# 汉语方言



## dojibear

汉语方言有多少不同？

I've read that the native language (母语) of about 2/3 of the people in China is a dialect of 汉语. I wonder how much the dialects vary. How well can a speaker from Chongqing (重庆市) understand a speaker from Changchun (长春市), if they are both using their native language (not 普通话)?


----------



## ovaltine888

It is hard to measure but the level of difference indeed varies.

As an American, you may compare how well you can understand the following to see how the difference ranges in Chinese.
1 RP accent
2 Cockney (London accent)
3 Scouse (Liverpool accent)
4 Scottish English
5 Gaelic (Scottish dialect)


----------



## ovaltine888

One thing to keep in mind is that 普通话 is mainly based on northern China dialects. Therefore, for people from the north, their "dialects" are generally more likely to be understood by a 普通话 speaker, except for limited regional expressions and some variations in intonation (imagining an American listening to a Londoner speaking English.)

By contrast, southern dialects are much more diverse. The differences from 普通话 are not just in the words and pronunciation but even in grammar and sentence structures, making it another language altogether.

As a result, I still remember when I was in college, we shared a 6-person dormitory and one landline telephone (mobile phones were not as common and rather expensive at the time). Those who from the north basically had no privacy when they talked to their girlfriends or family members on the phone because everybody else could easily understand what they were saying. But southerners could just switch to a dialect and talk aloud on the phone with no worries.


----------



## Flaminius

ovaltine888 said:


> 5 Gaelic (Scottish dialect)


This is not a dialect of English.  You may say that it is a dialect of the language that consists of Irish and Gaelic, but the thread topic is not cross-linguistic comparison.  I wonder what the Chinese term for regional differences inside Mandarin is.  官话的方言?


----------



## ovaltine888

I was trying to make an analogy to show for some Chinese dialects they may sound like another language.

There is no such term in my mind. As I mentioned, because of the origin of 普通话 most northerners speak very close to 普通话. Sometimes they think they are speaking 普通话 and they are not aware that they are using regional terms and tones. That is why some posts in this forum asking the meaning of a Mandarin word but it turned out to be a regional one.



Flaminius said:


> This is not a dialect of English.  You may say that it is a dialect of the language that consists of Irish and Gaelic, but the thread topic is not cross-linguistic comparison.  I wonder what the Chinese term for regional differences inside Mandarin is.  官话的方言?


----------



## gingerbread-mann

Figure: the Language Atlas of China (From wikipedia)

In my opinion, the answer of this question depends on location where the speaker comes from.

(I am not sure how to accurately describe the extent of understanding during communication.
But I try to score them. 0 refers that two speakers totally cannot understand each other while 5 refers that they can understand each other without any problem. I am going to give scores to the following cases)


> How well can a speaker from Chongqing (重庆市) understand a speaker from Changchun (长春市), if they are both using their native language (not 普通话)?


In this case, two speakers belong to the Mandarin dialect group. Although they inevitably speak with their own accent, they are still able to communicate each other (based on the premise that their speaking speed are the same, complete pronounciation). Score:4

However, if two speakers belong to different dialect groups, they may have some difficulties to communicate.

Take some examples of myself. I come from Shanxi Province(山西), and I learn and speak Mandarin in school, speak Jin dialect back home.

Case 1: After my graduation of high school, I went to college in Xi'an, Shannxi Province,陕西(Mandarin). It is easy to understand people speaking with their local accent. Score: 4.5 or 5

Case 2: When I went to Wuxi, Jiangsu(江苏) Province(Wu Dialect) for further study, I found that i had trouble to understand the locals who speak Wu dialects. Score: 2 or 3?

Case 3:And I found my roommates who came from Anhui (安徽) Province speak so fast that I had to ask them to slow down or speak twice at the beginning we met.  Score: 3 or 3.5

Case 4: When I went to Nanjing, Jiangsu(江苏) Province(Mandarin), I can understand most of locals speaking.  Score: 4

Case 5: If I watch a film of Yue dialect without subtitles, that would be difficult for me. Score: 1.5


----------



## KevinCheng

Generally speaking, as some of you who speak other mother languages already know and have often heard, Mandarin and Cantonese (as many Cantonese speakers go abroad) are the two popular languages (linked with Top 100 Languages by Population) Chinese people speak outside the world.

However, to define the word 'popular' is by the number of those speakers. In fact, we know the official language in China is Mandarin. According to that, nowadays, people in China, we were educated in Mandarin when we are in public places (such as schools, hospitals, shopping malls, and so on) with strangers. The reason why I present above is that, for now, a more younger people cannot say their dialects exactly natively. They say their dialects with some Mandarin words or pronunciations, and we call the languages they speak as X-Mandarin (X replaces the name of places, like Chongqing-Mandarin, Changchun-Mandarin). For that, in some cases (as there are too many different languages in China, as linked to Wikipedia), people from different places somehow can understand each other when they speak X-Mandarin.

Sorry, doing more background things above. Just as above shown, if people speak X-Mandarin, they would understand a part of their dialects with Mandarin words' help, on the other hand, they would only learn from those native dialects. Additionally for learning different dialects, I think that would be a different topic (how difficult to learn a new dialect and how different all dialects are and how different kinds of dialects transferred from the ancient and other topics, and so on). Plus, when we say 'understand' for a new dialect, we exactly need to be learned from others, just some are easy to learn and some are difficult.

In your specific case, Chongqing and Changchun, because of what 'ovaltine888' presented before.


ovaltine888 said:


> One thing to keep in mind is that 普通话 is mainly based on northern China dialects.


Changchun is a place they speak their dialect just as Mandarin (different with few words or pronunciations), so in this case, people from Chongqing could easily learn to understand (maybe just what meaning several words are) what speakers from Changchun want to say, but it may be hard by contrast for the different system of the language Chongqing speakers talk.


----------



## hx1997

Flaminius said:


> I wonder what the Chinese term for regional differences inside Mandarin is. 官话的方言?


Technically, they are 官话的次方言 (if 官话 is considered a 方言, of course). Colloquially, maybe they are just 北方话 or 北方方言.


----------



## Dymn

I'm interested too. I think dialects within Mandarin are quite different, as in intelligibility being quite high but still much more different than English varieties. Some questions for those who speak them:

Is there a stark difference between your dialect and Standard Chinese? If you listen to somebody, can you always tell whether they're speaking one or the other? Or there is a continuum?
Would you use your local dialect when speaking to someone who speaks another Mandarin dialect but is from far away?


----------



## gingerbread-mann

Dymn said:


> Is there a stark difference between your dialect and Standard Chinese?


Yes, mainly in pronounciation.


Dymn said:


> If you listen to somebody, can you always tell whether they're speaking one or the other?


It depends on the speaker's oral Mandarin capability. If the speaker make a quite standard pronounciation in 普通话(Standard Chinese), it will be difficult to guess his dialect.

If he does not well in it, his pronounciation will reveal some information about his dialects.

For example, it is quite easy to recognize Chinese Dongbei accent (东北口音).


Dymn said:


> Or there is a continuum?


It exists.
mod note: Video link deleted.



Dymn said:


> Would you use your local dialect when speaking to someone who speaks another Mandarin dialect but is from far away?


In my view, two speakers far away each other would communicate with standard Chinese as much as possible.
But sometimes, the speakers may unconsciously make pronounciation mistakes with their dialect accent.


----------



## KevinCheng

Dymn said:


> I'm interested too. I think dialects within Mandarin are quite different, as in intelligibility being quite high but still much more different than English varieties. Some questions for those who speak them:
> 
> Is there a stark difference between your dialect and Standard Chinese? If you listen to somebody, can you always tell whether they're speaking one or the other? Or there is a continuum?
> Would you use your local dialect when speaking to someone who speaks another Mandarin dialect but is from far away?


Shortly reply to Dymn, in my personal view, I may not say dialects within Mandarin, just because actually, the dialects are the languages they built basically on different language systems long ago even since thousands of years before, especially when we say the eight groups of Chinese dialects (linked to Wikipedia, Varieties of Chinese). 
Due to that, we can say Mandarin is one small kind of Chinese language (even though the number of speakers of it is the most now) which was created after the PRC had been proclaimed established. 

According to the above, answering the Q1, we can easily listen to another dialect and tell that is different, even though we cannot tell what the true differences are, because of the huge different systems of those languages, especially when we talk the Groups of Chinese Dialects. Furthermore, there really is a case that two speakers may not tell the difference when the first time they just meet by using different dialects, the case is their languages are built on the same group system and both are separately involved, like sometimes we may hear for Cantonese and Yue Dialect. There are many dialects belonging to Yue Dialect, as we know the most, Cantonese, and other languages people speak around the different cities or counties or even towns of Guangdong Province and nearby. The differences between them may even be just several words or pronunciations, but they can all say they speak Yue Dialect, not Cantonese, and they can easily understand each other.

For Q2, basic on the answer Q1 that people cannot easily or fully understand each dialect and for the time right now that not all people know how to speak their local dialect (instead Mandarin has already been popular), so we would not speak our local dialects with who don't speak. 

More things about speaking dialects are a huge part of topics. Because of what I present above, people would not speak dialects to strangers from other places, so in a big city (we always say in China, Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and so on about hundreds of cities), we basically are from different places around whole China, so we have less time to speak our dialects, and our children as well, for those children, they even cannot speak and no one teaches them. 

Sorry for lots of insignificant details, but the truth is the topic of speaking dialects is a big part. 
Maybe there is a chance to have other threads to talk about every single detail for that.


----------



## dojibear

Thank you very much, everyone. I learned a lot of information. And thank you for explaining so much in English, to help me understand. 

我每天都在学习，但还有非常长的路。


----------



## pimlicodude

The Mandarin dialects are not all mutually intelligible. The Chinese divide Chinese into "dialects" according to tone typology, not intelligibility. The Mandarin dialects mostly have four tones that descend from Middle Chinese in the same sorts of ways. But the tonal values vary. Village areas that theoretically speak Mandarin can be incomprehensible to Putonghua speakers. A villager in Qinghai speaking the local dialect may not be intelligible to someone from Peking. I was told when I lived in Sichuan that most Chinese people can understand Chengdu dialect (because Sichuan speakers are common in films), but someone from Leshan told me he understood Putonghua and Chengu dialect, but Chengdu residents could not understand Leshan dialect -- although it is categorised as a Mandarin sub-dialect. Victor Mair, the US professor of Chinese, was told by linguistic professors n Peking that, if divided by intelligibility (the general Western definition of a language), Chinese is actually around 400 different languages.


----------



## zhg

dojibear said:


> I wonder how much the dialects vary.


I think your question is, to a certain extent, a classification question. And you could try locating dialects that you are interested in, on some sort of "language family tree"(wiki) to tell how much they differ.

For example, 重庆话(wiki page) is classified under (漢藏語系-漢語-官话-西南官话-川黔片-成渝小片-重庆话), whereas 长春话 is classified under(漢藏語系-漢語-官话-东北官话-哈阜片-长锦小片-长春话)

Edit: I've found the following statement in 《中国语言地图集》(李荣等总编) for your reference. So base on the classification, I would reach to the conclusion that people speaking 重庆话 and people speaking 长春话 are mostly likely able to communicate without too much difficulty.

”汉语方言很复杂。比方上海人、福州人和广州人，要是他们不学习普通话，又不学习对方的方言，很难互相了解。但是，汉语方言中*官话*的一致性又很高。说各种官话的人，比方黑龙江的哈尔滨人，新疆的乌鲁木齐人，云南的昆明人，江苏的南京人，他们之间可以随便谈话，个人用自己的方言，没有什么困难。” -《中国语言地图集》(李荣等总编)


----------



## Deinonychus

Here's just a little personal experience.
As a northerner who could only speak 普通话, I would say that I cannot understand most, if not all, southern dialects. Perhaps the only exception is the Sichuan dialect (四川话).
Other southern dialects, such as 粤语, sound literally like foreign languages to me. And if a southerner says it to me, I am unable to comprehend maybe more than 10% of it.


----------

