Are regional accents that different in China

[Johnny20270]

Just a point of curiosity here ...

 

Do native Chinese notice strong differences in accents and is it as pronounced as for example people from England. Any native English person can easily tell the difference between a Manchester,Birmingham, summerset, welsh, Scottish etc accent a mile off

 

Similarly with the Irish accent. We only have 5-6 million people and to us the accents are very different from different parts of the country. Even in the capital city Dublin, which has only 1 - 1.5 million people, has 2 distinct accents from north and south of the main river. Its not as pronounced as it used to be in the 70's/80's though as people move around a lot more nowadays.

 

 

Would a Beijinger (is that a word?) be able to tell the different parts of Beijing for example

 

 

 

[simc]

Yes, there are very strong regional dialects of Mandarin. So much so that different Mandarin dialects might be difficult to understand if you don't come from that place.

Not sure about Beijing having multiple accents, but Beijing and Tianjin have a different accent.

[Hofmann]

In China, you say?

[Lu]

I wouldn't be surprised if there is a difference between central Beijing 北京话 and the 北京话 of its various outskirts. It's probably a lot less than it used to be though, with people moving not just within the city but also from all over the country.

OP, in the future perhaps you can consider first searching a bit for yourself. You don't have to know everything, but there is a wealth of information on China's accents and dialects and languages all over the internet and filling meters and meters of shelves in libraries, and it's not very hard to find. You'll usually even find a lot of additional information that you didn't even know you were looking for.

[Johnny20270]

Interesting, naturally I can't detect it but much like I can't detect differing French accents but I can detect differing American accents from state to state, however in the USA (which I have travel a lot to) 

 

Lu, I am specifically referring to accents, not differing languages or dialects. Its just a point of curiosity, that is if accents in China at a local level is as varying as say England or America.To be honest it comes as a surprise that even is one book written on the subject of Chinese accents (not dialects), given I have never seen one book in my life written on English accents in a UK bookshop, let alone a book on differences in Chinese accents. I can't see that being a best seller in a bookshop. 

[tooironic]

This something that I find very interesting and I have consciously taken note of over the years. In my work I meet Chinese people from all over Greater China so I've had the opportunity to train my ear.

 

Though there are exceptions, the general rule is that Northern accent pronounces SH well, can be nasally and tends to be quite fast-paced, while the Southern accent will often mix up S/SH, speaks from the front of the mouth and is often slower paced. Southerners also tend to drop off the G in NG syllables e.g. cheng will become chen, jing-> jin, etc. Some provincial accents like those from Sichuan, Hubei and Hunan tend to mix up L/N, L/R and others. Dongbei has a number of interesting features like S becomes SH, among others.

 

The main accents I can distinguish are Beijing accent, Tianjin accent (very distinct if you're used to it), Dongbei accent (although there is a difference between Heilongjiang/Jilin and Liaoning), Hunan accent, Sichuan accent, Guangdong accent (really obvious IMO), Hongkong accent and Taiwan accent. Shanghai and Jiangsu accent can be quite obvious, but I think it depends on the person. Fujian accent in theory should be easy to distinguish but in practice I tend to get it confused with a general Southern accent. Malayasian and Singaporean I could probably take a stab at too.

 

People often wonder which part of China speaks the most standard Mandarin. I think it really depends on the education level of the person, their speaking habit and whether their parents speak a dialect at home (many young people do not, many do not even know how to speak their hometown's dialect). In general though Northerners will speak closer to the standard, but I've only met 3 people so far who speak really standard Mandarin, one from Xi'an, and one from Shenyang, and another was a radio announcer from Beijing. And to finish off, just because you're from Beijing doesn't mean you necessarily speak more standard Mandarin than the rest of China. Some Beijingers speak with a heavy Beijinghua accent (they pronounce W as V-W, ING as IUNG, etc.).

[hedwards]

@tooironic, that's interesting, when I was taking mandarin classes the teacher emphasized somethings like ping to be more like piung and I was never quite sure whether she meant to or whether it's the result of overemphasizing that ending.

 

I think this is definitely an interesting topic, from what I understand globally it seems to range from countries like Germany and the UK with huge variation over relatively small distances to countries like Australia where there's basically no regional accents at all.

 

As pointed out earlier, any neighborhood accents that once existed in Beijing or the other large cities have probably been sanded down a bit by all the people flocking to the cities.

[tysond]

countries like Australia where there's basically no regional accents at all.

 

 

When I was in university it was relatively simple to guess which city/state people in Australia came from.

 

Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne all had their own accents and there were words that were only used in certain cities.  For example "grouse" was a word that meant "great" but only in Melbourne.  They may not be as big differences as in the UK, but they are still there and locals could tell.  

 

And if you get confused between Australian and New Zealanders I recommend watching this clip:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zs_rXxi0zhM  , we say "Where's the car" and they say "Where's the car".

[imron]

Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne all had their own accents

And there's the ocker accent on top of that.

[tooironic]

There are definitely variations in Aussie accents but I think the average Australian couldn't distinguish them very well. As a Queenslander I noticed we pronounce "oo" in fool, swimming pool, etc. in a weird way, like foouel and poouel.

[imron]

Once I was travelling in Germany and asked someone for directions (in English).  After giving me the answer they asked me if I was from Melbourne (I am) - which I found quite surprising.  Apparently they had a friend from Melbourne with the exact same accent as me.

[roddy]

That's an interesting question about accents within Beijing. I Googled up a couple of Chinese sites yesterday where opinion seemed to be that while there might have been some variation in the past, there's so much mobility nowadays that there's no real difference to speak of. I guess if you sat down with a bunch of non-mobile older rural males (Norms, in linguistics) who'd lived wherever they'd lived forever you might get some differences. And they'd have to be Noums, as not much of Beijing city is rural. 

 

But if you get a bit out of the city proper and search for, eg, Tongzhou accent, Changping accent, you can find bits of discussion, and it makes sense that there'd be differences.

 

On a wider geographic scale - yes, definitely. 

[Carl Chen]

Accents between China and Taiwan are different as well, so I can recognize people from China immediately.

[Lanchong]

Would a Beijinger (is that a word?) be able to tell the different parts of Beijing for example

The problem is that Beijing's accent has changed a lot in the past 60 years, because of immigration. This topic was mentioned on 鏘鏘三人行 a few weeks ago. 梁文道 claimed that Beijing proper used to have a noticeably different accent from the suburbs, and you still hear a few people (normally older people) with the old pronunciation. He said that people think of the "Beijing accent" these days is what would have been called a Hebei accent in the past.

If you have ever watched 北京人在紐約, there's a rich businessman who 王啟明 and 國燕 meet at a Christmas party (and later on at a birthday party). He has the distinctive accent which 梁文道 says is the old (educated?) Beijing accent.

I guess if you sat down with a bunch of non-mobile older rural males (Norms, in linguistics) who'd lived wherever they'd lived forever you might get some differences.

I had a quick look and found this video of 馬未都 saying that when he was a kid growing up in Beijing, he went to another part of Beijing for middle school, he couldn't understand his classmates: http://v.ifeng.com/society/200811/c74eca31-8a41-4c06-ab5f-3d74abe153d7.shtml

[Nathan Mao]

Makes sense.  The more a community interacts only with itself, the more its accent will develop its own special characterizations.

And the more people move around and intermix, the less strong the regional accents will be.

Which raises a question I've been mulling for a while, but unable to really find the right place to ask until now: Why is there so much similarity in accent between Taiwan and Southern China?  There seems to be a greater variation between North and South on the mainland than between Taiwan and the South Mainland, and the reason isn't immediately obvious to me.

 

Deliberate attempt to reject Northern (Beijing?) speaking styles to demonstrate rejection of the Communist regime?

Close/constat contact between Taiwan and Fujian residents?

 

@Johnny20270: there was a whole movie based on the slight variations in accent in UK: "My Fair Lady". 

[tooironic]

I dare say it's because the Han Chinese that populate Taiwan were originally from Southern China.

[Demonic_Duck]

Lu, I am specifically referring to accents, not differing languages or dialects. Its just a point of curiosity, that is if accents in China at a local level is as varying as say England or America.To be honest it comes as a surprise that even is one book written on the subject of Chinese accents (not dialects), given I have never seen one book in my life written on English accents in a UK bookshop, let alone a book on differences in Chinese accents. I can't see that being a best seller in a bookshop. 

 

Rule 34 of the internet: if you can conceive of it, someone has created porn of it.

 

I propose a "rule 34" of real life: if you can conceive of it, some idiot somewhere's written a book about it.

 

In the case of accents of the English language, I'm certain that it's a subject many different idiots in many different locations have written many different books about. Some of them weren't even idiots at all! I mean, it's hardly an obscure subject...

 

As for Chinese accents, it's an equally unobscure subject. I daresay 90% of those idiots have been Chinese and their respective books have been written in Chinese, but if we reasonably assume "a crapload" of books have been written about it, 10% of a crapload is still 0.1 craploads, which is quite a lot.

[Johnny20270]

In the case of accents of the English language, I'm certain that it's a subject many different idiots in many different locations have written many different books about. Some of them weren't even idiots at all! I mean, it's hardly an obscure subject...

 

Indeed you're right! I was curious so I looked at Amazon. Indeed there are a few books on English Accents

 

but first one has an Amazon sales Rank of 325,962. Can't see many turning up to that book signing.

[Demonic_Duck]

It's also worth pointing out that there's a continuum between "dialect" and "language", that "accent" is merely one aspect of dialect (rather than being a distinct phenomenon or a watered down version of the same phenomenon), and that from a linguistic point of view it's simply incorrect to call e.g. Cantonese a "dialect of Chinese" (it's a distinct Chinese language, as is Mandarin).

[realmayo]

 I am specifically referring to accents, not differing languages or dialects

 

Interesting. So the question is about how Chinese people speak Standard Chinese?

For people who don't speak Standard Chinese to the high standard required for professional work on TV and radio, the accent will obviously come from their regional dialect.

 

It's not surprising that most people in China speak with a non-standard accent. I think there's a tendency to assume that northern Chinese is not just the official standard, but also the logical one -- that because the capital is Beijing that's where things like accent, culture, etc etc will all be rooted.

 

That's not true though, it just happens to be where they based most of the rules of Standard Chinese.