DIALECTS

Dialects: translation

   Dialects in Italy are not just regionally distinctive pronunciations of Italian. They are the popular speech of many for whom speaking the literary language as taught in school is a terrible struggle. Yet no inferiority should be imputed. Dialects have their own verb forms and vocabularies. Many have their own theatrical tradition, their own poets, and—most conspicuously—their own songs. Many Piedmontese leaders of newly united Italy, including the king, had to learn Italian as a foreign language.

   As the Romans colonized the Italian peninsula, they met Etruscans, Ligurians, Oscans, Illyrians, Phoenicians, and Greeks. (Magna Grecia included Greek colonies in the river valleys of the Italian south, leaving a clear impact on local culture, including speech.) Not surprisingly, the pronunciation of the Latin learned by these people varied significantly.After the collapse of Roman unity and the Germanic, Norman, and Arab invasions between the fifth and ninth centuries, the absence of a political center exacerbated the differences between North and South and further slowed the acceptance of a common speech.

   By the Middle Ages a gulf separated the use of Latin as a written language and neo-Latin vernaculars, which, while initially only spoken, came to be written as well between the 11th and 13th centuries. Conceiving all dialects of the Romance languages as derived from Latin helps one see how in Italy (as in France, Portugal, and Spain), one powerful or wealthy region was able to ensure the widened use of its particular Latin dialect. Thus, Castilian became the dialect that the rest of centralized Spain had to accept as the standard, just as Parisian became the standard for unitary France and Tuscan the Italian literary language, for this was the language of Boccaccio, Dante, and Petrarch in the region whose wealth derived from having invented banking and being the major insurer of European trade with the Near and Far East.

   In 1945, 50 percent of Italians spoke only a dialect. Before the advent of television, increased school attendance, and the leveling effect on language of commercial films, most Italians found communication between people from differing regions as difficult as between people from separate countries. A Neapolitan and a Milanese can now converse in Italian; 50 years ago, unless they shared a knowledge of French, Latin, or another language, comprehension was difficult.

   The vigor of dialects continues at the end of the 20th century, especially in remote areas and among older generations. Spontaneity and intimacy are easiest in the dialect used in the home, among friends, and in the family, and it clearly distinguishes outsiders from those who “belong.” Indeed, one’s identity seems to depend on ties to territory in the form of ties “to the parish, the club, the neighborhood, the dialect.” The global economy may require the loosening of such ties, but the price to be paid has yet to be calculated. Dialectologists distinguish Gallo-Italic dialects (Piedmontese, Ligurian, Lombard, Emilian-Romagnol) from Venetian (Venetian, Trentino). In central Italy there are several Tuscan and central dialects (Umbrian, Marchigian, Roman) and southern dialects (Campanian, Abruzzese, Molisan, Calabrese, Pulian, Lucanian, and Sicilian). To these must be added the Ladino dialect spoken in Friuli (called Friulano in Italian or—in dialect—Furlans). Sardinian is closely related to Catalan, the dialect that Francisco Franco tried for decades to stamp out in Spain.

   See also Minorities.

dialects: translation

Two levels of linguistic variation within Chinese are referred to as fangyan, usually translated ‘dialect’ but preferentially now following Victor Mair as ‘topolect’, ‘language of a place’. At one level, linguists identify eight—sometimes seven-historically related language groups: Mandarin, Wu, Yue, Gan, Xiang, Kejia and Northern and Southern Min (sometimes combined). Mandarin, also called Putonghua or ‘common speech’ in the PRC, is the official language and is spoken as a native language in north China. Shanghainese is said to be typical of the Wu dialects, which also include languages spoken in Suzhou, Hangzhou, Ningbo and other smaller areas. Yue includes the Cantonese spoken in Canton and Hong Kong (and in many overseas Chinese Chinatowns).Southern Min is spoken in Fujian province and across the straits in Taiwan (where it is also called Taiwanese, Hokkien and Ho’lo). Hakka (Kejia) is spoken throughout southern China and Greater China. These eight fangyan are not usually mutually intelligible but may be represented by the single Chinese writing system (with some exceptions).

Within each of these fangyan groups, additional variation exists. Villages separated by mountains and rivers may speak varieties that are noticeably different, though they may be mutually intelligible.

The Mandarin fangyan are spoken as a mother tongue by approximately 70 per cent of the mainland population. Mandarin is increasingly regarded as the official language in Singapore, despite its residents being almost entirely speakers of southern dialects. Mandarin is the official language of Taiwan, though five-sixths of its population also speaks Taiwanese. Some fangyan have more speakers than well-known European languages; three—Mandarin, Wu and Yue—rank first, tenth and sixteenth in number of native speakers among all world languages. See Table 1.

Table 1 Linguistic variation

Dialect / Representative city or area / Percentage of Han in PRC (est.) / Population

Mandarin Beijing 71.5 / 858,000,000

Wu / Shanghai / 8.5 / 102,000,000

Yue / Canton (Guangzhou) / 5 / 60,000,000

Xiang / Hunan / 4.8 / 57,600,000

Kejia (Hakka) / Scattered in southern China and overseas China / 3.7 / 44,400,000

Southern Min / Amoy, Taiwan / 2.8 / 33,600,000

Gan / Jiangxi / 2.4 / 28,800,000

Northern Min / Fuzhou / 1.3 / 15,600,000

Total / 100 / 1.2 billion Han (92% of PRC population

See also: Sino-Tibetan language speakers

DeFrancis, John (1984). The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Mair, Victor H. (1991). ‘What is a Chinese Dialect/Topolect? Reflections on Some Key Sino-English Linguistic Terms’. Sino-Platonic Papers 29 (September).

Norman, Jerry (1988). Chinese. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ramsey, S.Robert (1987). The Languages of China. Princeton: Princeton University Press.