Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant passages that answer the question.
Query: Can people who speak Cantonese understand Mandarin?
Literate Chinese speakers can read and write in the Mandarin-based standard written language. However, because the graphemes in Chinese's logographic writing system are not directly linked to pronunciation (though there are quasi-phonetic hints), Cantonese speakers who do not speak Mandarin will read aloud the characters in Cantonese pronunciation only. The resulting speech is Mandarin-based grammar and vocabulary pronounced word-by-word in Cantonese. If the same sentence were to be spoken using regular colloquial Cantonese, it might be quite different. Here is an example:
Hong Kong Cantonese () is a dialect of the Cantonese language commonly spoken in Hong Kong, as well as Macau. Although the Hong Kong people largely identify this variant of Chinese with the term ""Cantonese"" (), a variety of publications in Mainland China describe the variant as "Hong Kong speech" ().
In Hong Kong, Cantonese became the dominant language spoken in society since widespread immigration to Hong Kong began from the 1940s onward. With immigrants of differing mother tongues, communication was hard without a dominant language. With Cantonese originating from the capital of neighboring Canton province, Cantonese became the dominant language by extension, and other similar dialects started to vanish from use in Hong Kong. Original residents, or aboriginals, of Hong Kong used their own languages including the Tanka, Hakka and Waitau dialect, but with a majority of Hong Kong's population being immigrants by the 1940s and 50s, the dialects vanished at a rapid rate. Most of Hong Kong's younger generation does not understand, let alone speak, their ancestral dialects.
Unlike most varieties of Chinese, Cantonese has de facto official status in Hong Kong and Macau, and has an independent tradition of the written vernacular. Taishanese, who make up one-third of the population of Hong Kong, may identify themselves with Cantonese instead of Taishanese. Since Hong Kong culture is heavily Cantonese-influenced and is a Cantonese-speaking society, Taishanese and other Han Chinese who are Hong Kong born and raised, assimilate into the Cantonese identity of Hong Kong. Many Hong Kong activists are of Taishanese ancestry such as the late Szeto Wah who was a politician of the pan-democracy camp and sang democratic Cantonese songs with other activists to promote democracy in China.
The Fuzhou immigrants often speak Mandarin along with their Fuzhou dialect and while all of the other Mandarin speakers were settling in and creating a more Mandarin-Speaking Chinatown or Mandarin Town (國語埠) in Flushing's Chinatown, and an even smaller one in Elmhurst all in Queens because they could not relate to the traditional Cantonese dominance in Manhattan's Chinatown, the Fuzhou immigrants were the only exceptional Non-Cantonese Chinese group to largely settle in Manhattan's Chinatown. This is due to the Mandarin speaking enclaves being too middle class and expensive and since many Fuzhou immigrants came without immigration paperwork and forced into low paying jobs, Manhattan's Chinatown was the only place for them to be around other Chinese people and receive affordable housing despite Manhattan's Chinatown's traditional Cantonese dominance that lasted until the 1990s
The varieties of Chinese are usually described by native speakers as dialects of a single Chinese language, but linguists note that they are as diverse as a language family. The internal diversity of Chinese has been likened to that of the Romance languages, but may be even more varied. There are between 7 and 13 main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin (about 960 million, e.g. Southwestern Mandarin), followed by Wu (80 million, e.g. Shanghainese), Min (70 million, e.g. Southern Min), Yue (60 million, e.g. Cantonese), etc. Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, and even dialect groups within Min Chinese may not be mutually intelligible. Some, however, like Xiang and certain Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and a certain degree of intelligibility. All varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic.
After the British acquired Hong Kong Island, Kowloon Peninsula and the New Territories from the Qing between 1841 (officially 1842) and 1898, large numbers of merchants and workers came to Hong Kong from the city of Canton, the main center of Cantonese. Cantonese became the dominant spoken language in Hong Kong. The frequent migration between Hong Kong and mainland Cantonese-speaking areas did not cease up until 1949, when the Communists took over Mainland China. During this period, the Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong was very similar to that in Canton.
Chinese, also known as Sinitic, is a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family consisting of hundreds of local language varieties or dialects, many of which are not mutually intelligible. The differences are similar to those within the Romance languages, with variation particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast. A widely quoted classification divides these varieties into seven groups: Mandarin, Wu, Min, Xiang, Gan, Hakka and Yue, though a more recent classification splits some of these to obtain ten groups, and some varieties remain unclassified.
The Longdu dialect is the most widespread dialect of the Zhongshan Min (Chungsan Min) language division within Southern Min Chinese. Native Speakers originated from towns of Dachong (Taichung) and Shaxi, Guangdong (Saakai) (formerly known as Longdu area) in Zhongshan (Chungsan) in the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong. Despite its close proximity, Longdu is not very closely related to the surrounding dialects in the region, which belong to the Yue group. As such, Longdu forms a "dialect island" of Min speakers (two other Min enclaves exist in Zhongshan, Sanxiang and Nanlang). Its native speakers generally understand Cantonese, but not vice versa.
Worldwide, English is used widely as a lingua franca and can be seen to be the dominant language at this time. The world's largest language by native speakers is Mandarin Chinese which is a first language of around 960 million people, or 12.44% of the population, predominantly in Greater China. Spanish is spoken by around 330 to 400 million people, predominantly in the Americas and Spain. Arabic is spoken by around 280 million people. Bengali is spoken by around 250 to 300 million people worldwide, predominantly in Bangladesh and India. Hindi is spoken by about 200 million speakers, mostly in India. Portuguese is spoken by about 230 million speakers in Portugal, Brazil, East Timor, and Southern Africa.
People native to urban Beijing speak the Beijing dialect, which belongs to the Mandarin subdivision of spoken Chinese. This speech is the basis for "putonghua", the standard spoken language used in mainland China and Taiwan, and one of the four official languages of Singapore. Rural areas of Beijing Municipality have their own dialects akin to those of Hebei province, which surrounds Beijing Municipality.
Four major Chinese-speech groups are represented in Indonesia: [[Hokkien]] (Southern Min; Min Nan), [[Mandarin Chinese|Mandarin]], [[Hakka Chinese|Hakka]] and [[Cantonese]]. In addition to these, the [[Teochew people]] speak [[Teochew dialect|their own dialect]] that has some degree of [[mutual intelligibility]] with [[Hokkien]]. Distinctions between the two, however, are accentuated outside of their regions of origin. There were an estimated 2.2 million [[native speaker]]s of various Chinese varieties in Indonesia in 1982: 1,300,000 speakers of [[Southern Min]] varieties (including [[Hokkien]] and [[Teochew dialect|Teochew]]); 640,000 [[Hakka]] speakers; 460,000 [[Mandarin Chinese|Mandarin]] speakers; 180,000 Cantonese speakers; and 20,000 speakers of the [[Eastern Min]] varieties (including [[Fuzhou dialect]]). Additionally, an estimated 20,000 spoke different dialects of the [[Indonesian language]].
China is a largely-homogenous society; over 90 percent of its population has historically been Han Chinese. Some of the country's ethnic groups are distinguishable by physical appearance and relatively-low intermarriage rates. Others have married Han Chinese and resemble them. A growing number of ethnic minorities are fluent at a native level in Mandarin Chinese. Children sometimes receive ethnic-minority status at birth if one of their parents belongs to an ethnic minority, even if their ancestry is predominantly Han Chinese. Pockets of immigrants and foreign residents exist in some cities.
The world's largest ethnic group is Han Chinese with Mandarin being the world's most spoken language in terms of native speakers.
The relative success of English-language films can also be explained by considering that the English language is widely considered to be a universal language—it is the first language of 400 million people, the second language of another 400 million, and a foreign language of an additional 700 million; English is thus understood by 1,500 million people, which is almost 20% of all the people in the world. The Chinese language, especially the standard variant, have over twice as many native speakers as English, but a lot fewer foreign-language speakers, thus making it a less globalized and potentially less commercially profitable language outside of China.
Today in Hong Kong, people still make an effort to avoid these sound merges in serious broadcasts and in education. Older people often do not exhibit these shifts in their speech, but some do. With the sound changes, the name of Hong Kong's Hang Seng Bank (), , becomes , sounding like "Hon' Kon' itchy body" ( ) "'un cold" ( ) . The name of Cantonese itself (, "Guangdong speech") would be without the merger, whereas (sounding like "": "speak eastern speech") and (sounding like "" : "chase away eastern speech") are overwhelmingly popular.
It is not uncommon to encounter children who grew up with a regional variant of Mandarin as their parent tongue with little or no fluency in a Wu variety at all. However, this is primarily when parents are speakers of different languages and communicate in Mandarin and more rarely due to the parents' attitudes towards using language or dialect, which most associate with the warmth of home and family life. Many people have noticed this trend and thus call for the preservation and documentation of not only Wu but all Chinese varieties. The first major attempt was the "Linguistic Atlas of Chinese Dialects", which surveyed 2,791 locations across the nation, including 121 Wu locations (a step up from the two locations in PKU's earlier surveys), and led to the formation of an elaborate database including digital recordings of all locations; however, this database is not available to the general public. The atlas's editor, Cao Zhiyun, considers many of these languages "endangered" and has introduced the term (Languages in danger) or "endangered dialects" into the Chinese language to raise people's attention to the issue, while others try to draw attention to how the dialects fall under the scope of UNESCO's intangible cultural heritage and as such deserve to be preserved and respected.
In the 20th century, written Chinese divided into two canonical forms, called simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese. Simplified Chinese was developed in mainland China in order to make the characters faster to write (especially as some characters had as many as a few dozen strokes) and easier to memorize. The People's Republic of China claims that both goals have been achieved, but some external observers disagree. Little systematic study has been conducted on how simplified Chinese has affected the way Chinese people become literate; the only studies conducted before it was standardized in mainland China seem to have been statistical ones regarding how many strokes were saved on average in samples of running text.
Throughout East Asia, Literary Chinese was the language of administration and scholarship.
Although Vietnam, Korea and Japan each developed writing systems for their own languages, these were limited to popular literature.
Chinese remained the medium of formal writing until it was displaced by vernacular writing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Though they did not use Chinese for spoken communication, each country had its own tradition of reading texts aloud, the so-called Sino-Xenic pronunciations, which provide clues to the pronunciation of Middle Chinese.
Chinese words with these pronunciations were also borrowed extensively into the local vernaculars, and today comprise over half their vocabularies.
The Chinese Northern Mandarin dialect spoken in Beijing had a major impact on the phonology of the dialect of Manchu spoken in Beijing, and since Manchu phonology was transcribed into Chinese and European sources based on the sinified pronunciation of Manchus from Beijing, the original authentic Manchu pronunciation is unknown to scholars.
Over time the newcomers adopted the term "Hakka" to refer to themselves, not least due to the migratory tendencies inherent in their own culture. However, because the term also covers Hakka speakers (in the same way that Punti covered several people speaking different tongues), and because the Han Chinese registered as Guest Families who migrated may not have been Hakka speakers, and because of intermarriages among Hakka and Punti members (which showed that relations between the two were very good at times), identification as Hakka was largely a matter of self-selection. Through studies of both Cantonese and Hakka genealogies, some Hakka and Punti people with the same surnames claim the same ancestors, although their descendants strongly identify with one group to the exclusion of the other.
Although large numbers of non-Cantonese Chinese immigrants, often speaking Mandarin arrived into New York City, they could not relate to the Cantonese populations, which largely do not speak Mandarin or use it only to communicate with other non-Cantonese Chinese people. As a result, the non-Cantonese Chinese populations created their own Mandarin-speaking Chinatown, or "Mandarin Town" (國語埠) in Flushing, and a smaller one in Elmhurst as well. This allowed Manhattan's and Brooklyn's Chinatowns to continue retaining its almost exclusive Cantonese-speaking society and nearly were successful at keeping its Cantonese dominance.
A great majority of people in Taiwan can speak both Mandarin Chinese and Taiwanese although the degree of fluency varies widely. There are however small but significant numbers of people in Taiwan, mainly but not exclusively Hakka and Mainlanders, who cannot speak Taiwanese fluently. A shrinking percentage of the population, mainly people born before the 1950s, cannot speak Mandarin at all, or learned to speak Mandarin later in life, though some of these speak Japanese fluently. Urban, working-class Hakkas as well as younger, southern-Taiwan Mainlanders tend to have better, even native-like fluency. Approximately half of the Hakka in Taiwan do speak Taiwanese. There are many families of mixed Hakka, Hoklo, and Aboriginal bloodlines. There is, however, a large percentage of people in Taiwan, regardless of their background, whose ability to understand and read written Taiwanese is greater than their ability to speak it. This is the case with some singers who can sing Taiwanese songs with native-like proficiency, but can neither speak nor understand the language.
The Fuzhou immigrants could often speak Mandarin in addition to their native Fuzhounese language (also known as Fuzhou dialect). While all of the other Mandarin speakers were settling in and creating a more Mandarin-speaking Chinatown or Mandarin Town (國語埠) in Flushing's Chinatown and Elmhurst, Queens because they could not relate to the traditional Cantonese dominance in Manhattan's Chinatown, the Fuzhou immigrants were the only exceptional non-Cantonese Chinese group to largely settle in Manhattan's Chinatown. This is due to the Mandarin speaking enclaves being too middle class and expensive and since many Fuzhou immigrants came without immigration paperwork and forced into low paying jobs, Manhattan's Chinatown was the only place for them to be around other Chinese people and receive affordable housing despite Manhattan's Chinatown's traditional Cantonese dominance that lasted until the 1990s
Starting in the 1970s and especially throughout the 1980s-90s, Mandarin-speaking Taiwanese immigrants and then later on many other Non-Cantonese Chinese immigrants also were arriving into New York City. However, due to the traditional dominance of Cantonese-speaking residents, which were largely working class in Manhattan's Chinatown and the neighborhood's poor housing conditions, they were unable to relate to Manhattan's Chinatown and mainly settled in Flushing and created a more middle class Mandarin-Speaking Chinatown or Mandarin Town (國語埠) and even smaller one in Elmhurst, since most of the newer upcoming generations of ethnic Chinese were already using Mandarin although still their regional dialects in everyday conversations, whereas Cantonese speaking populations largely don't speak Mandarin or only speak it with other Non-Cantonese Chinese speakers. As a result, Manhattan's Chinatown and Brooklyn's emerging Chinatown were able to continue retaining its traditional almost exclusive Cantonese society and were nearly successful at permanently keeping its Cantonese dominance. However, there was already a small and slow growing Fuzhou immigrant population in Manhattan's Chinatown since the 1970s-80s in the eastern section of Chinatown east of the Bowery, which was still underdeveloped as being part of Chinatown. In the 1990s, though, Chinese people began to move into some parts of the western Lower East Side, which 50 years earlier was populated by Eastern European Jews and 20 years earlier was occupied by Hispanics.