Job Discussion Forums

[eslstudies]

[arioch36]

[lumber Jack]

I've got pretty good qualifications for the subject at hand too 11:59, and I have never come across anybody before who would claim that Mandarin speaking professors from different provinces have big trouble with communication. I find that claim ridiculous. I worked in a university in Jiangxi for a while (a Gan language area) and educated people spoke Mandarin in a reasonably standard way, and certainly had no particular trouble communicating with people from other regions. And that is just ordinary students.

If you have passed exams in Chinese you must have worked with taped materials using the Beijing type accent (which is not "notoriously bad", it is just it has a bit of localized colour sometimes, and everyone likes to criticize the elite if possible). Otherwise, since you claim Mandarin is such a mess, and you have learnt the Hong Kong version, how did you understand the tapes in the exam room?

There is no inherent "neutrality" in any accent, but some accents are better known that others. The BBC accent appears in many Hollywood movies for example, since the cold and nasty villain usually has that accent (Hugh Grant films excluded). Internationally, English has two standards, and that is one of them. The older one, perhaps the one with the greatest geographical spread, but anyway the weaker one.

[11:59]

Where did I "claim Mandarin is such a mess"? All I said was that there is immense variation, at all levels of structural linguistic description (phonetics, phonology, syntax, etc.), and certainly more than exists between 'different' languages elsewhere in the world (such as in Scandinavia). And where did I state I had learned "the Hong Kong version" of Mandarin, and what is 'HK Mandarin'? And to the extent that 'HK mandarin' exists, how and why should it be better or worse than, say, 'Guangdong Mandarin' or 'Beijing Mandarin'? I had no problems understanding the Mandarin tapes, after all, we have tonnes of Mainland Mandarin TV shows here in HK and no shortage of native speakers to practice with, but Mainland professors here in HK have great difficulties communicating together if and when they all speak their own regional variants of 'standard Mandarin'. I suspect the professors you refer to on the Mainland unconsciously switch to a lingua franca type of Mandarin in order to achieve mutual comprehension. I think you will find that is also why most if not all TV shows in China have subtitles (they are not for the hard of hearing!).

[seventeenpercent]

11:59, you are absolutely correct about the subtitles!

[lumber Jack]

Why on earth would people from different places get together and speak regional language, if they speak decent Beijing Mandarin? When talking about regional language, it is hard to classify what is Mandarin and what isn't. That is exactly my point.

The subtitles are for the large minority who cannot understand spoken Mandarin (although Japan and Korea use a lot in native language broadcasts too, so not entirely).

If three English speakers from Glasgow, Durban and West Virginia get together, they may have some problems communicating. Just as in the Chinese case though, if they are professors then they will likely be able to move closer to the kind of English used internationally, and the problems will be reduced.

[seventeenpercent]

yes, that is also a reason.

another reason is for people to understand other people with thick accents.

just to let you know if you didn't, if somebody does not speak or understand manadarin and is from the mainland- it is very likely he or she cannot read most of the words comming out of the captions.

[lumber Jack]

As far as I remember, it is hard to know how many don't understand Beijing Mandarin, but it is maybe 40%. Those who cannot read are a much lower percentage - maybe 12%?

[seventeenpercent]

[lumber Jack]

It must be invalid if the percentages I have given are anywhere near accurate. Anyway it doesn't make any sense. Everyone knows, for example, that there are many people in South China who only speak the local dialects/languages but are able to read. However, I'm sure you are right that "thick" accents are also one reason.

[11:59]

It is not just 'thick' accents which prevent mutual comprehension between the various forms of 'Mandarin' in China. In fact, there is no 'Mandarin' as such. As I said before, to the extent that it exists it exists only in the abstract, as an idealisation.

Rather than one, truly 'common' tongue, there are (depending on one's analysis) many, many wholly distinct languages. It is true that there is a lingua franca of sorts � Mandarin � but for most this is but the language of education and TV news, and nothing else (as you note, this is especially true in the South).

The 'Mandarin' in Shenzhen and the 'Mandarin' in Harbin are as different as, for example, present-day German and English (viz., several common underlying structural, especially syntactic, features, common stock of vocabulary, common pronunciation, but nevertheless two distinct languages).

As I said before, I think the impression of a common Chinese language is but an illusion, created mainly by the highly uniform nature of the written language. It certainly has no relevance to the vast majority of China's population. In many areas 'Mandarin' is spoken with three tones, in others with five, and in some even six distinct tones can be identified. In general, the further south one goes the more tones one hears.

As you correctly stated, I think, most can understand standard four-tone Mandarin, but they speak other languages in the course of their daily lives. This is why, as I mentioned, TV is invariably subtitled in China and why Chinese people themselves have such a difficult time communicating with others from different areas (just as the Mainland professors here at my uni have considerable difficulties communicating with each other when they all speak their regional variants of 'Mandarin'). Many people (who, needless to say, are not linguists) refer to Chinese 'dialects', though interestingly they never actually define such terms (let alone offer a structural analysis). If the Chinese languages are 'dialects' then so too are contemporary German, English, Dutch, Swedish, and Icelandic, for example.

The term 'Mandarin' is much bandied about, and it certainly suits the Chinese government to refer to a common language, but this is a subjective and politically-motivated statement, not a scientific linguistic analysis.

There are no hard and fast rules with which experts can separate languages from dialects, or species from varieties, or streams from rivers, or hills from mountains, for example. Rather, the experts must draw their own lines, and these often need to be highly subjective and often arbitrary. There is no Platonic Essence to the things we call languages or animals: humans decide how to best analyse and categorise them. In the field of linguistics there is a whole sub-discipline devoted to language typology, and categorisation is the mainstay of biological analysis.

Above I drew a distinction between spoken and written Mandarin. To illustrate some quite radical differences in spoken "Chinese", I suggest you merely consider, for example, how the perfective grammatical marker is realised in various areas around China. In Beijing, it is '-le', in Gungdong it is often '-tso' (as it is in Cantonese), in Min (Fuzhou) it is 'o', in Hakka it's '-e', and in Wu (Shanghai) it is actually achieved through reduplication (repetition of the grammatical element in question). That is but one isolated example; I could list many more that spring straight to mind. Nevertheless, most people � no matter how they express the perfective � will claim to be speaking Mandarin.

[lumber Jack]

It rather undermines your own argument to use examples from areas that linguists consider to be separate language areas rather than the Mandarin area, don't you think? To compare the Mandarin of Shenzhen to that of Harbin is absurd, because one is considered to be a Mandarin area, and one is not. Do I need to find a linguistic map of China for you?


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_China

It is true, nearly every area has some strong dialect features. It is also true that in most places considered to be Mandarin speaking areas most people can understand and to some extent reproduce the Beijing-based accent used on national broadcasts. Just like BBC English, Mandarin isn't that widely spoken with a standard accent, but it is widely understood, promoted in education and used in certain "high level" spheres, and is no more an "abstraction" than any other kind of language term you might use - they all turn out to be slippery sometimes.

[11:59]

[arioch36]

lumber

[Henry_Cowell]