A linguistic survey conducted by the P.R.C. regime discloses that barely more than half the population of China is conversant in the standard form of Mandarin.[1] Of course younger persons rather than older, and urban persons rather than rural, are more likely to be able to communicate with one another in standard Mandarin ("Putonghua"), but there are many people who have a need to communicate by speech who cannot. Contrary to much myth about the issue, I have NEVER seen two Chinese persons who cannot speak a mutually comprehensible language resort to writing out Chinese characters for one another in an attempt at conversation. To the contrary, I have seen many more examples of Chinese people (some from one place, some from another in China) speaking to one another in English as a useful interlanguage, although these days most people who can do that can also use Putonghua as an interlanguage.
Chinese characters still represent SPEECH (not ideas or abstract concepts) and do so in a way that is specific to the particular Chinese (Sinitic) language that one speaks. The long story about this can be found in the books The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy[2] or Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems[3] by the late John DeFrancis or the book Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning[4] by J. Marshall Unger. The book Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention[5] by Stanislas Dehaene is a very good book about reading in general, and has a good cross-cultural perspective.
I'll give an example here of how Chinese characters reflect speech more than they reflect meaning-as-such. Many more examples are possible. How you might write the conversation
"Does he know how to speak Mandarin?
"No, he doesn't."
他會說普通話嗎？
他不會。
in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write
"Does he know how to speak Cantonese?
"No, he doesn't."
佢識唔識講廣東話？
佢唔識。
in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters.
Many other examples of words, phrases, and whole sentences that are essentially unreadable to persons who have learned only Modern Standard Chinese can be found in texts produced in Chinese characters by speakers of other Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects"). Similar considerations apply to Japanese, which is not even a language cognate with Chinese, and also links Chinese characters to particular speech morphemes (whether etymologically Japanese or Sino-Japanese) rather than with abstract concepts.
[1] http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838...
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci...
[3] http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Asian-Interactions-Comp...
[4] http://www.amazon.com/Ideogram-Chinese-Characters-Disembodie...
I read the other comments here before typing out this comment. As several of the comments say, distinguishing different varieties of speech as "dialects" rather than "languages" is often a matter of politics rather than a matter of linguistics. It happens that I was one of the Wikipedians who was active in updating the Wikipedia article "English language"[1] earlier this year so that it is now a "good article" by Wikipedia's article rating criteria. For years, there were all kinds of stupid edit wars on that article by editors who didn't bother to look up or read any sources, but when several Wikipedians agreed to look up sources together and check what the sources actually say, we reached consensus about how to improve the article. The main point about the English language is that it has a very large speech community with high mutual comprehensibility spread all over the globe. The spread around the globe came first from trade, migration, and colonization, but even after the British Empire dissolved, the spread of English has been maintained by telecommunications, travel, broadcasting, film, book publishing, study abroad, and the efforts of many national governments of non-English-speaking countries to promote knowledge of English through formal schooling and government administration. The majority of people who use English day-by-day now are not descendants of English settlers who live in the "inner circle" of English-speaking countries. When we consider that railroads, the telegraph, the telephone, voice radio broadcasting, passenger airplanes, and talking motion pictures were all invented in English-speaking countries, and were used in international communication as early for United States-to-Britain communication as for international communication between any other country pairs, it is not surprising that English has stayed remarkably homogeneous across the vast territory of the United States and has even stayed mutually comprehensible despite the political separation of the United States and Britain. Like the majority of my ancestors (I have only a little English ancestry, from which I gain my family name), most Americans are descended mostly from people who did NOT speak English when they arrived in North America, but who learned English to communicate with one another as residents of the United States. My two maternal grandparents were both born in Great Plains states of the United States, but their schooling (only primary schooling) was conducted entirely in the German language, and they learned English as a second language as native-born United States citizens to interact with neighbors.
There were earlier comments in this thread about Chinese. Absolutely, positively the different Sinitic languages are distinct languages, not mutually comprehensible, and it does violence to the English usage of the term "dialect" to refer to Mandarin and to Cantonese as "dialects" of Chinese. I speak Modern Standard Chinese fluently and have worked for many years as a Chinese-English interpreter. I have also studied Taiwanese, Cantonese, and Hakka (listed in decreasing order of proficiency). Mandarin and Cantonese are more distinct, in several respects, than English is from German or than French is from Spanish. Calling both Mandarin and Cantonese "dialects of Chinese" is simply a matter of the politics of China denying linguistic reality.
The distinctions among Sinitic languages as distinct languages apply even if you write them down in Chinese characters. Chinese characters still represent speech (not ideas or abstract concepts) and do so in a way that is specific to the particular Chinese (Sinitic) language that one speaks. The long story about this can be found in the books The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy[2] or Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems[3] by the late John DeFrancis or the book Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning[4] by J. Marshall Unger. The book Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention[5] by Stanislas Dehaene is a very good book about reading in general, and has a good cross-cultural perspective.
I'll give an example here of how Chinese characters reflect speech more than they reflect meaning-as-such. Many more examples are possible. How you might write the conversation
"Does he know how to speak Mandarin?
"No, he doesn't."
他會說普通話嗎？
他不會。
in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write
"Does he know how to speak Cantonese?
"No, he doesn't."
佢識唔識講廣東話？
佢唔識。
in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters.
Many other examples of words, phrases, and whole sentences that are essentially unreadable to persons who have learned only Modern Standard Chinese can be found in texts produced in Chinese characters by speakers of other Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects"). Similar considerations apply to Japanese, which is not even a language cognate with Chinese, and also links Chinese characters to particular speech morphemes (whether etymologically Japanese or Sino-Japanese) rather than with abstract concepts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci...
[3] http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Asian-Interactions-Comp...
[4] http://www.amazon.com/Ideogram-Chinese-Characters-Disembodie...
All Chinese speakers read the same script even if their spoken language is quite different.
That's an oversimplification. Chinese speakers who have not learned to read of course don't read any script. And in actual current usage, written Chinese is conformed to the speech patterns of the national standard language, Mandarin, and reflects the vocabulary and grammatical patterns of that language. Chinese characters still represent SPEECH (not ideas or abstract concepts) and do so in a way that is specific to the particular Chinese (Sinitic) language that one speaks. The long story about this can be found in the books The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy[1] or Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems[2] by the late John DeFrancis or the book Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning[3] by J. Marshall Unger. The book Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention[4] by Stanislas Dehaene is a very good book about reading in general, and has a good cross-cultural perspective.
I'll give an example here of how Chinese characters reflect speech more than they reflect meaning-as-such. Many more examples are possible. How you might write the conversation
"Does he know how to speak Mandarin?
"No, he doesn't."
他會說普通話嗎？
他不會。
in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write
"Does he know how to speak Cantonese?
"No, he doesn't."
佢識唔識講廣東話？
佢唔識。
in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci...
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Asian-Interactions-Comp...
[3] http://www.amazon.com/Ideogram-Chinese-Characters-Disembodie...
[4] http://readinginthebrain.pagesperso-orange.fr/intro.htm
Many other examples of words, phrases, and whole sentences that are essentially unreadable to persons who have learned only Modern Standard Chinese can be found in texts produced in Chinese characters by speakers of other Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects"). Similar considerations apply to Japanese, which is not even a language cognate with Chinese, and also links Chinese characters to particular speech morphemes (whether etymologically Japanese or Sino-Japanese) rather than with abstract concepts.
How you might write the conversation
"Does he know how to speak Mandarin?
"No, he doesn't."
他會說普通話嗎？
他不會。
in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write
"Does he know how to speak Cantonese?
"No, he doesn't."
佢識唔識講廣東話？
佢唔識。
in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters.
Chinese characters still represent SPEECH (not ideas or abstract concepts) and do so in a way that is specific to the particular Chinese (Sinitic) language that one speaks. The long story about this can be found in the books The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy[1] or Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems[2] by the late John DeFrancis or the book Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning[3] by J. Marshall Unger. The book Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention[4] by Stanislas Dehaene is a very good book about reading in general, and has a good cross-cultural perspective.
Many other examples of words, phrases, and whole sentences that are essentially unreadable to persons who have learned only Modern Standard Chinese can be found in texts produced in Chinese characters by speakers of other Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects"). Similar considerations apply to Japanese, which is not even a language cognate with Chinese, and also links Chinese characters to particular speech morphemes (whether etymologically Japanese or Sino-Japanese) rather than with abstract concepts.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci...
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Asian-Interactions-Comp...
[3] http://www.amazon.com/Ideogram-Chinese-Characters-Disembodie...
I'll give an example here of how Chinese characters reflect speech more than they reflect meaning-as-such. Many more examples are possible. How you might write the conversation
"Does he know how to speak Mandarin?
"No, he doesn't."
他會說普通話嗎？
他不會。
in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write
"Does he know how to speak Cantonese?
"No, he doesn't."
佢識唔識講廣東話？
佢唔識。
in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci...
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Asian-Interactions-Comp...
[3] http://www.amazon.com/Ideogram-Chinese-Characters-Disembodie...
[1] http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838...
In other words, hundreds of millions of persons in China cannot have a telephone conversation with one another, or ask for directions and get a comprehensible answer if they travel to each other's home regions, and so on. National common language promotion in China still has a very long way to go (although of course it is farther along in the younger generation than in the older, and farther along in urban areas than in rural areas). For this issue of national policy, the relevant issue is whether or not people can understand one another when they have a conversation. Many, many, many groupings of citizens of the P.R.C. would include people none of whom have a common language mutually understood by any other person in the group.
By contrast, Taiwan has been much, much, much more successful, much earlier in history, in making Modern Standard Chinese (Mandarin) a common language in a region where historically "Taiwanese" (the Taiwan dialect of Southern Min Chinese) was the majority language and Hakka was a significant regional minority language. After 1949, when the defeated Nationalist forces retreated to Taiwan, perhaps 10 percent (mostly soldiers) was added to Taiwan's population, but not all of those persons were speakers of (mutually understandable) Mandarin either, yet Mandarin was thereafter treated as the sole national language in Taiwan. My wife grew up speaking Taiwanese to her parents (who spoke Japanese to each other, because of their prewar education in occupied Taiwan, then a colony of the Japanese empire), and Mandarin to her siblings and classmates. I met her in 1982. She spoke perfectly adequate (Taiwanese-accented) Mandarin as young adult, and she often impressed visitors from the P.R.C. to the United States in the mid-1980s when we were both students with the quality of her Mandarin. My nieces are now generally more proficient in Mandarin than in Taiwanese, although both languages are still used among our relatives in Taiwan. (Mandarin and Taiwanese are cognate Sinitic languages, but no more similar than English and German are, and certainly NOT mutually comprehensible.) Taiwan achieved much more rapid spread of Mandarin by having a stronger economy in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and thus much more use of personal telephone calls and radios and televisions and much more internal travel. China still has a lot of catching up to do.
The book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by John DeFrancis
http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci...
does a lot to disentangle the issues of speech versus writing, and dialect versus language, that are discussed in several of the interesting comments that preceded my comment here.
Here's an example of how you might write the conversation
"Does he know how to speak Mandarin?
"No, he doesn't."
他會說普通話嗎？
他不會。
in Modern Standard Chinese characters. Contrast that with how you would write
"Does he know how to speak Cantonese?
"No, he doesn't."
佢識唔識講廣東話？
佢唔識。
in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters. Even the traditional Chinese character writing system doesn't bring about mutual understanding among people from all parts of China.
I already mentioned above that I have seen counterexamples--written Chinese that was incomprehensible to many of the people who might reasonably be expected to read it--in several daily life situations in various parts of China.
Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese can read Chinese text in their own languages.
No, strictly speaking they were reading Chinese text in Chinese (possibly with mind's-ear pronunciation of the Chinese characters reflecting influence from their native languages), which they acquired as a second language while learning literacy. The full details to respond to the point of view you have put forth can be found in
http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci...
(P.S. I can read some current Japanese too, and of course current Japanese writing shows plainly that Japanese is a very different language from Chinese, as you correctly note. I had occasion recently to read a brush painting of bamboo with some Chinese characters on it hanging in the office of a physician, who is a man of Korean-Japanese heritage. We could both sight-translate the Chinese characters into English. I didn't ask him on that occasion how he would pronounce them.)
http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci...
or
http://www.amazon.com/Ideogram-Chinese-Characters-Disembodie...
For your convenience, I can link a deep look into one of those books through a focused search on Google Books:
The blog post kindly submitted here is by a linguist, Geoffrey Pullum, who specializes in the English language and who co-edited the most definitive grammar of the English language.[1] Pullum is not a specialist in Chinese language but he cites the numerous writings of Victor Mair,[2] who does have deep professional knowledge of the Chinese language. Simply put, the author's comments are linguistically and sociologically correct. My nieces and nephews who grew up in the Chinese-speaking world were faced with a considerably more difficult task in learning to read and write than was strictly necessary, solely because of clinging to the tradition of writing Chinese in the traditional characters rather than the alphabetical writing systems that are used EVERYWHERE in the Chinese-speaking world for initial reading instruction.
The late Y.R. Chao, an eminent Chinese linguist, made the simple point about alphabetical writing of Chinese: if one claims that alphabetical writing cannot be understood, that is equivalent to claiming that Chinese people cannot speak to one another over the telephone. But in fact Chinese people can speak to one another over the telephone just fine--I have seen it done, and I have been party of many international voice-only conversations in Chinese. See a whole book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by the late John DeFrancis,[3] a linguist who specialized in the study of the Chinese writing system, for more details.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language...
[2] http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?author=13
[3] http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci...