Please don't use the term "dialect" or "language" in this case without understanding the background.
Thousands of years ago, when Chinese was first written down, the language was already splitting into different dialects, with very minor but noticable differences. They were called 方言 or regional speech (read in modern Mandarin as fang-yan).
Over hundreds of years these dialects diverged further, but being spoken in a relatively small area (this is still thousands of years ago), they still were not remarkably different.
When the Chinese empire began expanding, these dialects (still called "regional speech") were spread to the far reaches of the empire, and learned as a second language by indigenous people who were eventually assimilated, and loaned some words, grammar, and phonology to the dialect of the locale they were in.
Over such a large area, these dialects diverged and by the 1700s could be counted as languages (語言), but this term was used generally to distinguish Chinese from foreign tongues and sometimes foreign tongues from one another. Even as separate languages, they were termed "regional speech" 方言 because that is really what they are - spoken within the Chinese empire and related to one another, together forming the Han family of languages, with a standard based roughly on the spoken language of around 2000 years before but matching somewhat closely the modern Cantonese or Hakka.
With the ever-increasing polarized view of the world as Chinese vs Foreign, the speech, habits, and country of the Chinese were seen as more and more united, as one opposed to "Foreign". Also, Chinese does not mark plurals, so "漢語" (modern Mandarin han-yu) can be translated as both "Han language" and "Han languageS".
However the issue of terminology only came when Western lexicographers needed to translate Chinese words to Western languages for their dictionaries. Using a Western linguistic model of the time, "regional speech" maps almost directly to "dialect".
So in the Chinese languages, this is not really a concern as you refer neutrally to "the speech of Shanghai" or "Wu speech" or "the speech of the northern region".
However, in English, it has been a cause for debate, many people saying the term "language" should be used, but others saying "dialect" should be used.
In fact, the amount of time for which Chinese speech varieties have been diverging for one another is longer than that between French and Spanish or Dutch and German.
Mark
On Fri, 4 Feb 2005 19:21:35 -0500, Stirling Newberry stirling.newberry@xigenics.net wrote:
On Feb 4, 2005, at 7:15 PM, Felix Wan wrote:
On Thu, February 3, 2005 8:54 pm, Sheng Jiong said:
Max Weinreich: "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy". If we follow that line of thinking, then yes, since there is no public education in the world that teaches written Cantonese, we should not have an encyclopedia in it.
In our case, a language is a dialect that can support the writing of, and whose readers desire, its own encyclopedia.
I'll leave aside my quarrels with Weinreich's definition of language. That was a long time ago, in a different professional incarnation.
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