Reflections on the "Unity" of Spoken and Written Chinese and Academic Learning in China
by William C. Hannas
Chinese is not a language. Although treated as a language for political reasons by the governments in Beijing and Taipei eager to unify a culturally diverse country, or as something less than a language by governments in Hong Kong and parts of Southeast Asia, it is in fact a language group (yuzu), one of four such groups in the Sino-Tibetan language family (Mair 1991). Within this group of languages, most experts (Yuan 1960, Zhan 1981, DeFrancis 1984, Ramsey 1987, Norman 1988) recognize 7 or 8 mutually unintelligible varieties which in any other context would be considered languages in their own right. They include: (1) Mandarin, spoken in northern China, where the capital at Beijing is located, and western China; (2) Wu used by some 80 million speakers in the eastern part of China focusing on Shanghai; (3) Northern and Southern Min used on Taiwan, in China's Fujian Province, and in parts of Southeast Asia; and (4) Yue, often called Cantonese, used in China's south. There are also at least three "transitional" varieties (Gan, Xiang, and Hakka) spoken mainly in China's interior.
Some facts about these different Chinese varieties will shed light on the reality of the Chinese-speaking world, and how this reality affects academic learning. The first point to be made is that each of these Chinese varieties is, as mentioned, completely unintelligible to speakers of other varieties. This unintelligibility is on the order of what is found between the different Romance languages of Europe, which should not be surprising, since both are spread over vast areas and both had their origins in splits from parent languages one and a half millennia ago or possibly even earlier. Although some Chinese people, particularly those who speak standard northern Mandarin, tend to downplay the distinctiveness of these different varieties, these claims tell us more about personal prejudices than about the true situation. In fact, Mandarin speakers have as little success understanding Cantonese as an Italian has understanding Spanish.
Evidence for this is available even outside China, in the example of Mandarin speakers being forced to use English in restaurants to communicate with Cantonese-speaking waiters. Although pieces and snippets can sometimes be grasped from cognate morphemes whose sounds have, in a few cases, not drifted too far apart, this is more the exception than the rule. I have used the Wu variety of Chinese with friends to avoid eavesdropping by surrounding Mandarin speakers, and in turn have been quite effectively shut out of conversations by bilingual Chinese shifting from Mandarin to Min. Communication across these different varieties simply does not happen.
Part of the reason is different pronunciations, which vary radically from one Chinese language to the next in number and types of segmental phonemes; in number of phonemic tones, their contours, and their susceptibility to different types of tone sandhi; and in suprasegmental features. Equally important, there are also enormous lexical differences, especially in the common use vocabulary which amplifies the effect of these differences beyond their actual number. Even where the morphemes are cognate, meaning and nuance can vary enough to alter one's understanding of a word completely. Finally, there are significant grammatical differences as well.