Talk:Chinese language

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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 28 March 2019 and 8 May 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Czhu1995.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 19:00, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 4 October 2021 and 9 December 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Amber MWY.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 19:00, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion

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• The origin and spread of the Sino-Tibetan language family.png

Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 09:37, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

Problem with the def of "Chinese dialects"

According to the text of the article, there are multiple versions for the definition of the term "Chinese dialects" which are all acceptable. ("The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be dialects of a single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered to be separate languages in a family." )
I have no personal preference for any of which, but the fact that Min Chinese have diverged from other branches of Chinese prior to the formation of Middle Chinese is recognized by most scholars and is therefore needed to be specified in the infobox. In addition, if Min Chinese is not considered a Chinese dialect(According to @Kwamikagami:), all other Chinese dialects mentioned in the article will then need to be removed from the text as well. Hank2530 (talk) 02:44, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

First, you don't have to say "dialect", you could just leave it off. Second, Min is a language family -- call them "dialects" if you like, but there are dozens of them. There is no "Min dialect" either way. I mean, would you claim that the non-Min "dialect" derives from Middle Chinese? Finally, we used to say "all but Min" (if I recall correctly, I was the one who added that claim to begin with), but that was removed because the preponderance of sources does not support the claim. — kwami (talk) 05:45, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

Change "dialects" wording?

The list of Chinese languages on the info card is labeled "Dialects:" but they're not dialects, really not even close. They're mutually unintelligible languages that happen to share a writing system. Mandarin speakers and Cantonese speakers can't understand each other any better than speakers of English and French do. LaymansLinguist (talk) 07:55, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

The analogy of English and French sounds a little extreme – the relationship between these two languages is only remote, and if it weren't for the numerous loanwords they would be hard to recognise as related at all, while even the most divergent varieties of Chinese or Sinitic are still relatively closely related. A closer analogy, with respect to time depth and similarity (from what I've seen), would be West Germanic or Western Romance for non-Min Chinese, with Min being more analogous to outliers like North Germanic or Sardinian in their respective families respectively.

Ultimately, I understand what we have in the case of Chinese or Sinitic is more like a strongly differentiated group (like Germanic or Romance) of several moderately differentiated groups (like Frisian or Oïl) of dialect groups (like North Frisian or Walloon), which elsewhere would be classified as a language family composed of several branches each consisting of several individual languages. Just as a very rough idea. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 17:44, 17 August 2023 (UTC)

Just as an illustration, our article Southern Min says:

Southern Min is not mutually intelligible with other branches of Min Chinese nor with non-Min varieties of Chinese, such as Mandarin, and the principal varieties of Southern Min are not intelligible with each other.

So Southern Min is a merely a branch of Min Chinese, yet itself like a language family.

The tables here give a rough impression of just how diverse Min Chinese is internally. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 20:56, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

A couple hundred languages, so a larger family than Romance or Slavic or Western Germanic, but maybe about that time depth / degree of similarity. — kwami (talk) 08:57, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm not talking about the number of languages, but only the linguistic distance within the family. Some of the most divergent members, such as Standard Chinese and Hokkien, are comparatively distantly related – certainly there's no question their divergence would typically get them classed as distinct languages, that is, Hokkien is an Abstandsprache with respect to Standard Chinese. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 22:30, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

As we all know a language is a dialect with an army and navy, so calling them languages isn't ideal. But they are clearly not just dialects either. That's why "variety" is used, as in the above quote and more generally when discussing Chinese language(s). That would be the obvious thing to change it to I think.--2A04:4A43:907F:FEB1:E804:215E:5C25:7100 (talk) 23:30, 7 September 2023 (UTC)