Why Cantonese is considered as a dialect of Chinese?

Question

Can someone explain why Cantonese is considered as a dialect of Chinese, instead of a language? It is also for any language exist in China, both land and Taiwan (Cantonese, Hunanese, Fujianese, Taiwanese, etc.).

For long as I know, dialect is differ from language. Just like in Indonesia: Javanese, Sundanese and Madurese is considered as a language, not a dialect. But, Javanese is called as a dialect when someone speak Indonesian language with Javanese accent.

But, for Cantonese (or any other languages listed above), although you speak Cantonese, Chinese will considered it as a dialect, not a language. You know that, Cantonese and Mandarin is 'completely' different each other.

Answer 1

From Wikipedia:

There is no universally accepted criterion for distinguishing a language from a dialect.

My hunch is that in general Chinese politics favors unity, whereas European politics favors separation, thus speakers of Dutch and German would hate to think that they were speaking dialects of the same language. Conversely in general it is useful for the notion of Chinese unity, that there is only one "Chinese", although in fact there are many spoken languages within the peoples considered Chinese, that are considered separate languages.

Note that (accoring to WP) the distinction is so unclear that some linguists consider "Dialect" and "Language" to be synonyms, and that a dialect can also be a language. Thus "Hokkien is a language that is a dialect of Chinese" would not be an illogical statement.

Answer 2

No, they're not completely different, but similar in some ways. You should know, all dialects are different.

• Mandarin Chinese is not a natural language. It grabs pronunciation from Beijing dialect, vocabulary from all the northern dialects, grammar from the articles written by great writers during the New Culture Movement.
• Modern dialects have only one root -- Middle Chinese. Middle Chinese (中古漢語) is the lineal descendant of Old Chinese (上古漢語). Cantonese is also from Middle Chinese.
• Although the written form is different. The original characters are the same. The new characters are only made to show the pronunciation of Cantonese.
• Northern dialects of Chinese lost the entering tone (入聲). For example, 力 is pronounced as "li4" today in Mandarin, but it's "lik" in Middle Chinese. Many southern dialects still have entering tone.
• Cantonese is not the same as Middle Chinese, but a descendant. In fact, all today's dialects are its descendants.

You see: Cantonese is from a language which all other dialects (including Mandarin) are from, so Cantonese is a dialect of Chinese, not a new language.

Answer 3

In this case, I think the quote "A language is a dialect with an army and navy" best describes the situation. Since the mainland government considers linguistic unity to be in favor of their ruling, they will consider any spoken variety of Chinese to be a dialect, no matter how different it is from Mandarin (excluding minority languages).

Answer 4

The thing that unifies Mandarin and Cantonese is the common Chinese script. For instance, in both Mandarin and Cantonese, 不 means "not."

The character is pronounced "bu" in Mandarin, and "but" in Cantonese, and while they are pronounced differently, they are recognizable versions of each other, even in sound, and have the same meaning linked to the character.

Answer 5

This might be a bit provocative and perhaps only half related to the question... However after reading the other answers and comments (of which I think many are excellent), I felt this was missing from the whole picture:

The last few years there have apparently been mass protests in HK against the Mandarinization of the Cantonese language-or-dialect and culture.

This obviously doesn't at all answer whether Cantonese is a dialect or a language, but it complements answers along the lines "Chinese politics favors unity" (true), "because it's not a separate country" (true), and the comment in Chinese saying "don't worry, if you can just speak and understand Mandarin you'll be fine" (often true, but not if you live in Canton).

To my knowledge the Taiwanese also generally consider themselves having their own culture and language, and probably don't see Taiwanese as a Chinese dialect. But I'll try asking the next Taiwanese person I meet. :)

Answer 6

Because it truly is a dialect. Cantonese sounds very different from Mandarin, cuz they differed for a long long time. So called "Chinese" (by "Chinese", I mean people) thousands years ago didn't include people in today's Guangdong, Guangxi, Guizhou.

Answer 7

It is dialect indeed. Most usage of the cantonese is similar to mandarin. If a mandarin speaker watch a Cantonese channel for sometimes, he can grasp most of the detail.Like me I watch football match on UUSEE and I can understand most contents of the commentator mean. And I have not turned to any Cantonese classes before.

Answer 8

In reality, these two languages are not mutually intellegible. Cantonese is not considered another language per se, because Chinese characters unify these two languages in writing. In the absence of Chinese characters, they will be considered different languages today.

I cannot think of other group of languages that experience such phenomenon. For example, a person fluent in Mandarin can comfortably read content from Hong Kong and adjacent areas. We can say the same about people from Hong Kong reading material from the mainland and Taiwan.

Now, take Spanish and French, which share the same alphabet. Without experience, however, it is much more difficult for a monolingual, native speaker of one of these languages to grasp the full meaning of the text in the other language.

Answer 9

I think that the basic concept is all they use same character system (Cantonese or other dialect uses few new introduced words), from about B.C. 230 year, Qin dynasty uniform character script and units. Most of these dialect uses same characters. So Cantonese is dialect, but Man滿/Yi彝/Zhuang壮/Zang藏 are new languages.