Americans discover the 3000 year old continent spanning nation of 1.4 billion people... might have regional differences. honestly, who knew?
western ignorance is truly a form of exceptionalism
this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2025
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bud, in southern China you can travel between neighbouring cities their dialects would not be mutually intelligible with Mandarin or even each other
the distance between Cantonese and Mandarin is wider than spanish and italian
and thats not even talking about non-chinese langauges like Mongolian and Uyghur or whatever
As a Spaniard I always found it funny that I can just read Italian and understand like 95% of it. Like, what did the Fr*nch do to their language that fucked it up so bad smh
Fujian has Min bei (Sanming, Nanping, Wuyi Mt. I think), Min dong (Fuzhou), Putian, Min nan (Quanzhou, Zhangzhou), Min xi (Longyan), and Hakka. That's six different, not mutually intelligible, languages.
Even Zhangzhounese and Quanzhounese, while mostly mutually intelligible, are different enough from each other that they would be called different languages if it was europe (like serbian-croatian, portuguese-galician, czech-slovak, icelandic-faroese, norwegian-swedish etc)
Really doesn't help that China insists on calling them 'dialects' and not 'languages', which is what they really are, though the added confusion of them being basically the same when written down muddles things.
a language is a dialect with an army and a navy