Dialect Usage around China

[Takeshi]

Hmm, so it seems like Kunming, 四川, 桂柳 at least are all as strong or stronger than Guangzhou in terms of dialect usage; though obviously Guangzhou has much stronger media, it's really more from HK than anything else.

Though it's funny to hear the differences between the areas where the people "understand Mandarin, but reply in dialect", and "understand dialect, but reply in Mandarin".

Must be pretty inconvenient in all the dialect-speaking areas that don't have dialect public announcements though. Maybe it's not so bad for the Mandarin-related ones because it's easier to guess or it's not too different, but I can't imagine living in say Shanghai and trying to figure out all the Shanghainese names of places when I have to talk about them. Canto announcements are really helpful in Guangzhou. >_<

@OneEye: Ahh, I figured. I've never been to Taiwan, but I remember watching one Taiwanese drama for a few eps (比賽開始). It was set in Southern Taiwan, but I think the young people spoke in Mandarin while the old people spoke in Taiwanese; and they would often have conversations with both sides speaking a different language. I'm not sure how much this is representative of the actual situation in Taiwan though.

Speaking of media, I really want to just try and learn Hokkien from media; I'm pretty sure I could do it (to some degree) but I have no idea where to find like Hokkien shows. I listen to a ton of Hokkien songs, but I think this is different.

@abcdefg: Interesting. I noticed one of your other threads where you talk about this guy at a wet market who asked you "when you will learn their language"; but you said he could speak perfect Putonghua; I guess he is an exception? So you can understand Kunminghua even if you don't speak it?

I never knew Kunminghua was so strong; I expected it to be weaker considering how everyone in these forums promotes Kunming as a place "where people speak Mandarin, yet isn't as cold as Heilongjiang" or something. But I guess it makes sense if most people are locals.

@Steingletscher: Cool. Any link to some of those hip hop videos? I've actually never heard 四川話, kinda curious.

@anonymoose: Ahh, sorta sounds like Guangzhou in the sense that non-local public service workers usually understand Canto but may reply in Mandarin; except here a few number of young people will still use Cantonese when dealing with things in public too.

@liuzhou: Cool! So you can speak 桂柳话 I guess? When you say the vast majority of the teachers fail Putonghua exams, is it like, in schools do teachers end up speaking in 桂柳话 anyways even if they technically aren't supposed to?

@hainandao: Got the book; so far after reading the first two chapters I really only found out things I already knew. (Except for the fact that Wuchow speaks Cantonese; never knew that) I'll keep at it tho, might be some more interesting stuff later. I am kind of worried about the age of the book though; China has changed a lot in the last 20 years...

[Steingletscher]

It's only some times I'm replied to by store keepers in 四川话 as opposed to 普通话，I guess it depends on the person.

I don't have any hip-hop videos at the moment, but I do have a video on my computer of a foreigner speaking perfect 成都话 with some locals. Problem is that it is on my computer and it was not allowed to be uploaded to youku.com, and has been taken down from the rest of the Chinese video sites. My VPN is too inconsistant (and at the moment isn't working), so I can't upload it to youtube. Next chance I have I will.

By the way, it's only 20 mbs, so is there any way I could upload it here?

[abcdefg]

@abcdefg: Interesting. I noticed one of your other threads where you talk about this guy at a wet market who asked you "when you will learn their language"; but you said he could speak perfect Putonghua; I guess he is an exception? So you can understand Kunminghua even if you don't speak it?

I subsequently found out that vendor is a retired middle school teacher. I can understand some Kunminghua after living here a large part of the past 5 or 6 years. I've learned to use some Kunminghua phrases when buying things in the local market, but that's all.

I never knew Kunminghua was so strong; I expected it to be weaker considering how everyone in these forums promotes Kunming as a place "where people speak Mandarin, yet isn't as cold as Heilongjiang" or something.

Unfortunately, that just isn't so.

----------------------

And as to the phrase endings, here it's "ga" instead of "ah."

One often hears things like "xie xie ga" and "zai jian ga."

[liuzhou]

@liuzhou: Cool! So you can speak 桂柳话 I guess?

Yes. I've lived here for 15 years, so I had to pick it up.

in schools do teachers end up speaking in 桂柳话 anyways even if they technically aren't supposed to?

Yes.

Interesting. When I travelled around Yunnan and other southern provinces like Hunan and Hubei I remember hearing a lot of abrupt 哈s at the end of sentences, I wonder if that's related.

Yes the 哈 at the end of sentences is very common in Hunan. I lived there when I first came to China and picked up the habit. Still trying to break it years later - they don't use it down here. I still find it nearly impossible to say 谢谢 with adding 哈 to the end.

再见哈！

[gato]

哈哈！

[Steingletscher]

Fat Shady - A 成都话 rapper. He has a bunch of videos on Youku, so just look on the right. Another guy is Kafe Hu, but he doesn't seem to have any videos on Youku.

Foreigner speaking perfect 四川话 (on youtube).

[liuzhou]

Here is a tongue-in-cheek example of 桂柳话.

[Lu]

Speaking of media, I really want to just try and learn Hokkien from media; I'm pretty sure I could do it (to some degree) but I have no idea where to find like Hokkien shows. I listen to a ton of Hokkien songs, but I think this is different.

I used to get listening practice from The Talking Show, in which pro-indepence types discuss news and politics in Taiwanese (Hokkien, Minnan, whatever). You could try looking for that, it should be online somewhere. Taiwanese tv also always had some soap series or the other in Taiwanese going on, but I don't really know any titles.

[liuzhou]

It's early days, but this could develop into something useful.

http://phonemica.net/

[OneEye]

The recent conversation between me and Air under "Recent Status Updates" is, in my experience, representative of most people's attitudes in Taiwan about Taiwanese. Unfortunately, you have to read my crap Chinese to get through it though.

The few voices trying to establish a full-fledged way of writing Taiwanese are up against a tidal wave of people who think it should be written according to the way characters are pronounced in Mandarin because "otherwise we can't read it," as if any writing system in the world is readable without learning it first. The Ministry of Education has established a standard that nobody seems to know or care about (I only found out about it recently), and so Taiwanese usage is declining rapidly among the younger generation, and will likely continue to do so until eventually nobody speaks it.

The few foreign scholars trying to work on the problem (Henning Klöter being one example) are largely ignored, precisely because they're foreign. The few conferences on the subject are held in Taiwanese, only accessible if you possess an academic-level command of the language, which is made very difficult by the lack of learning material for foreigners above the beginning level. Using learning material for Taiwanese people is difficult because it tends to assume you grew up around the language and can therefore understand it pretty well.

As much Taiwanese as I hear around me on a daily basis, I still wouldn't be surprised if it dies out completely within my lifetime, the way things are going.

[Takeshi]

I read the conversation, I didn't understand it completely, but yea, I think it is unfortunate the Taiwanese is mainly written with Mandarin-pronounciation characters. Looked like both sides were kinda ranting tho, but lol, I'd get heated up if I was in a debate like that too x_x

However, my personal opinion is that I don't even support 臺語書面化 in the first place. (Oh, you are going to hate me )

Why not follow a HK model where Modern Standard Written Chinese (basically Mandarin) is used as the standard written language read with Taiwanese pronunciation, while Taiwanese is promoted as the spoken language? What do you think of this idea? Is it practical? Do people in Taiwan not do this already? Or is it strange sounding to read Modern Standard Written Chinese with Taiwanese pronunciation? (More ideally I'd say that Classical Chinese should be the standard written language; but nobody will agree with me so I'll stop dreaming.) This way the written language is the same all around China and people can still read what everyone has all wrote. It might not be real Taiwanese, but hey, I think it's much better than writing 我 as 挖...

Air does have a point in that if people don't understand the writing system, it's never going to become popular, because it's imposing a standard on people.

Written Cantonese became so successful actually because people who know Cantonese and have never seen Written Cantonese before can actually (usually) understand it. But the Cantonese people are starting from a different base than the Taiwanese people I guess because it has always been a normal custom to read Modern Standard Written Chinese with Cantonese pronunciation, especially among people who don't know Mandarin. This is why the (formal) writing in HK can be the same as the rest of China.

As to how Written Cantonese is understood by people who never seen it; it's simply because Cantonese people are accustomed to reading characters by their Cantonese pronunciation already; so Written Cantonese just uses characters that when read with Cantonese pronunciation should sound like spoken Cantonese. The degree of how "correct" such characters are varies; but at least they are meant to be read with Cantonese pronunciation and not Mandarin pronunciation.

Do Taiwanese people not have the concept of reading things in Taiwanese pronunciation though? I find this quite strange. Say like words like 中國 or something really really obvious; not even a grammar word here. I hope people don't see it and say "zhong guo, oh, it's Mandarin" but do understand you can say "in Taiwanese it's read like tiong kok". If you take this concept and extend it to function words and use characters that (even if they may be "incorrect") when read with their Taiwanese pronunciation will sound like the function word you want; then you have Written Taiwanese a-la Written Cantonese style. The only reason this could not work is if people have no ability to read things in Taiwanese pronunciation.

Heck, what do old people who only know Taiwanese and not Mandarin do? (According to my friend such people exist.) Are they literate? Can they not read texts using Taiwanese pronunciation?

EDIT: Ok, so I looked at your 我个英文無真好 line. I understood everything except the「个」But wow, you're right; that dictionary you linked to actually does list it for ê. I would never have imagined it though. Most people just use「的」and I personally have not made an opinion on what it should be; it's really a word without a character. I usually write it with「ㄟ」myself which seems to be semi-understood though. I only found out recently upon looking at the dictionary that the correct sound for it is「ㆤ」go figure. (//EDIT3: I did this because as I said, in Cantonese style it is custom to use a new character for vernacular readings even if it stems from the vernacular reading of a common character; this is probably done so that you don't get confused etc. So we never use「不」for "m" to mean negation, we would use「唔」The character「不」is reserved for its literary pronunciation of "bat" which is still means negation. So from my mind it feels weird to use the「的」character for ê so I tried to be character-agnostic and use「ㄟ」but if that is again a Mandarin approximation and not a proper Taiwanese 注音, then maybe I'll just go and use「的」from now on is probably better...)

While I totally understand agitated reactions against「个」(I mean it's an evil simplified character *gasp*... no wait... why is it in the 康熙 Dictionary?), but I find it quite strange that people would correct「我」to「挖」Even in Taiwanese song lyrics,「我」is used extensively and I don't think anybody has a problem understanding it. Same with「真」「个」is not really used though.

Heck speaking of Taiwanese song lyrics, don't you have a system going on there? I don't actually understand Taiwanese, so I really can't say much, but from my outsider point of view, it seems that Taiwanese song lyrics do have a fair bit of vernacular in them. (Compared to say Cantonese lyrics, which traditionally have no vernacular in them at all.) I'm not sure if the language in Taiwanese songs is representative of the actual language though. It is still a fairly ad-hoc system; I find it annoying that often times the same character can be pronounced in a few different ways and you just have to know it from the song/context. (「不」comes to mind; I see it used in place of "m", "boh", "put" etc (3rd one is rare); I suppose if "m" is really it's vernacular pronunciation then I don't have a problem with it, though written Cantonese doesn't work this way, we'd generally use a different character if the vernacular pronunciation sounds different, even though this technically makes it a "wrong" character. I have no clue why it is used in place for "boh" though, this doesn't make sense to me. Maybe this annoys me only because I don't actually know Taiwanese, I dunno.)

FAKE EDIT: Actually, maybe your use of「个」might be wrong? Looking at the examples in that dictionary, yes it is used to represent ê, but only in phrases like「兩个人」、「這个物件」etc where it is used as a 量詞 or 代詞. Look at the entry for「的」you can see it used as a 助詞.

「我的英文無真好」is exactly the style used in Taiwanese song lyrics; anyone who says they can't understand that line shouldn't be able to read Taiwanese song lyrics either.

EDIT2: But wow! This is a very useful Taiwanese dictionary!!! Omg thanks! I have always been looking for one! Unfortunately it doesn't go Xxxx -> Taiwanese, so I can't look for words I don't know yet, but meh, this is still useful enough.

[Lu]

The few voices trying to establish a full-fledged way of writing Taiwanese are up against a tidal wave of people who think it should be written according to the way characters are pronounced in Mandarin because "otherwise we can't read it," as if any writing system in the world is readable without learning it first. The Ministry of Education has established a standard that nobody seems to know or care about (I only found out about it recently), and so Taiwanese usage is declining rapidly among the younger generation, and will likely continue to do so until eventually nobody speaks it.

The few foreign scholars trying to work on the problem (Henning Klöter being one example) are largely ignored, precisely because they're foreign. The few conferences on the subject are held in Taiwanese, only accessible if you possess an academic-level command of the language, which is made very difficult by the lack of learning material for foreigners above the beginning level. Using learning material for Taiwanese people is difficult because it tends to assume you grew up around the language and can therefore understand it pretty well.

Yes, exactly this. Sorry for the big quote. I couldn't agree more. Except for one thing: from what I've seen there are actually quite some learning materials for foreigners. Granted, there is a lot more for Mandarin, but there is enough that an old classmate of mine could fall into the old trap of collecting textbooks instead of actually studying. (I went the exact other direction and learned from the first textbook they put in front of me, which was the old-fashioned but solid Maryknoll book.)

Air does have a point in that if people don't understand the writing system, it's never going to become popular, because it's imposing a standard on people.

But then how on earth do people get to write Mandarin? How do they learn English? Do they understand that without having learned it? Is Mandarin in any way not an imposed standard? Too many Taiwanese people seem to think 'I am well educated and I can speak Taiwanese, therefore anything related to Taiwanese that I don't immediately get is too difficult and therefore bad'. Or something like that.

Simply reading Mandarin with Taiwanese pronunciation is not going to work well, I'm afraid. For one thing, Taiwanese grammar is a bit different from Mandarin, so the reader would need to convert sentences while reading. This is of course not impossible, but it needs to be trained. Given many people's attitude on studying in relation to Taiwanese, they likely won't learn this. The result would likely be Taiwanese pronunciation with Mandarin grammar, which will be bad in all kinds of ways.

Furthermore, there are some Taiwanese characters that will fall out of use even more and be totally forgotten this way. Just like Cantonese, Taiwanese actually already has a number of characters perfectly suitable for writing it. It would be a pity to just abandon those.

In addition, this will mean that people still can't write their mother tongue.

Some years ago I saw a documentary on the aftermath of the 921 earthquake. A girl had lost her parents, her house, everything. The documentary followed her as she built up a life of her own. At some point, I assume on the advice of a psychologist or sth, she wrote a letter to her parents on how her life was now, some years after the quake. Throughout the movie we had seen her speak Taiwanese only, clearly this was her language, the language she thought in, dreamed in, had her emotions in. Suddenly we hear her speak Mandarin, which she spoke well enough, but clearly as a second language. She was reading aloud the letter to her dead parents. This meant that she could not write about her emotions in her own mother tongue.

There are many languages that have no written system, but if a language is to function in the modern world, it needs to be written or it is crippled.

[OneEye]

Why not follow a HK model where Modern Standard Written Chinese (basically Mandarin) is used as the standard written language read with Taiwanese pronunciation, while Taiwanese is promoted as the spoken language?

Well, I don't think Taiwanese will ever be promoted as the spoken language. I'm sure there are people who would love to get rid of Mandarin entirely, but in reality, that's just not going to happen. I do like the idea that some people have put forward, to establish a Taiwanese Vernacular literature. It probably won't (and shouldn't, IMO) replace standard Chinese any time soon, but having stories, novels, magazines, etc. written in Taiwanese will go a long way toward preserving and promoting the language.

I don't know of anyone who reads standard Chinese with Taiwanese pronunciation, though they're probably out there. Of course, it could be done. The question is, are people willing to do that? As far as your question about old people who only speak Taiwanese, I really don't know.

The thing is, people do know that, like you said, 中國 is tiong kok in Taiwanese, or 好 is hó, etc. I think 足久無看 is pretty recognizable as being Taiwanese (equivalent to 好久不見), as is 你食飽未 (你吃飽了沒). But for some reason, some words just get completely screwed up. 我 is a great example. The Taiwanese first person pronoun guá should quite obviously be written 我, but often gets bastardized to 哇, 挖, or the like.

I'm all for using characters for their phonetic value, even if they may be incorrect, as you say. That's how the writing system works, and how it has worked since the beginning. What makes no sense is to use them for their phonetic value in a different language than the one you're trying to write, which ends up making the whole thing a big mess. It gets even worse when you start talking about 入聲字, of course.

There are materials out there for Taiwanese people who want to learn to read written Taiwanese, or even to read classical Chinese with Taiwanese pronunciation. There are 台語文 readers, audio recordings of the classics being read in Taiwanese, etc. That last site unfortunately calls it 古語, doing nothing to dispel the absurd myth that, as one of my teachers put it, "Confucius spoke 台語. It hasn't changed in 2500 years."

So anyway, there is an established and recognized way of reading Chinese characters with Taiwanese pronunciation. There are shelves at the flagship 誠品 book store, not to mention 台灣ê店, full of books on the subject, audio recordings of classics, fables, folk songs, etc. There are dictionaries like the one I posted above, or the 《台華雙語辭典》. The problem is, the shelves remain full because nobody's buying them. A lot of people think it shouldn't or can't be written down, and shouldn't be taught formally, but passed down orally from generation to generation. But then they raise their kids to speak Mandarin. These kids grow up, get embarrassed about the fact that they hardly speak Taiwanese, but they think it's too late because, after all, it must be passed down orally, not taught formally. And so on.

Except for one thing: from what I've seen there are actually quite some learning materials for foreigners. Granted, there is a lot more for Mandarin, but there is enough that an old classmate of mine could fall into the old trap of collecting textbooks instead of actually studying. (I went the exact other direction and learned from the first textbook they put in front of me, which was the old-fashioned but solid Maryknoll book.)

I have to admit I'm guilty of collecting textbooks. A friend gave me the Maryknoll books and recordings, but they use the 台中 dialect which some of my friends have said they have a bit of a hard time understanding. I bought one called Spoken Hokkien, which I then discovered teaches the 台南 dialect, which is even further away. So I'm using Harvard Taiwanese 101, which uses the 台北 dialect. I haven't seen anything for foreigners higher than beginner-level though, except for Talks On Chinese Culture like I mentioned earlier. But I'm open to recommendations!

I did find one of those "3000 sentences" type books. It's Japanese-Taiwanese-Mandarin, with recordings. I plan to use it after the Harvard book, but it really isn't a textbook, just a list of sentences. I don't mind that so much though.

[li3wei1]

I seem to remember hearing about overseas Chinese in the US teaching their children Taiwanese, and there even being some Taiwanese-language schools in some areas. But I've been wrong before. Anyone know anything about this?

[Takeshi]

Sorry, I just made some massive edits to my post because for some reason when I refreshed the page I didn't see your posts and I thought my post was the latest one; try reading them.

@Lu: Sorry of course I do not support in any way the writing of Taiwanese using Mandarin pronunciation characters. This is just wrong. The only people who should ever do this are people who don't speak Taiwanese and are trying to borrow some Taiwanese words in their Mandarin.

Yes, Written Mandarin was also an imposed standard, but it still makes sense. I'd figure that anybody who could speak Mandarin and write Classical Chinese could look at a vernacular Mandarin text and easily figure out what it was saying.

Cantonese is a purely oral language too, but it doesn't have a problem because Cantonese sounds can be used to read Standard Chinese. When Cantonese people pick up that letter they wrote to their dead parents, they won't have to switch to Mandarin to read it; they could read it out loud with Cantonese sounds, but it just won't be the way they speak because the literary language is different.

While OneEye says nobody does this in Taiwanese, I don't really see why it's so hard. Taiwanese is morpheme-wise closer to Mandarin than Cantonese is imo. (At least from my experience of looking at Taiwanese songs) Many function words that are a different character in Cantonese are the same character (as Mandarin) in Taiwanese. I'm thinking of 的, 是, 不 etc, which would be 嘅, 係, 唔 in Canto, but still 的, 是, 不 in Taiwanese (if you are ok with reading 的 as ê and 不 as m). Even I can read very very very basic Chinese lines in Taiwanese sometimes. But I guess if there was never such a tradition, it will always be weird.

@OneEye: It's nice to know the concept of reading things in Taiwanese seems to exist? Why some characters get bastardized is beyond me...

[OneEye]

I did end up correcting myself the 个 thing once I found that entry. I have seen it used in that situation, but apparently it isn't standard. I'd be OK with people using it though. I'd be OK with a Japanese-esque mix of Chinese characters and bopomofo. I'd be OK with making up new characters for the syllables nobody agrees on. Just as long as it's reasonably internally consistent, I'm happy. Random borrowings based on Mandarin pronunciation doesn't fall under that category.

I think the problem is really more sociolinguistic than anything else though, and unfortunately I don't have the knowledge to tackle it from that angle. I can talk until I'm blue in the face about the linguistic side of things, but people's ideas about their own languages are anything but logical, often involving nationalism, ethnocentricity, and all kinds of other nice things. Oh well.

[Takeshi]

Haha, I know what you mean.

[Lu]

I have to admit I'm guilty of collecting textbooks. A friend gave me the Maryknoll books and recordings, but they use the 台中 dialect which some of my friends have said they have a bit of a hard time understanding. I bought one called Spoken Hokkien, which I then discovered teaches the 台南 dialect, which is even further away. So I'm using Harvard Taiwanese 101, which uses the 台北 dialect. I haven't seen anything for foreigners higher than beginner-level though, except for Talks On Chinese Culture like I mentioned earlier. But I'm open to recommendations!

Maryknoll has a book 2 as well, which I got started on after about a year, but I suppose that's still not that high-level. Perhaps I should have worried about dialect, but I never had trouble being understood in the little Taiwanese that I had, nor had I any trouble understanding things like the Talking Show or the radio (the easy parts, that is).

Cantonese is a purely oral language too...

If I'm not mistaken Skylee writes a blog in Cantonese. It can most certainly be written and written Cantonese is different from written Mandarin to the extent that I have trouble reading it and there are sentences that I simply do not understand.

...but it doesn't have a problem because Cantonese sounds can be used to read Standard Chinese.

But what you end up with when you read Mandarin text with Cantonese pronunciation is not Cantonese, it's some kind of hybrid. Even then, I'm afraid that if one asked the average Chou in Taiwan to do that, they would read a few lines, say 'that sounds weird, you cannot do that' and maintain that Taiwanese cannot be written.

I think the problem is really more sociolinguistic than anything else though, and unfortunately I don't have the knowledge to tackle it from that angle. I can talk until I'm blue in the face about the linguistic side of things, but people's ideas about their own languages are anything but logical, often involving nationalism, ethnocentricity, and all kinds of other nice things. Oh well.

Yah, this is the problem.

[Takeshi]

@Lu:

Really? If I'm not mistaken skylee has been vocally against Written Cantonese.

And well, I guess the Cantonese way of thinking is it's the "literary language", that just also happens to be the same as the vernacular in the North, but that's not important. I have no idea how this idea managed to propagate either, but probably because around 100 years ago the literary language changed, and Cantonese people just went along with the change without immediately learning how to speak Mandarin.

[skylee]

If I'm not mistaken Skylee writes a blog in Cantonese. [/Quote]

You are indeed mistaken. I don't really support writing in Cantonese. I don't do it myself except when texting or transferring those text messages to my blogs. It is difficult to write it anyways as there is not a standard.