YESTERDAY'S post on Cantonese touched a few nerves. A blog post is a very compressed medium, and I said some things briefly that I still stand by but which deserve a bit of elaboration. My calling Cantonese and Min and Hakka "languages", not dialects, annoyed some people so much that my main point about the politics of Cantonese was lost.

There is no single definition of "dialect" and "language" that covers all cases. The Yiddish expert and linguist Max Weinreich is credited with the famous a sprakh is a dialekt mit en army un flot (though he was actually quoting an unnamed friend). Indeed, a "language" is often "a dialect with an army and a navy". For example, we usually consider Danish and Norwegian languages. But when we look at them on the page, they look suspiciously similar. Here's the first bit of the Lord's Prayer in Danish and then (Bokmål) Norwegian:

Vor Fader, du som er i himlene!
Helliget blive dit navn,
komme dit rige,
ske din vilje
som i himlen således også på jorden;

Fader vår, du som er i himmelen!
Helliget vorde ditt navn;
komme ditt rike;
skje din vilje
som i himmelen, så og på jorden;

Danes and Norwegians and Swedes can converse comfortably, though they'll occasionally confuse each other and switch to English or talk around a confusing point. A lot depends on how quickly they talk, which region they come from, whether the speakers are of standard Stockholm Swedish and Copenhagen Danish, what they are talking about, and so forth. But they clearly exist close to one another on a continuum (so much so that Norwegian nationalists created a second Norwegian variant, Nynorsk, to distance it from Danish-influenced Bokmål above). We might call them dialects of each other, but that would be slightly annoying to Scandinavians; we respectfully refer to languages, whatever the linguistic reality.

How is Chinese similar and how is it different? Most English-speakers use "dialect" to refer to regional variants that are noticeably different in accent, vocabulary and a bit of grammar, but are mutually comprehensible. But "comprehension" is a continuum, as mentioned above. It depends on topic, familiarity, context, the relationship of the two speakers, and many other factors. Another example: a speaker of Hindi and Urdu might think they speak the same language when discussing the weather or cricket, but different languages when discussing philosophy or architecture, since they share a basic vocabulary and grammar, but diverge (Urdu towards Arabic and Persian and Hindi to Sanskrit) at higher registers. Script too plays a role. One reason for calling Hindi and Urdu distinct languages is that they are written differently. But a good reason for calling them dialects is the plain fact that a Hindi-speaker and Urdu-speaker can chat on a wide variety of topics before running into major comprehension trouble.

Chinese is, in a way, the opposite of Hindi-Urdu: it shares a written tradition, but the spoken languages, especially at the level of low-register conversation, are far more different than Hindi and Urdu are. If you take the writing system out of the picture and focus on speech, it is indisputable that an illiterate peasant speaking Min and an illiterate peasant speaking Mandarin are going to struggle rather more than a Dane and a Norwegian. To borrow quickly from Wikipedia, here is "I'm not feeling well" in Min, and below, cognate-for-cognate in Mandarin;

Goá kā kī  lâng ū   tām po̍há bô sóng    khoài.
Wǒ  jiā  jǐ  rén  yǒu dàn  bó   wú  shuǎng kuài.

Compare a Norwegian headline from Aftenposten today ("Here's where you get Europe's worst food"—click through for the shocking answer.) Below is a Danish translation and an English gloss.

Her   får du   Europas verste  mat
Her   får du   Europas værste mad
Here get you Europe's worst  meat

I chose this headline because it's a particularly good illustration, but it wasn't hard to find it on the first Norwegian newspaper page I looked at. There's a case to be made that English and Norwegian are comparable to Mandarin and Min, and that Danish and Norwegian are as close as sub-dialects of Mandarin.

It is true, as one commenter pointed out that the "dialects" in China differ systematically, making the case that they weren't really different languages. Here we can see a bit of that. But German and English differ systematically too. (Where English has p German often has pf, as in pound/Pfund and apple/Apfel.) If those differences, systematic or no, are so great as to make running conversation on a random topic impossible, most linguists, like laymen, say we are dealing with languages, not dialects.

One of the confusing factors is that China uses a very different set of words from English's "language" and "dialect" and even "Chinese". Zhongwen is used to refer to written Chinese, and zhongguohua to spoken Chinese. China really does share one Zhongwen (and it is Mandarin-based). Meanwhile, fangyan is the Mandarin word for China's different language varieties; it translates as "place-speech". This can be translated into the technical term "topolect" in English, but this says nothing about intelligibility. Since we often use "dialect" to refer to the speech of a given place, fangyan is often straightforwardly translated as "dialect" (as my new Oxford Chinese Dictionary does, without explanation). My post was getting at the fact that if you think you can learn Mandarin and use it in Hunan as easily as you can learn English in London and travel to New York, you're going to find yourself saying, as Mr Weinrich might, "dialect, shmialect. This is a different language."

To sum up: I don't mean to be so rude as to tell a billion Chinese they are fools for referring to a Chinese "language" and a Cantonese "dialect". But the evidence is firmly in favour of calling Chinese a "language family" in English, and Cantonese a "language", if we want to use those words as linguists and laymen commonly use them. An alien linguist, who knew nothing of China's borders or history, would conclude the same. China does have quite an army and a growing navy, and a strong sense of itself as a nation. If they want to call Min and Yue "dialects", I can't stop them. But if you use "dialect" to describe the varieties of Chinese, just make sure not to give the impression that the dialects are mere variations on a common frame, and that speakers can nearly always understand each other, the way "dialect" is used in the rest of the world.