connection that Taiwan and China is related and belong as one.

A little point about the mutual intelligibility of Chinese dialects: I grew up learning Mandarin as a second language but my every now and then I would hear a conversation between my parents or older relatives in Cantonese and find that I could understand them despite only being able to recall so few words I can count them with my fingers. I think it's similar to how you can mostly read simplified and traditional chinese even if you only learned one script. The grammar and vocabulary are almost identical, so with some context I can guess and make a near 1-to-1 translation from Cantonese from Mandarin. But I think me being able to guess the words also has something to do with hearing some (though not a lot) of Cantonese since young, because I can't understand a single word of Hokkien or other dialects

Did I mishear, or did you say you aspire to spend your free time speaking Danish? 👀

Wait until you hear about " Arabic "

What’s the outro music called?

Great video. You should create a video about the many “dialects” of Arabic.

I would like to see a similar video made about de Spanish language and the differences between dialects, accents and actually different languages inside Spain and Spanish-speaking countries

Not sure if I'm alone, I usually think of 'Chinese' as a writing system used to write many different languages, mainly Mandarin. But admittedly this creates more problems. If you go to your phone's language setting, you will find traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese, but they are inherently the same language, written with different subsets of Chinese, the writing system. This also makes the sentence 'I speak Chinese' problematic, since you can't speak a writing system 🙄

outside of linguists, which most people are not, language/dialect is simply defined by government and politics. The problem goes on a spectrum from China/Portuguese/German (low intelligibility between varieties but most natives consider them one language) to Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (nearly identical varieties but most natives consider them multiple languages)

Two things: 1. fyi this video does not appear in my subscriptions feed on my laptop (it does on mobile) 2. about the argument that starts at 4:06, it's not clear to me whether you're saying that people think that Chinese is the *only* (native) language spoken by most people in China, or that they think it's a language that is spoken by most people in China. In the latter case, I'd say that the same argument can't really be applied to Italian and {the country that borders San Marino} nowadays, so maybe it's "slightly more okay" to call Italian Italian. I have to say that I've seen Italian called "toscano" in a comic (originally in Italian) from idk 65ish years ago, which (and this is a complete guess) might have been a reference (for comedic effect) to the fact (I'm guessing this is a fact) that when the """dialects""" were more prevalent than Italian (so, like, not too long before the publication of the comic) they often called Italian Tuscan. Sorry if the second thing was hard to read, I'll admit I didn't try my hardest to keep it easy to read, sorry about that

My 2 cents: I’m Italian and I refer to it as “standardised Italian” or “TV Italian” in my podcast. I specifically use standardISED because it has been made into the standard. So maybe: standardised Chinese?

It’s even a bigger problem for other languages that don’t have the word “mandarin” (普通话) and only the basic “chinese language” (汉语). I don’t know what to say when people ask what language do i study, if i answer “mandarin” they’re gonna look at me like “?????? whaddya mean you study a fruit”, if i answer chinese, everything inside of me dies. Plz send help

You can try tandem for language partners

Mandarin was a term coined by the Portuguese when trading with China in the age of discovery. It's a Portuguese portmanteau that means "language used to command" to designate the artificial language used in official Chinese empire communications and thar was only used by officials (people that command others). It was later adopted by the British and other countries.

In the theme of mutual intelligibility, I think it would make a great video to talk about how Brazilian Portuguese speakers can so easily understand Spanish speakers, but not the other way around.I know the can understand us, but not as easily.

I burst out laughing because my life also includes failing to learning languages and eating stupid amounts of cheese

This is fascinating to me as a Chinese person (Cantonese) who grew up hyper-aware of this. Cantonese, even, is an umbrella term for a variety of other non-Mandarin, Sinitic languages

legit my favourite channel rn

I think the difference between italian and 'chinese' is mostly that italian has one name, italian, if we wanted to change that we'd have to propose a seperate name for the language, whereas (standard) mandarin is called (standard) mandarin, and calling it chinese is part of an in progress effort to homogenize the languages spoken in china, both by chinese nationalists, who want to strengthen national identity in a huge country with many different ethnic groups with their own languages and culture, and, less consciously, by foreigners who find it easier to view a different country as a single united whole that they can either vilify or lionize, rather then dive into the complexities of the people who make up that whole.

I have come to the opinion that it's impossible to expect an average person to use the proper terminology because it demands an unreasonable degree of cultural or linguistic understanding. The phrasing that gives me cringe the most is "is this written in Mandarin or Cantonese?" I see that question as the consequence of the speaker being told that the terminology matters without being provided the proper context for pick the terminology (which is fair). I might have a problem with someone saying 中文 when they should be using 普通话, but expecting the same degree of subtlety in general English discourse is not practical.

You see, I'd love busu if I wasn't so socially anxious. Which you may think is odd if I'm trying to learn another language, something that is, to its core, a social thing. Idk, man. Chinese just sounds so cool and maybe one day, I'll be able to use it for any reason, especially career opportunities that involve language

and then the guitar/banjo storms in -- this is amazing

Same with French, French is actually just the Parisian / Francilien langue d'oïl, each other region has its own indigenous language, even Maine Champagne and Picardie which are close to Paris. As for Brittany and Basque country it's pretty obvious already.

In Hong Kong, people sometimes also call cantonese "chinese", because we can all understand what it means by the context. And some may argue that cantonese is the language that should be called chinese as some claims it has a longer history than mandarin.

I feel like another great example is Serbo-Croation. That area from Montenegro to Slovenia all exists on a language continuum (I think that's the right word), but the emphasis on language versus dialect seems to stem from a want of nation-state.

This is not controversial topic. This is actually a scholarly consensus in recent works.

It's more like a group of languages

I really expected you to say "Standard Mandarin or Standarin" Anyway, the keyword is "spoken", right? As the languages can be mutually intelligible when written down. (or so I've heard)

Actually the current constitution of the CPC mandates education occur in local languages and all efforts be made to preserve indigenous language. For example Tibet recently achieved a 99% youth literacy rate in Tibetan, something that would have been impossible in the days of religious government. The other side of the coin of people not knowing how rich Chinese languages are is that they also don't keep up with how rapidly the CPC has become progressive on preserving minority ethnic group culture.

I honestly have somewhat hard time understanding Swedish (as a Dane) ^^ I've had close working relationships with Swedes, and we often ended up speaking English, but probably mostly for my sake ^^ It makes me wonder whether my high proficiency with English is more about education than inherent ability with languages ^^

I try to correct people on this when I can. “Which Chinese?” Because there's a little too much ignorance on the outside and a little too much propaganda on this inside that the minority languages deserve to be aired. These are the same discussions I have in Thai where folks say ภาษาจีน (Chinese language) and I have to ask which one, which the response is usually a confused expression (but maybe it's my accent). When I talk about the minority languages in Thai and how the government pushed Central Thai in schools around the country to promote a united identity to quell descent with countrymen, they give me a nod (because they know there's a long and current history of propaganda). Asymmetric intelligibility is real. The sad part though is seeing young folks with no interest in learning their dialects because it makes you look ‘poor’ and doesn’t lead to opportunity-which of course reminds me of striving to develop a General American accent when I was young to not identify with the trailer rabble (hooray early onset classism I wasn’t aware of).

The subjects like Maths, English and Physics also don't have clear lines between them. Languages are basically a classification tool that uses an algorithm to determine categories to assign speech into, so that the information with a category in intelligible with itself. Technically this can lead to weird things like a first speaker, where (x = the amount of time explaining words) is just below the threshold value/equation result and adding new speakers interfering with the categorisation of unrelated languages. But it still works.

Congrats on the sponsor K!

This has the same energy as the idea of "Illiteracy" in the Medieval age. Where people who can't read and write in Latin was classified as Illiterate, despite their ability to do them in their Native Language. What really defines a language does blur in a lot of times. Looking at the Italian Example, and your analogy with Danish and Swedish... There's an Italian "dialect" that have different phonetic structure than Italian. Venetian / Lengoa Veneta Despite being called a "Dialect", many of its phonetics are detached from Italian and I hear that people call it "As if Italian went into a blender with other Romance Language and Old English".

There are 2 small number mistakes As of now the population in the mainland of China is higher than 1.4b, and while it will probably decline in the future, its definitely not 1.3b Also, most of the loss of other language influence is not due to government programs, it's mostly due to younger generations just not learning their parents native language, as there is no suppression of language diversity in China, anymore

Neither is Spanish. "Spanish" is the group of languages, including Castillian, Catalan, Gallician, etc. However because Castillian is the most widespread and the most famous, usually when one says "Spanish", usually we mean Castillian. Same with "Chinese" and "Mandarin" or so.

"Bonjour!" **"ah shit wrong one"**

(1:00) You didn't have a clear marker for where the sponsored segment started, and you made it appear as if it was part of the episode itself. Note that this might be illegal where you are from, and if you continue this, you might be in legal trouble.

I think we should just call it Chinese. It seems like there is this weird need to call out China specifically for doing something that literally most European countries already have done/are doing, which is making a standardized version of a dialect the national language. I don't see anything inherently wrong with that just as long as you also make teaching local dialects also important which I don't really think have been on the highest priority of either China or European countries.

K…as a native Mandarin speaker born in Beijing & currently living in Hong Kong, I’m having a hard time understanding why RU-vid recommended this video to me 😬 Feeling targeted 😂 But yeah I can confirm that Cantonese, Hokkien, and the Wu languages aren’t really dialects, they really are frickin different languages from Mandarin. I mean I can’t understand sh*t in those languages at all. Even though I’ve lived in Hong Kong for 5 years I still can’t communicate in Cantonese. It’s just impossible. Lol. Generally I only perceive the dialects spoken in northern China (like Henan, Shanxi, Shandong and stuff) as “real dialects” of Mandarin. They could be grouped as the same language. But once we get to the South… It’s just completely different.

Well boys, we did it. Italian is no more. From now on, we need to refer to what is commonly seen as the national standard language of Italy, as "Tuscan".

I think this calls for a video on Heinz Kloss and the sociolinguistic concepts he introduced

3:16 I loved the part where he said "It's Common Language time!" and common language'd all over the place.