Author: dsfsd
Date: 10-28-03 22:45
>>but the problem with mandarin is that 99% of china speaks mandarin. alot of dialect or languages has been replace with mandarin.
one of the language is the zhejiang or wu dialect. mandarin is slowly replacing the wu dialect.<<
99% speaking Mandarin does not mean 99% would prefer to speak Mandarin. There are 90 million Wu speakers in China. That is not 1% of the population. These people are not born speaking Mandarin; they learn Mandarin in schools because Wu is not encouraged by PRC (unlike Cantonese, there is not a single Wu-dialect TV station; nor has any developments been made into devising a more suitable script or set of characters for Wu).
A visit to Shanghai will tell you that Mandarin is not slowly replacing the Wu dialect. All native Shanghainese youths speak Shanghainese, with a very strong sense of "Shanghai" identity. Most see their purely vernacular dialect as their distinguishing mark; many will argue that Shanghainese sounds far better than Mandarin or Cantonese. Yes, because of only Mandarin education (and the lack of a suitable script for Wu), more and more Mandarin vocabulary has entered Shanghainese, but the dialect has not turned into Mandarin; it is still unintelligible to a native-Mandarin speaker. The equivalent is Chinese vocabulary entering Japanese (or the opposite way); the language is still Japanese. Would you consider Mandarin word 'shehui' (society) a Japanese word? It was borrowed by Chinese writers from the Japanese (which is shakai) during the early 20th century. The same for words like:
ideology = zhuyi (shugi)
telephone = dianhua (denwa)
abstract = chouxiang-de (chuushou-teki)
suffrage = toupiao (tohyou)
philosophy = zhexue (tetsugaku)
organic = youji (yuki)
definition = dingyi (teigi)
The words above were all first coined in Japanese and transfered later to China. I bet you don't think they are Japanese now do you?
Also, the Shanghainese have managed to speak Standard Mandarin better than native-Mandarin speakers in the north (my personal observation using CCTV and Chinese radio stations as the standard); this might've given you the idea that Mandarin has replaced Wu.
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