I know politically Chinese ppl would object because this can be controversal .... especially when all Chinese believe in Unity..... anyways what do you think?
Remember unity in writing script does not mean the language is the same.... English and Vietnamese use the Latin script for writing but that does not mean they're related.....
Is Chinese a language or a family of languages?
Spoken Chinese comprises many regional and often mutually unintelligible variants. In the West, many people are familiar with the fact that the Romance languages all derive from Latin and so have many underlying features in common while being mutually unintelligible. The linguistic evolution of Chinese is similar, while the socio-political context is quite different.
In Europe, political fragmentation created independent states which are roughly the size of Chinese provinces. This created a political desire to create separate cultural and literary standards between nation-states and to standardize the language within a nation-state. In China, a single cultural and literary standard (Classical Chinese and later, Vernacular Chinese) continued to exist while at the same time spoken language between different cities and counties continued to diverge, much in the same manner European languages diverged from each other, as the result of the sheer scale of the country, and the obstruction of communication by mountains and geography.
As a case in point, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than flat North China. There's even a saying in Chinese, ÄÏ´¬±±ñR (pinyin: n¨¢n chu¨¢n b¨§i m¨£), meaning "Boats in the South and horses in the North." The flat plains of the northern China allows one to cross with relative ease using a horse, but the dense vegetation and numerous mountains and rivers of the south prevented this. In southern China, the most efficient means of transportation was a boat. For instance, Wuzhou is a city that lies about 120 miles upstream from Guangzhou, the capital of the Guangdong province in the south. On the other hand, Taishan is only 60 miles southwest of Guangzhou, but several rivers must be crossed in order to get there. Because of this, the dialect spoken in Taishan, relative to the dialect spoken in Wuzhou, has actually diverged more from the Standard Cantonese spoken in Guangzhou (Ramsey, 1987).
This diversity in spoken forms and commonality in written form has created a linguistic context that is very different from that of Europe. For example, in Europe, the language of a nation-state was usually standardized to be similar to that of the capital, making it easy, for example, to classify a language as French or Spanish. This had the effect of sharpening linguistic differences. A farmer on one side of the border would start to model his speech after Paris while a farmer on the other side would model his speech after Madrid. Moreover, the written language would be modelled after the language in the capital, and the use of local speech or mixtures of local speech and the national standard would be considered substandard and erroneous. In China, this standardization did not happen.
More relevant to China's situation is that of India. Though India has historically not been as unified as China, parts of it speaking multiple languages have long been united in various states, and many of the languages have not until the last few decades been standardized through political centralization. Sanskrit long played a role as a common written language. In India, however, the status of the different descendant languages of Sanskrit as separate languages is not in question; 13 of them are official languages, and the borders of Indian states were even re-drawn several decades ago to conform to those of the languages.
Few linguists would seriously hold that Cantonese and Mandarin are the same language in the way they use the term, but for the popular classification of a speech variety as a language or dialect, linguistic considerations are often not as important as cultural or nationalistic ones. In self-description, Chinese people generally consider Chinese to be one single language, partly because of the common written language. In order to describe dialects, Chinese people typically use the speech of location, for example Beijing dialect (±±¾©Ô’/±±¾©»°) for the speech of Beijing or Shanghai dialect (ÉϺ£Ô’/ÉϺ£»°) for the speech of Shanghai. Often there is not even any awareness among laypeople that these various "dialects" are then categorized into "languages" based on mutual intelligibility, though in areas of greater linguistic diversity (such as the southeast) people do think of dialects as being grouped into categories like Wu, Hakka. So although it is true that many parts of north China are quite homogeneous in language, while in parts of south China, major cities can have dialects that are only marginally intelligible even to close neighbours, there is a tendency to regard all of these as "Chinese dialects" ¡ª equal subvariations under a single Chinese language. As with the concept of Chinese language itself, the divisions between different "dialects" are mostly geographical rather than based on linguistic distance. For example, Sichuan dialect is considered as being distinct from Beijing dialect in the same way that Cantonese is, despite the fact that linguistically Sichuan dialect and Beijing dialect are both considered Mandarin dialects by linguists while Cantonese is not.
Due to this self-perception of a single Chinese language by the majority of its speakers, some linguists respect this terminology, and use the word "language" for Chinese and "dialect" for Cantonese, but most follow the intelligibility requirement and consider Chinese to be a group of related languages, since these languages are not at all mutually intelligible, and show variation comparable to the Romance languages. As with many areas that have been linguistically diverse for a long time, whether the speech of a particular area of China should be considered a language in its own right or a dialect of another is not always clear, and many of the languages do not have sharp boundaries between them. The Ethnologue lists fourteen (http://www.ethnologu....asp?subid=1270), but the number varies between seven and seventeen depending on how strict the intelligibility criterion is.
The distinction between a single language and a language family has major political overtones, and the amount of emotion put into this issue arises from political implications. To some, describing Chinese as different languages implies that China should actually be considered several different nations, and challenges the notion that there is a single Han Chinese "race". For this reason, some Chinese are uncomfortable with the idea that Chinese is not a single language, as this perception might legitimize secessionist movements. Supporters of Taiwanese independence do tend to be strong promoters of Min- and Hakka-language education. Furthermore, for some, the implication that describing Chinese as multiple languages is more correct carries with it the implication that the notion of a single Chinese language and by implication a single Chinese state or nationality is backward, oppressive, artificial, and out of touch with reality.
However, the linkages between ethnicity, politics, and language can be complex. For example, many Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese speakers would consider their own tongues to be separate spoken languages, and the Han Chinese race to be a single entity, do not consider these two positions to be contradictory; instead they consider the Han Chinese to be an entity that is, and has always been, characterized by great internal diversity. Moreover, the government of the People's Republic of China officially states that China is a multinational nation, and that the very term "Chinese" refers to a broader concept called Zhonghua minzu that incorporates groups that do not natively speak Chinese at all, such as Tibetans, Uighurs, and Mongols. (Those that do speak Chinese and are considered "ethnic Chinese" from an outsider point of view are called Han Chinese ¡ª this is seen as an ethnic and cultural concept, not a political one.) Similarly on Taiwan, one can find supporters of Chinese unification who are also interested in promoting local language, and supporters of Taiwan independence who have little interest in the topic. And in an analogy to the mainland Chinese idea of Zhonghua minzu, the Taiwanese identity also incorporates Taiwanese aborigines, who are not at all considered Han Chinese because they speak Austronesian languages, predate Han Chinese migration to Taiwan, and are culturally linked to other Austronesian-speaking peoples such as the Polynesians.
Source - http://en.wikipedia....hinese_language
Edited by Yun, 21 March 2005 - 10:13 PM.
