Hi Neocon; Re: "My impression, from reading around, is that you misrepresent the facility of people with Putongha ..."
We're not talking about "people", we're talking about the "best minds" of China.
Re: "... but a sort of Esparanto ..."
The comparison to Esparanto is highly inaccurate. The various dialects of Chinese share the same grammar, Esparanto shares its grammar with no language. Next are you going to start arguing that Spanish and English could share the same written language?
The differences between the Chinese dialects is similar to the differences between the various dialects of English. We share the same written language, (other than the odd "harbour" spelling), but we sometimes have great difficulty communicating with each other. In addition, we have different slang words for various things. Do I need to point out that slang words aren't used much in high tech? Would you expect the UK to use Cockney slang as the language for instruction in programming in Java? Does the UC Berkeley offer graduate classes in physics taught in Black English? How about Spanglish, is that the language we use to teach Chemistry at USC's PhD programs?
China is similar in that her education in high tech is uniformly taught in Mandarin Chinese, with a considerable amount of English as well.
For that matter, the number of people in China for whom Mandarin is the native language is huge.
Here's what the CIA says (remember, Neoconservatives ignore CIA warnings at their peril, LOL):
The World Factbook
Population: 6,302,309,691
...
Languages: Chinese, Mandarin 14.37%, Hindi 6.02%, English 5.61%, Spanish 5.59%, Bengali 3.4%, Portuguese 2.63%, Russian 2.75%, Japanese 2.06%, German, Standard 1.64%, Korean 1.28%, French 1.27% (2000 est.)
note: percents are for "first language" speakers only
...
cia.gov
Thus the CIA's own figures say that about 905,641,902 people are NATIVE speakers of Mandarin. Most of those are in China, but not all.
If the official numbers from the CIA aren't good enough for you, then you can get the same facts from various other places:
...
Standard Chinese (Mandarin) is spoken by 70% of the population.
...
emsc.nysed.gov
...
Mandarin (northern Chinese) is the principal and official language of China. Local dialects are spoken in the south and southeast. English is not widely spoken.
...
eia.doe.gov
...
There are seven major Chinese dialects and many subdialects. Mandarin (or Putonghua), the predominant dialect, is spoken by over 70% of the population. It is taught in all schools and is the medium of government. Only about two-thirds of the Han ethnic group are native speakers of Mandarin; the rest, concentrated in southwest and southeast China, speak one of the six other major Chinese dialects.
...
clinton3.nara.gov
* "Chinese" for this chart is composed of the total of the following SIL designated languages:
Mandarin 836,000,000
Xiang 36,015,000
Hakka 34,000,000
Gan 20,580,000
Minbei 10,537,000
total 937,132,000
www2.ignatius.edu
Many of the Chinese are convinced (rightly or wrongly) that they can speak a foreign dialect by simply making consistent changes to their pronunciation. Think of an American imitating a British accent.
Here's another source for similar data:
China:
Mandarin: 70%
Wu: 8%
Cantonese: 5%
Hunan: 5%
Hakka: 3%
Southern Min: 3%
Gan (Jiangxi): 2%
Northern Min: 1%
members.fortunecity.com
Also see:
petitiononline.com
Also see the efforts in Tsingapore in promoting the Mandarin dialect:
...
By late 1988, some 87 percent of the Chinese population [of Singapore] claimed to be able to speak Mandarin.
...
reference.allrefer.com
For an update, see:
...
Overall, Mandarin has superseded Chinese dialects as the predominant home language of the Chinese resident population. The proportion of Mandarin-speaking Chinese increased from 30 per cent in 1990 to 45 percent in 2000. There was a corresponding decline in the proportion who spoke in dialects, from 50 per cent to 31 per cent.
...
singstat.gov.sg
So do you still say that language is a big problem for China? Is this one of those neocon beliefs that will refuse to fade in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary?
-- Carl
P.S. As time has passed, the differences between our regional accents has decreased. This is probably due to the influence of television. There was a time when a visitor to Georgia from Australia could expect to be unable to communicate with the locals. |
