One Line in 23 Chinese Dialects 

These are different Chinese languages and NOT dialects. Dialects are more than 90% mutually intelligible with each other like Australian and American English. These Chinese languages are as different as German and English although coming from the same ancestral language

Similar characters and yet…..

@@cyber1991 That's a very narrow definition of 'dialect'. Based on my experience, linguists typically don't differentiate between dialects and languages. The difference is mainly political. That is, whether it's officially established as a language or not. If you don't believe me, I suggest reading about the BCS "languages" spoken in ex-Yugoslavia.

@@Ramboldt Nonsense! Linguists do differentiate dialects and languages. A dialect is more than 90% mutually intelligible while a language is less than 90%. Go study linguistics in university before spouting nonsense. However, the Chinese languages are all descended from a proto-Sinitic language just like all Germanic languages descended from a proto-Germanic language.

@@cyber1991 ​ First of all, I don't know what you're getting so worked up about. Secondly, like I already said, the argument of "mutual intelligibility" does not apply to a lot of cases. I can tell you did not follow my advice to read up on BCS, so I'll be kind enough to summarize it here: Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian are three different languages because they are officially registered as such. Linguistically speaking, they're basically the same. On the other hand we have the Cakavian and Kajkavian *dialects* in Croatia, which are *not* mutually intelligible with the standard languages (Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian as we know them today). Conclusion: languages are inseparable from politics. Whether you agree with this or not is none of my concern. I also don't care whether you call Cantonese, Wu, or Hakka languages, dialects or 方言. I'm just pointing out that linguistics are hardly involved in what is or isn't considered to be a language. A final example to make this absolutely clear to you: German and Dutch could be considered dialects of each other, and before nationalism became popular, the people between Amsterdam and Berlin all had their own dialects that gradually wove into one another. Only when nationalism showed up and clear borders appeared, did the languages as we know them today come into existence. Think about that for a moment before acting all smart. Thank you.

Absolutely, I concur, as a native Cantonese speaker who also speaks Mandarin.

Min in early days as tribal languages basically predates most southern lingual groups including hakka and when being distinct it can sound very different because it is also generally the least influenced by northern languages historically, some of the really old form and word uses are preserved in hainan island alongside influence from cantonese, hakka, teochew and some other older zhuang and hlai language influences, and there are 13 languages on the island with some of them not in the han family. so when using the word "chinese dialect" as the way dialects are referred to in international standard, I will have to say you won't have a single day you won't get much less bewildered on the island 😏

@@baqikenny Yes, I think that western linguists tend to think of dialects in a narrower sense than Chinese linguists do. For instance, a Chinese linguist might travel to Germany and the Netherlands, and come to the conclusion that German, Dutch, and Frisian are very clearly just 'dialects' of west Germanic. I am not familiar with the Min dialects, but I have heard that they are very ancient and very divergent, and if you see 'Chinese' as a term that means a language family, rather than just a single language, then you might even think that some of these southern 'dialects' are not even part of this 'Chinese family'--they are so different and ancient. They are Sino-Tibetan, but not really Chinese (let me know if that's an accurate description).

@@baqikenny I am Hainanese from Simgapore and appreciate very much your comments on Hsinanese which is regarded as a Min branch dialect and very ancient. For instance "see or look" is "mo"; Hockien: "kua"; Teochew "toi" from Cantonese "tai"; Hakka "kon" from Mandarin "kan"..Chinese linguistics fascinating indeed.

@@kmsoh5585 haha yes, indeed, "mo" is special and I haven't seen a lot of places in the south use it like we do for the usual "see or look", the original word is 眸 I think, there exists a profane expression also used in hk like 眸乜卵?Mou Mak Lan, is like combined cantonese and min, meaning "what the fxxk are you looking at?" Heres some other examples, as you know, the word "Bbui Nong" is used to mean "sibling" besides the word YaDdiJeMue兄弟姐妹, Bbui nong is usually written as 贝侬 in chinese, but it originated from the Zhuang word "Beixnuengx", which was carried to hainanese min by Be language(lingao) migrated to the island from guangxi as early as Qin dynasty. The Thai word พี่น้อง and the old Lao word ພີ່ນ້ອງ are of the same origin. There's also a bunch of Malaysian loanwords, like sabun for soap, tracing back arabic صابون, Gosong for satirical ridicule to nothing can be done, tracing back to Kosong in malay. Dongkat as old man's walking cane, from tongkat meaning stick in Malay just to name a few.

many dialects are actually using ancient chinese vocabulary

chinese characters the same just the pronunciation diff

the northern dialects just sounds like mandarin spoken with a slightly different tone, the southern dialects on the other hand, you can't even make head or tail out of it if you don't speak it lol.

@@lyhthegreat It's probably because Mandarin isn't the first language for many in the South.

That's true😂When southerners hear us northerners talking, they alwaya think that we're having a quarrel, but we just speak normally

I think the opposite. Southern dialects are very harsh and Northern dialects are very elegant, I'm a southern Chinese fyi

@@jiuncho4435 I think it just depends on the people talking, and it's not the language itself.

just like to point out, it's not accurate to say northern dialects sound close to Mandarin because what they speak is Mandarin (官话), but not the Standard Mandarin (普通话).

You can’t use one sentence to make that sort of assessment. Listen to a whole dialogue. They are COMPLETELY different

The northern dialects are just dialects of standard mandarin ! Whereas most southern dialects are in fact dialects of others chinese languages .

That’s pretty cool, because as the dialects went further north the more i could understand, i speak mandarin as my mother is from ShenYang 😂

Oh my god, I'm so sorry, she typed it to me and I was mistaken. Thank you for pointing this out.

@@ChinesewithJessie You’re welcome! My friend who is from Bozhou told me a fun fact that even CCTV(China Central television) news reporter read it as Haozhou for many times before lol. Some Chinese cities names are really confusing.

As a learner of Chinese, I feel reassured 👍 I often mix up characters 😅

@@minghaozhang9853 Why is it like that?

@@prasanth2601 There is a little difference at the bottom part between that two characters. So they have different pronounce and meanings.

I worked for six months in Taiwan, and Taiwanese is basically Hokkien (not surprising as a majority of Taiwanese have ancestry from Fujian)

A language, dialect or accent (sound or tone) really depends on the individual’s preference or personality in character of how he/she speaks. Hokkien or in some places Min dialect is actually rough and loud. Haha

All the Northern examples were clearly the same language. I could understand all of them. Just slightly different accents.

Thank you for your support!

gaginang ah

Teochew sounded nothing like the standard mandarin dialects.

Cici's accent sounded really soft and elegant with the nice flowing sound of Teochew, it sounds like a very poetic and not too pressured language.

@@alexlim6300 teochew is a full-blown language, nothing like mandarin! the level of similarity between them is like english and spanish

⁠@@katherineamelia98more like cantonese and english or swedish and arabic

I liked the music though, maybe it depends on the device? Or it's just me being too used to videos with background music lol. Great video indeed.

@@CL-ui8jx Being used to music in videos is as you say probably why you’re less sensitive to it. I find that music that is supposed to be background music is always too loud and thus distracting. It was already too loud for Jessie’s interaction then when it got to the girl with the black dress I didn’t even hear a word she said. Unfortunate. It’s be nice if music was kept for non-speaking parts of a video. Thanks for replying.

@@tokyochemist Hi, thank you for your suggestion. I actually paused the music when the girl in black was talking, she's an owner of a clothing store, that's the music in her store. I tried to denoise the audio when editing too but didn't work so well. I apologize for that. There was no music but I decided to add the music for the rest of the video at the last minute, I don't know what got into me lol. But your suggestion is deeply appreciated and I'll definitely work on that next time.

Thank you Minh!

Norwegian, Swedish and Danish definitely are very closely related, while Finnish doesn't have anything in common, it shares language group with Hungarian and Estonian.

@@Analfeber Exactly a very similar situation to China. Several separate and distinct language groups. Many of which would be considered "separate languages" but The Communist government claims all Chinese languages are "dialects" of one common language.

yeah my parents are from the same city (ningde, fujian) and even their native tongues ("dialects") sound completely different to each other, let alone from standard chinese

I get the reasoning for grouping them under the same language, because even though some vocabulary may be exclusive to certain languages, not to mention some languages having completely different pronunciations, the writing system is still the same. You can read 大家早上好 in cantonese, hakka and sichuanese, and it'd still mean the same thing with the same grammatical structure It's said that once you pick up a chinese language, you'd have no trouble picking up any of the dialects, it just takes a fair bit of listening and updates to your vocabulary

@@randot6675 the thing with the Chinese languasges is the written script has nothing to do with the spoken languages. Different languages associate compleltely different words to the same characters. . Therefore there is no justification for calling completely different and seperately evolved languages "dialects". . some of the languages don't even belong to the same language groups.

Well it’s hard. Not exactly like some Northerners could understand Cantonese 😅. It’s similar to pu tong hua but still different and northern dialects are in the same situation

我完全听不懂潮汕话😂

Thank you! This seems to be difficult for people, especially for Chinese people, to understand, and I find it quite annoying.

Exactly 💯

topolects

True

I think I would call most of the northern examples dialects, while the southern ones were more separate languages. Like 粤话 is clearly a language

true, but she said dialects of "chinese", not mandarin. chinese isn't a language, just more of an umbrella term for all of the languages spoken there

The Teochew girl speaks Teochew really cute. Usually it's like being yelled at by a ruffian/ gangster/ warlord. LOL. I really liked the [th] sounds from the Guangxi (I think) guy. Very different phonology from the rest of the Chinese languages.

@@Jumpoable you meant the sound when he pronounced 心？

@@rickr9435 Yeah I think some [s] sounds in most Chinese languages become [th] in the dialects around the Guangxi region, (further turning into [t] sounds in Sino-Viet). It's just like the phenomenon of [s] sounds turning into [th] sounds in European Castilian Spanish.

@@Jumpoable Then you never heard the real Teochew before: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-cDuUuimV3Rw.html

@@Jumpoable It's the same in Hainanese

that's mostly the northern dialects...if you speak mandarin, you can roughly tell most what they are saying if you listen carefully. Southern dialects on the other hand is lol...

@@lyhthegreat lol ya, I would happily classify them as proper languages n not just dialects.

@@IcyTorment I just hope we can hold on to our dialects or else they will die off within the next few generations.

@@IcyTorment It's more like Chinese (or more accurately, Sinitic) is a broad language family, at the same level of equivalence as Germanic, Romance or Slavic language family groups.

Hi Jesse, as far as I know the northern(or mandarin) accents start from Nanjing in this video

There is no linguistic difference between a dialect and a language.

Yup, same for us as Hakkas. I believe it depends which tribe/sub-dialect each location's Chinese originally came from. Even those as close as KL and Ipoh are different, like my friend and myself.

The reason why you see lots of people speaking their dialects are young people is that there isn’t a sanction that prevents them speaking the local language, but to guarantee the widespread use of Mandarin, there has to be some way to limit the use, eg. at school. So it’s okay to speak at home, in the streets, etc.

WTF? "a lot of them are going extinct" ? because of the "mainland policy of one people, one language"? no man, you don't know what you're talking about so stop acting like that. there's no such thing as "mainland policy of one people one language" are you F serious? you can't make a policy to eliminate dialect so be smart, it's good for your health.

@@hannibalyin8853 OK. Do you learn Hakka in school? Do you learn any other language other than Mandarin or maybe English? Did you learn any of the Chinese languages other than Mandarin? Officially?

@@Fledermausmann your comment has defeated all humanity's intelligence yet again, your understanding of the word "dialect" is profound, in an ignorant way. dialect is for local ordinary people's daily usage. NO ONE in China would expect some school to "officially" teach you some dialect, but not you apparently. why? maybe you are not Chinese, that's why. and to answer your question: 1, I don't know WTF Hakka is, so no. 2, yes, I graduated in 2003 so bear that in mind - that's almost 20 years ago, we have English major - of course, and Japanese, Germany, French and some other minor languages. 3, I don't because The official "dialect" in China is and always will be mandarin 普通话, that's why most part of the country you will find teacher using mandarin in class. of course there are so many ethnic groups has their own language class but that is not a "dialect", and also I'm not an ethnic minority, I'm Han Chinese so we learn Mandarin. your question shows your ignorance once again - if you don't know what T F you're talking about, then don't act like one and make yourself a joke.

I wonder if that's a universal thing? For example, here in the Netherlands, Frisian dialects in the north also sound more deep and pronounced than the ones in the south (North Brabant and Limburg). And same goes for English: the R in Scotland is more prominent than it the south of the UK. And in North America, Canadians generally sound deeper than people from the Southern states of the US.

As a Punti Hong Konger, every time I listen to different varieties of Hakka they sound like they are completely different languages, I could understand Malay Hakka the best surprisingly, but this is probably because there is also a significant population of Cantonese speakers in Malaysia which cause the languages/dialects to mix.

@@splooey2151 Maybe you're right about that. Although, there are other states where Mandarin or Hokkien is the dominant Chinese instead of Cantonese (some of their people don't even understand Cantonese), and the influence on Hakka is audible there.

The only 2 Chinese languages I can somewhat understand are Huizhou Hakka and Cantonese. I can't understand Hakka from other places that well.

There’s also hakka from fujian province. I met one, theirs is a little different from msia one which has more similarities with cantonese

one least known yue language is the danzhou cantonese in hainan island, aside old Min Nan influence it still kept more sui-tang period cantonese such that it has kept theoretically 70-80% of the original compared to modern cantonese do around 55%, but that's according to chinese linguistics since the 80s and I am not too sure about the depth of the studies

I hoping there's toisanese as well 😌

真的不是「只是聲調變了」，聲調很難學的！自己試著學學看就知道多難講得像！我自己學了五六種漢語方言，結論就是都不容易，北方真的完全沒有比南方簡單，音接近反而很難把差異掌握好～

Because the such called southern dialects belongs to independent chinese languages

@@emiriebois2428 yes this. I wouldn't call some of the southern ones dialects of mandarin. They're really their own languages, hence the (Cantonese), (Hakka), etc in parentheses.

The Northern dialects are accents/dialects of Mandarin. The Southern dialects are dialects of other Chinese languages, so that's why there's a huge difference!

hokkien has so many different varieties actually.

@Gachi Would you have understood Mainland Hokkien though (are they mutual intelligible to each other)?

Quanzhou type is different from its neighbours, like Zhangzhou, Amoy, Putian and what not, and even within the prefectures, the words and accent can be mutually unintelligible village to village.

Most of them are not mutually intelligible especially the southern dialects, we were taught Mandarin at school and that's the official language (some Cantonese areas are an exception though, Cantonese is still the main language and a lot of people there have a hard time speaking Mandarin)

Most of the Southern languages are totally mutually unintelligible. Linguistically, they're definitely distinct languages, not "dialects". Only the mainland Chinese call them "dialects".

The same text

Please don't feel bad, I couldn't understand some of them either!

Why is linguistic diversity depressing?

@@Jumpoable I didn't say diversity is depressing, just that they sound so alien so even understanding a little Putonghua it doesn't immediately help understand a lot these dialects. However the strength of Chinese is that Putonghua and the writing system is universal so that helps.

@@TheDaigoro75 Of course you wouldn't recognize the sounds or even understand most of the other languages in the Southern part of China (except for the ones in the North which are all derived from Mandarin) because many of the characters and words they use are completely different from Mandarin.

Actually it's not, it's still a Mandarin dialect, brought over by soldiers during the Ming & Qing. Southern dialects tend to be more conservative & retain more phonological features from Old & Middle Chinese, like consonant endings & more tones. Although I did here a [k] or a glottal stop after "bird" so it does keep what seems like a consonant final!

West dealing with Asia(dialects inside country and dialects outside country) 圆的，不能，拿（捏）. Push them to their recent-past enemies, oil-and-gas middle-east, food-farms south-america, (conmen-currency religions africa)

I think Suzhounese sounds beautiful ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-7ko5vtUgpFM.html

True

I didn't know anybody that spoke Mandarin growing up. I didn't study it until university.

learning mandarin will get you through the door, learning the dialect will get you to the top (in the corporate world, probably true in other areas)

Yes, because Putonghua is based on the Beijing dialect, & they are all grouped as Mandarin languages, as opposed to all these different language groups in the South such as Yue (Cantonese), Wu (Shanghai; Ningbo; Suzhou; Hangzhou dialects in Eastern China), Southern Min (Hokkien/Fujian; Taiwanese; Teochew) & Eastern Min (Fuzhou) & Hakka.

That's because mandarin is a northern dialect

@@EvilAbed both the northerners should be able to understand each other's dialects to a certain degree unlike the southerners

Of course

@@lyhthegreat so a mandarin speaker cannot understand Hakka or canto ?

Toisan is a very small dialect. It makes sense it wasn’t represented here.