Cantonese is very different from Mandarin. Is it a language or a Chinese dialect?

In 2007, a message circulated on the Internet in China that Cantonese was defined as a language by the United Nations. When 20 10 Guangzhou TV station broadcast the "Guangdong-Guangdong dispute", the news began to spread more and more widely. Supporters of Cantonese say that Cantonese is an independent language, not a dialect, and certainly cannot give way to Mandarin.

However, many people expressed dissatisfaction. Since Chinese characters are used as Mandarin, Cantonese can only be regarded as a dialect. English, French and Chinese are just languages, while Henan dialect, Northeast dialect and Sichuan dialect are naturally just dialects and local dialects.

In other words, why can a Cantonese who has studied English claim to be trilingual-"English, Chinese and Cantonese", while people in other places can only speak two languages?

This debate has been going on for more than ten years, but can Cantonese be regarded as an independent language? Or is it just dialect?

There is a big difference between Cantonese and Mandarin.

What is a language and what is a dialect is not strictly defined in the field of linguistics.

Generally speaking, linguistics has only one concept of "mutual understanding" when judging whether it is a language, that is, "understanding without learning the other language" [1].

Let a China person who has never studied Japanese listen to Japanese, and he may not understand anything except "Hay" and "Starling Road". It can be judged that Chinese and Japanese are two different languages.

What is the mutual understanding between Cantonese and Mandarin? Northerners who have lived in Guangdong must have a deep understanding of this. If your Cantonese friends suddenly switch from Mandarin to Cantonese, they are probably speaking ill of you. If you don't study hard, some people have lived in Guangdong for several years, and their Cantonese level still stays at the "thunder" level.

In In the Mood for Love, Hong Kong movies are all the rage. In order to prevent people from understanding them, movies have two modes/networks: Cantonese and Mandarin.

This is why many people support Cantonese as a language rather than a dialect. The gap between Cantonese and Mandarin is even greater than that between some European languages.

First of all, lexically, according to a survey of 1988, only 140 words are the same as those in Beijing dialect, accounting for only10.4% of the total [2].

You know, Spanish and Portuguese, which are completely regarded as two different languages, have a lexical identity of 89% [3]. In Spanish, "you, me, him/her" is "yo, tú, él/ella" and in Portuguese it is "eu, tu, ele/ela", and the lights look almost the same.

20 17 on may 26th, Spanish king and queen letizia and Portuguese president Marcelo visited the Madrid book fair. Portuguese and Spanish are so similar that the Fuehrer can roughly understand each other/vision china without translation.

In Beijing dialect, eating, drinking and watching are all Cantonese. If you want to ask someone "Do you know", you should say "Do you know" in Cantonese. These alone make people desperate.

In pronunciation system, the great difference between Cantonese and Mandarin often makes people feel that they are listening to a foreign language. According to statistics, the phonological intercommunication rate between Cantonese and Mandarin is less than 50%[4]. Cantonese has nine tones and six tones, while Beijing dialect has only four tones [5]. Think about it. When you ask someone "What floor are you on?" in the elevator, the other person's face suddenly changes. It is very likely that you said "you are gay (gei 1 lou2)".

Not only are there different tones, but there are also many voices that the other party doesn't have. In Beijing dialect, flat tongue Z, C and S are opposite to zh, ch and sh, while in Cantonese they are all pronounced as Z, C and s[5]. Therefore, it is not so puzzling to hear Cantonese people introduce themselves with such a strange accent as "big slag is good, I am slag, I am an ancient snail".

201April 14, Hong Kong, the 33rd Hong Kong Academy Awards presentation site. Tony Leung Ka Fai's: I'm Zha Hui. I worked as a comedian for a while, but I really can't blame him. This is caused by the pronunciation in Cantonese/vision china.

There are many sounds in Cantonese that are difficult for northerners to distinguish, such as -p, -t, -k and -m at the end of consonants. If you want to praise others for being "really nice", others will sound "really slutty", and the style of painting will be very different.

However, in the unique grammatical phenomena of Cantonese, such as "I am reading", "Jin" is equivalent to "Zheng", which means "I am reading". In "I ate my rice", "turn over" means "continue" [5], which means "I continue to eat my rice". Students in the north often look confused when they hear it.

Whether it is a language or a dialect depends on the comparison standard.

Since the gap between Cantonese and Mandarin is too big, it is impossible to communicate. Can Cantonese be considered as another independent language?

Don't worry, it's not that simple. If we judge only by mutual understanding, there will probably be thousands more languages in the world.

For example, although Arabic is the official language of 22 countries and regions, in daily life, standard language is only used for written records, and almost no one can communicate in standard language.

Just like classical Chinese, even in ancient times, most people used vernacular Chinese, and only in official records did they use classical Chinese to record/vision china.

For example, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Lebanon all speak Arabic in name, but the Maghreb dialect, Egyptian dialect and Levant dialect they actually use are basically unable to communicate with each other, so it is better to communicate with body language when they really meet [6]. Nevertheless, Arabic is still regarded as a language.

There is a similar situation in Japanese. Tsutsugaru dialect in Aomori, Japan is quite different from the standard language. Sushi is the standard Japanese and Susu is the standard Japanese dialect [7]. Therefore, the appearance of Tianjin dialect in TV programs should be accompanied by standard subtitles, but no one says that Tianjin dialect is another language independent of Japanese.

Foreigners are holding the Tianjin Light Dialect Competition. Although there are great differences between Tsukikuji dialect and Japanese standard language, it is generally believed that Tsukikuji dialect belongs to a network of Japanese dialects.

On the contrary, many languages are very similar, just because they are used in different countries, they become different languages.

For example, many people often claim to know eight languages, among which Swedish, Danish and Norwegian may be among them. These three languages are very similar. If you learn one subject, you can learn three. 1976 A survey shows that 95% of Norwegians say it is not difficult to understand Swedish, while 97% of Swedes can understand Norwegian [8].

1905 son of king Frederick VIII of Norway. His son, Olav V, successfully met Queen Louis of Sweden at the 80th birthday celebration of King Gustav of Sweden. You can see the subordinate languages of two languages, and you can also have intimate communication/vision china.

More extreme examples are Indonesian and Malay. Initially, both Indonesia and Malaysia used Malay. 1945 After Indonesia's independence, Indonesia unilaterally announced the use of Indonesian instead of Malay [9]. The original language has also been forcibly divided into two languages.

In fact, language division itself is not a strict linguistic problem. With the blessing of unrelated factors such as history, culture and even politics and nationality, each dialect can become an independent language. No wonder Weinreich, a linguist, sarcastically said that language has dialects of the army and navy.

Cantonese is not the orthodox successor of ancient Chinese.

But many Guangdong supporters have other reasons. They will compare Cantonese with ancient Chinese to prove that Cantonese is an independent language.

Jordan chan once voiced in Weibo: Cantonese is the real mandarin in ancient China. Many Tang and Song poems rhyme in Cantonese, but Mandarin is not. Because Cantonese retains a complete ancient phonology, and Mandarin has only produced a kind of "Manchu-Mongolian miscellaneous language" in nearly 500 years.

Many people think that Cantonese has such a long history that it is fully qualified to be independent of Putonghua.

Unfortunately, this statement is completely unfounded.

The indigenous people in ancient Lingnan area did not use ancient Chinese, but a minority language similar to Zhuang-Dong language and Miao-Yao language. Due to the inconvenient transportation, there is little communication with the outside world. Until the Han Dynasty, the main language in Guangdong was this minority language [10].

20 14 12 10, 2nd floor, Lingnan Guo, Shang Yue Ancient Village, Fogang County, Guangdong Province. Lingnan is mountainous, with inconvenient terrain and little communication with the outside world. The language they use cannot be called Old Chinese/vision china.

According to the Book of the Later Han Dynasty: "Where the toes are unified, there is a county. Moreover, retranslation is common because of different words. " It can be seen that central officials still have to bring translators when they arrive in Guangdong, let alone orthodox China people. Huineng, the sixth ancestor, was born in Guangdong. He was called "Yi Li" when he first met monk Hong Ren. Obviously, Cantonese at that time was not a positive tone [10].

Until the middle of the Tang Dynasty, Xinmeiguan Road connecting Shaozhou in northern Guangdong and Dayu in Jiangxi was opened, which facilitated the traffic between Guangdong and the mainland.

In the mid-7th century, the population of Shaozhou was only 40,000, but it soared to 17000[ 10] in the 8th century. These increased populations are mainly immigrants from the north, and naturally they also brought their own languages. As you can imagine, the embryonic form of Cantonese is a Creole language that mixes the characteristics of Middle Chinese and indigenous languages.

In 2008, Danxiashan Geopark, Shaoguan City, Guangdong Province. Due to the remote geographical location of Shaozhou, there is little communication with the outside world. After the opening of Meixin Road in Tang Dynasty, communication with the outside world was strengthened/vision china

What is Creole? Think about anti-Japanese dramas. The Japanese say, "What do you do?" This kind of transitional language, which combines the characteristics of Chinese and Japanese, is Creole.

Until the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, Guangdong and Guangxi were ruled by the Southern Han Dynasty for more than 70 years. The isolated and relatively stable internal environment gave birth to the early Cantonese. Then, the north fell into war again. Guangdong, far away from the war, once again attracted a large number of northern immigrants. They interact with each other, and modern Cantonese is a bit like this [10].

After all, Cantonese is not the perfect successor of ancient Chinese.

Although Cantonese also retains the entering tone system of medieval Chinese-P-,t-, -k and so on. Northern dialects are well preserved in nasal sounds and tongue warping. Some poems rhyme better in Cantonese, but others rhyme in Mandarin. Not speaking Cantonese is an orthodox descendant of ancient Chinese.

If it is the inheritor of non-oral ancient Chinese, Vietnamese has 162 vowels, which almost completely retains the phonology of middle ancient Chinese [1 1], and no Chinese dialect can compare with Vietnamese.

In fact, if Cantonese is a language, so are other dialects.

20 1 1165438+1On the evening of October 28th,11a Minnan drama from Qiong, Yue and Taiwan was staged in Hainan Song and Dance Theatre. If Cantonese is a language, then Minnan is also a language, so these opera singers have mastered at least two languages/vision china

This is really not empty talk. The International Organization for Standardization has a specific language coding system. In a standard (ISO 639-2), Beijing dialect, Cantonese, Wu dialect and Min dialect, no matter how different from Mandarin, can only be Chinese dialects [12].

In another coding standard (ISO 639-3), Chinese is not regarded as a language, but a language family. At this time, not only Cantonese is a language, but also Wu dialect, Minnan dialect and even Puxian dialect. In fact, according to this standard, Chinese suddenly became 14 languages [13].

Whether Cantonese is a language depends on whether other dialects can be regarded as languages. However, whether it is a language or not, it does not prevent Cantonese people from using Cantonese every day.