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jefflaura...

M$1 March 03, 2009 11:30 PM

Is Mandarin a language or a dialect?

I've read that this has been disputed in the past, but is there a final answer?

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nativenerd

March 03, 2009 11:33 PM

Technically it is a dialect. But since it has been the official language for so long, it is the standard "chinese" language.

http://chineseculture.about.com/cs/language/a/dialects.htm
"There are many Chinese dialects in China. It is hard to guess how many dialects exist, but they can be roughly classified into one of the seven large groups, i.e., Putonghua (Mandarin), Gan, Kejia (Hakka), Min, Wu, Xiang and Yue (Cantonese). Each language group contains a large number of dialects. These are the Chinese languages spoken mostly by the Han people, which represents about 92 percent of the total population. We will not get into the non-Chinese languages spoken by the minorities here, such as Tibetan, Mongolian and Miao. "

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rickg

March 05, 2009 09:56 PM

One is reminded of the quote from the scholar of Yiddish, Max Weinreich:

"A language is a dialect with an army and a navy." (translated from the original Yiddish).

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elly2222

March 07, 2009 08:17 PM

Mandarin is a dialect. As a spoken language, it is one of many Chinese dialects. In Chinese, though, different dialects are not just differently 'accented' versions of the same language (like British English, Australian English, and Canadian English might all be considered different dialects of English). In Chinese, people with different dialects might not understand each other.

But the written language of Chinese characters does not depend on the sounds of the words. So in the Chinese language, there is one written language that is used for many different spoken dialects. That's why these very different dialects are all grouped together as the same language -- they all have the same written language.

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