Is reading Mandarin text straightforward for speakers of other varieties of Chinese?

Question

I'm travelling in Taiwan right now and I'm curious about the Chinese writing situation. Verbal announcements in all public transport are repeated in Mandarin, Hokkien and Hakka, but I only ever see one version of text written, and I assume that it is intended to be pronounced in Mandarin. Are the varieties of Chinese close enough so that speakers of other varieties can read the sentences written in Mandarin and correctly and unambiguously pronounce them in Hokkien and Hakka?

It looks like you never see a written form of Hokkien and Hakka on official signs. This seems very different from other multilingual countries that similarly try to keep local languages alive: for example, in Ireland you would see Irish on all official signs even though few people speak it.

Answer 1

This is an interesting question, and is one a bit unique to chinese, due to its diglossia ((written language is not 100% matched to spoken language)).

I'll start with answering your question, then explain the answer: No one educated in chinese will have any issue reading that single chinese text, called standard written chinese, native or second language or whatever.

Now for why: Way back in the day, all the areas of china had their own languages and dialects and stuff going on, maybe even two villages within a days distance will have trouble communicating. Opposite ends of the country would have no chance to succeed in communication at all.

So how was china running successfully for so many thousands of years in this situation? Because it had one unified writing system, used by the literate and government, to communicate. If I was a villager in the south, the chance the local government leader who came from the north speaks my language is negative. However, I could pool my savings with some neighbors, and pay a literate scholar to help us turn the local language into an officially written letter, which we could send to that govenrnment official to report our problems to be investigated. Thats a completely arbitrary example scenario, but hopefully it paints a clear picture of how this diglossia came to be.

Back then that standard was classical chinese, and things have changed a lot since then. Literary chinese replaced classical chinese, and modern standard written chinese replaced literary standard. The basic concept is the same though.

Theoretically, you could have someone only literate in classical and not modern standard, or only literate in their spoken language written down-- they would NOT be able to read standard written chinese. Thats super unlikely though, cause standard written chinese is standard, you wouldn't really get educate to read in anything else. We've now come full circle, and hopefully my initial sentence makes perfect sense now.

As a side note, standard written chinese is NOT the same as spoken mandarin, although it is very heavily inspired by it and much much closer to it than to any other type, by far. So a native speaker of a local mandarin like that will probably be able to read the basic message of the standard text in the above scenario of only using local tongue. Any local tongue not mutually intelligible with standard mandarin, not so much （＾ν＾）

Answer 2

Read my answer to a similar question

• We do have written Cantonese beside SWC and Written Mandarin. But it is only used in casual content like comics, gossip columns, or web chats. For official documents and formal text like news reports or homework, we all use SWC

• We can read the same text in either Mandarin with Pinyin or Cantonese with Jyping. The same applies to other dialects

Example:

(Written Mandarin): 我是中國人 (pinyin)/wo3 shi4 zhong1 guo2 ren2/

(SWC): 我是中國人 (Jyping)/ngo5 si6 zung1 gwok3 jan4/

(Written Cantonese): 我係中國人 (Jyping)/ngo5 hai6 zung1 gwok3 jan4/

Answer 3

There is only one written form of Chinese, although there are many spoken dialects. That's how people from all over the country can read things such as road signs and notices.