Learning About Chinese Dialects
As I look back on my college days, I recall learning more about Chinese history in a Chinese Language Class elective. Yes, it was going back to Grade 1 Chinese, but doing Grade 1 Chinese right. I looked at this video and thought of China's many dialects. A dialect is defined by the Oxford dictionary as, "a particular form of a language which is peculiar to a specific region or social group." The subject was taught in English, not requiring students to learn Hokkien first, and it was how the Chinese school system should've been.
Most Chinese Filipinos (like myself) are Hokkien speakers. Amoy is known as Xiamen today, a coastal city of the Fujian Province. I was shocked to learn there are many different types of Chinese, such as Cantonese (used in Hong Kong), and I wasn't shocked to learn that Hainan and Hakka are other dialects in China. Similar to Filipino, China has several languages too! In the Philippines, we have Tagalog, Cebuano, Kapampangan, Waray, and Hiligaynon, to name a few of the many!
Kiril Bolotnikov of the Asia Society provides this detail of China's many languages:
The “standard” Chinese language can be seen as something of a construct imposed on the Chinese people, whose respective “dialects” are myriad, with hundreds of local languages that are often not at all mutually understandable. So while schools and government affairs are run in Mandarin, the language that a local grows up speaking is not at all necessarily Mandarin. It is also not uncommon in China to encounter situations where a group of people converse with one another in different dialects. Each can understand the other, but they are unable to speak the other’s dialect. For example, a storeowner who only speaks Cantonese has no problem doing business with a customer that only speaks Mandarin, but will reply either in Cantonese or through gestures; and vice-versa.
Personally, this has led to some interesting experiences in terms of my speaking Chinese, particularly in southern China where Mandarin is less prominent. In Guangdong province in the very south of China, Cantonese announcements are read before Mandarin, and there were massive protests when the government in Beijing wanted to enforce Mandarin-only television programming. Hong Kong and Macau, immediately adjacent to Guangdong, also speak Cantonese, and are some of the few places in China that are not bound by the law regarding Mandarin. Traveling in Hong Kong, I was shocked to find that I was able to communicate in Mandarin more easily with the Hong Kongese than with someone in Shanghai—until I realized that it was a second language for both of us, which must have meant a simpler shared vocabulary and set of grammar structures.
It's pretty much like Standard Filipino is mostly in Tagalog, but there are many dialects in the Philippines. My dialect in Filipino is Cebuano, and my dialect in Chinese is Amoy Hokkien. Sadly, I'm not fluent in Amoy Hokkien--a constant source of frustration for the older generation Chinese against the younger, more integrated Chinese Filipinos. It wasn't like when the Spaniards and the Chinese mutually hated each other, during the Intramuros Days. I don't intend to return such stupidity, and I'm open to going out with Spanish Filipinos, or even Spanish people living in Spain.
