Yes, that's right, specially western linguists, that's why I also wrote Varieties of Chinese. The thing is that in Mainland China they are not still considered as independent languages for the majority.

For the sake of cultural conformity, the Chinese won't use the word "language". But to those of us who are descended from South China, we know better! Mandarin is definitely a Northern Chinese language, so different and alien. Hence in Spore, many of us of South Chinese descent struggle to learn Mandarin which has been made a compulsory 2nd language for almost 3 decades, leading to much misery and the well off ones going overseas to continue studies in North America, Australasia and UK..

Actually Chinese should not even be considered as an ethnic group. Rather, it should be a cultural group. Northern Chinese and Southern Chinese don't even have the same blood. Most Southern Chinese today are descended from the Baiyue people, who were conquered and subsequently sinicized by the Han.

YES EXACTLY!!!!

Nonsense! Did you read Chinese history? Southern Chinese are immigrants from the north! There are many records and each village has their own ancestral books to prove they are not Baiyue. Stop talking nonsense!

2:52 Southern Min, not Min

Kokonami Dai lol, I am a minnanese in Hong Kong, so I can bilingual user in Taiwanese and Cantonese

老表你好呀 我南昌的 嫩果砸女崽仔好k7

戳打木娘卖憋

Love you,lao biao

Wesley Z. W Yeah it's true

Orally, they are entirely different languages. It's only through the writing system and common roots dating back centuries that still unifies the various Chinese language families.

Extra Lite Not true, hong kong/macau/taiwan uses traditional written Chinese whereas mainland uses simplified. In fact, majority of the cantonese speakers outside of China uses traditional writing while mandarin speakers mostly use simplified writing system

Scripts =/= writing systems. Everyone in the Chinese-speaking world uses the writing system of Modern Vernacular Chinese which supplanted Classical Chinese in the early 20th century. Having different script forms does not change the writing system. You can use Simplified Chinese scripts to write Classical Chinese or you can use Traditional Chinese scripts to write Modern Vernacular Chinese. Just because they look different does not mean they have different meaning. This is not true if you rearrange the characters according to Classical Chinese grammar or Modern Vernacular Chinese grammar.

I want to mention though that they don't use the exact same characters. Cantonese has a written language, so does mandarin, but at school in HK students have to write "written standard Chinese" aka "standard Mandarin". The written form of the spoken language sure uses "Chinese characters" but they use variants and not as commonly used characters as the ones in Mandarin. Ex: 他，它，她，祂 all are 佢 in Cantonese. Sentence comparing: Mandarin: 我不喜歡喝水，也不喜歡吃東西。(Canto speakers understand this if they are taught standard written Chinese which songs also are being sung in) Cantonese: 我唔鍾意飲水，都唔鍾意食嘢。 (Mando speakers can probs not understand this that easily) Standard written Chinese: Literally just what was written in the mandarin one. In HK they have to write in a totally different way from how they speak, that's just horrible and wrong. (Sorry for that last sentence, it's just that it has to be changed so they use their own language at school too) Okay so translations: 喜歡＝鍾意 喝＝飲 吃＝食 東西＝嘢 也＝都 不＝唔 The words that were the same: 我 and 水 Mostly because they are nouns. In different Chinese languages nouns are often the same, but verbs, adverbs, adjectives etc... are not the same all the time ^-^ Fun fact: Cantonese is actually much closer to older Chinese when it comes to word usage than what Mandarin is :D And in pronunciation of characters too :D (Btw, I'm just a learner of both languages, so I'm just saying stuff I'm being taught by natives since I self-study and don't have classes) Hope this explained a little more that Chinese "Dialects" aka "Languages" (some of them) are not the same in word usage ^-^ They don't use the exact same characters for the same words either etc...

Lei hai heong gong yan?

yeah, the rest of the dialects sounds kinda rough and idk...barbaric.

If you move further up north, it becomes pirate like

Especially Beijing accent with that rrr sound, it does not come from chinese origin more like mongol and manchu influenced. Southern chinese are much closer to old chinese, the intellectuals had to move doen south due to constant attacks frm the barbarian tribes up north

对对对，很明显和家里的宁乡人的腔调比较像，和官方电视台的长沙话有些不同。

They should be able to understand but maybe have funny accent. But technically same language I think.

According to some personal research on Wikipedia some varieties of Mandarin have limited mutual intelligibility (that is, do not understand very well) with each other. So what you saw was quite accurate I believe

No, Mandarin dialects are not totally intelligible. Speakers of different Mandarin dialects have difficulty to understand each other although they are able to understand some words here and there (especially when the dialects are spoken slowly and formally) But in colloquial speech, understanding is quite limited for different Mandarin dialects.

Standard Mandarin is more properly called Standard Chinese linguistically.

@@frankyong2607 The written form, yes.

@@bigbowl5044 there is only one singular written form of Chinese i.e. the Chinese script. Therefore there is no need to refer to that script as Standard Chinese - that would be redundant. A Chinese professor of Chinese literature with a PhD from an American University (where both of us attended) told me Mandarin is Standard Chinese.

@@frankyong2607 妳識唔識講白話？Just kidding. I know what you're saying, though.

@@frankyong2607 For written form, the other written form of Chinese is already eliminated. For grammar, Chinese has different grammar between writing and speaking(for Mandarin, they are same). Because of China, the Mandarin is Standard Chinese for now, that is true. But if u know some history about chinese, u will see that we have various standard Chinese before China established. They become dialects for now.

Opposite

Certainly,it might be like Japanese. There are only two tones,higher pitch or lower pitch in Shanghainese.

湘语用长沙话代表也不妥，但是毕竟关于湘语的资源并不多

还有粤北土话，湘南土话，平话应该分成桂北和桂南，瓦乡话

mandarin, yue (cantonese), wu, min, hakka, gan, xiang (not by total amount of speakers)

hubei？

Why do Mandarin speakers sometimes refer to Mandarin as pu tong hua?

@@syllevineo "普通pu tong" means normal, “话hua" means language, yea so is normal language

putonghua is the first one，the one you labelled as “putonghua” is actually gan

@@Might0_God A better translation would be “common language”. Here 普通 doesn’t mean ordinary or 普普通通, but common as in 普遍通用.

泉州的可以听懂，感觉在听厦门口音的闽南语

Same here in singapore 🇸🇬 almost all chinese speak hokkien and Teochew here we can all understand the swear words first cuz that is the first thing most people learn 😂

@@zhenhuanwang9852 台灣和廈門同樣是漳泉混合腔

眉山话都没有

me too it sounds softer and not so harsh

@@intrepidclass828 I dunno, i guess its an opinion, I am from Hong Kong and I found Cantonese to be more harsh than Mandarin. I actually like it like that tbh.

@@Tyranitar66501 wrong

a bit

Not much, it's similar to the romance languages.

Not really, with context and words written out, you might understand a bit but without context and having never heard of it, I would say not at all.

I speak Mandarin, Malay, English, abit of Cantonese and Hokkien. I can't understand Shanghainese, Hakka, Nanchang.

*and japanese

Starship Uss Voyager I agree! Vietnamese ancestors actually came from Min Yue and Nan Yue and they brought their languages with them.

@@MinhNguyen-ff6xf vietnamese and cambodian are from same root

裆中痒毛遮洞 Chinese, Mongols, Manchu, Evenk, Nanai, and Khitan are from the same root also.

@@MinhNguyen-ff6xf you are very right! i'm a biologist and it has been proven that there is always a connections between languages that are related and genetic flow between people. so northern asians are more genetically closely related to each other and southern asians are more related. I would like to learn more about vietnamese culture though, even though i know that china had colonized vietnam for many centuries, in general do the vietnamese like the chinese or hate them because of history? and why is the vietnamese flag [red with a yellow star] so similar to china's communist flag? vietnam isnt communist.

@@hagongda123 how close are vietnamese and cambodian, enough for them to understand each other or is it like french and italian?

it’s has 9. The last 3 are different tones

No. The writing systems in different Chinese languages are actually different. Try reading Taiwanese/Hokkien and you will only be able to understand 50% or less. Many words in Taiwanese/Hokkien actually mean different things in Mandarin. In some cases the grammar is different too. Chinese characters are just like the Western alphabets. An example in Taiwanese/Hokkien lyrics, 想你的心遮歹款 毋甘願毋甘放 毋甘到遮準拄煞 你敢攏袂毋甘. I bet you would not have a clue about what it means if you are a Mandarin speaker. More example from Taiwanese/Hokkien lyrics, 啥物我攏毋驚 啥物我攏會擔 我有你 思念就會綴阮行.

@@fcfhkmelb If you know the sound changes that occur between 客家话 and 普通话, and you can read Chinese text, then you will find the text matches what the speaker speaks, implying that that variety of Hakka Chinese is actually intelligible with Mandarin in writing. By the way, a literate Chinese person in Mandarin can read other written Chinese vernaculars more easily than Japanese, Korean written with Chinese characters, or Vietnamese written with Chinese characters. The Hakka-speaking woman in the video is likely speaking the acrolect version of Hakka, and in this acrolect version, the written grammar is indistinguishable from Standard Written Chinese grammar. The basilect of Hakka is likely going to use more Hakka slang and colloquialisms, which decrease intelligibility with Standard Chinese.

kiwifruitkl There is no such thing called the Standard Chinese in the point of view of linguistics. Mandarin is just one of the many Chinese languages.

@FichDich InDemArsch No. Italian, Arabic, German, Spanish are all languages not dialects. So the Chinese varieties are languages not dialects. People have the perception that they are dialects just because modern China is one single country and has one official language called Mandarin. Imagine if China was composed of many countries like Europe and each used their own local language as the official language. People would not think they are dialects but languages.

@FichDich InDemArsch Is Spanish a dialect of Romance language? Imagine the Roman Empire still occupy much of Europe today (just like how CCP occupy much of China today) and the offical standard Romance language is Italian. Would you say Spanish is a dialect of the standard Romance language. And What is standard Chinese in the first place? Do you know Mandarin has the shortest history among all Chinese varieties? A dialect has to be a branch evolved from the standard language. But none of the Chinese varieties are evolved from Mandarin. If you look at the history of Chinese languages, Mandarin is definitely more like a dialect than other Chinese varieties by your definition.

呵呵，唯有美国瓦解了，美洲的土著语言、及移民者母语才能保存，不然2100年，大概就只有英语了。

@@timurjin6526 身為中國人，怎麼在意美國幹嘛？ 怎麼管到別人的國家去了 不是都叫別人不要干涉中國內政嗎？

Michael Z 武汉是西南官话属官话的 四川话也是

Alessio Leporati I think Italian and Spanish sound the same too.

Nice try

I think only Cantonese is distinct and sounds noticeably different.

@@Checkmate1138 they all sound totally different as a chinese speaker i will tell you

@@user-gy9ry7lb5n Oh for sure! But for us Westerners, it's not so easy to identify, unless we had a very keen ear. Even then, it's about the familiarity, and Chinese speakers will inherently have more familiarity than non-Chinese speakers.