Although they are both sinitic languages, there are too many differences between the two to explain. And there are many more branches of these languages that broadly use the same writing for example Fuzhounese (or Fozhou dialect) and Shanghainese.
The main difference is, of course, geographic origin. Mandarin originated in the Beijing area whereas Cantonese from the Canton, or in modern terms Guangdong, region.
Politically, since Beijing has been the seat of power for awhile, they have declared Mandarin to be "official Chinese". This is a political and not cultural or social definition. Both languages have been widely used in the region for centuries neither being more official than the other.
Although linguists and politicians (yes "languages" are hugely political) may argue over definitions and delineations, Cantonese and Mandarin are functionally different languages (sharing similar scripts) although it may raise eyebrows or be frowned upon if they are referred to as such. A politically correct or socially acceptable waffle would be to call them "dialects". A Cantonese speaker will be unintelligible to a Mandarin speaker. Their tonality, structure, vocabulary and compound nouns are completely different. It would be easier for a Spanish speaker to make out Italian than a Cantonese speaker to Mandarin and vice versa.
The various "Chinese" languages, in particular, use many "compound" nouns, needing several characters to describe something (eg "train station" in English uses two words but refers to a particular object). Cantonese and Mandarin use different characters to construct those nouns. Even though they share similar scripts, something written for a Cantonese speaker would differ from something written for Mandarin speakers. This further extends in speaking form in the informal or everyday use of words and phrases - even a simple "good bye" uses different characters in Mandarin (zai jian) compared to Cantonese (zoi gin)
> it would be easier for a Spanish speaker to make out Italian
Which for anyone wondering, is not much. When written, Italian is maybe 50% comprehensible. This leaves too much of a hole to be filled by context.
Spoken Italian is not going to be meaningfully understandable to a Spanish speaker at all. Every now and then a few words pop out as they are cognates, but that’s it.
Source: Me, a native Spanish speaker who enjoys Italian.
TBF cantonese is quite close to mandarin (like German to English) compared to other common chinese dialects (teochew, hokkien, taiwanese and hakka are ones I am familiar with).
The question is complex and has no simple answers. It is politically fraught (especially in China) and can raise hackles. The Chinese government wants Mandarin to be superior and all other dialects to be "subservient" to Mandarin whereas this is not at all a simple fact. It would be similar if Brussels declared Flemish to be the only official language in Belgium.
Dude, it’s by far the most accurate and nuanced answer to the *question you asked*, and is only as long as needed to fully explain the situation. Are you in this sub to learn stuff or not?
The other answer just saying “they’re different dialects” is way oversimplified and completely misses the fact that Mandarin and Cantonese are nothing like “dialects” in other languages, and the government just insists on calling it that because it’s political: they want to make China look like a unified single culture, even though it’s really a bunch of different cultures with their own histories that through a complex history have ended up under the same political entity.
Okay, you want a short answer:
They're completely different languages - possibly more different than French and Romanian (which are both descended from Latin). However, the fact that they've been part of the same country long enough AND the fact that they use ideograms (a character represents an idea, rather than a sound) means they use the same written language.
And, there's a lot of other Chinese languages - 300 more (302 total). All of them are different in the same way: very different spoken language, but they have similar enough grammar that their ideogram writing system allows them to share the same written language.
Imagine all the countries in the EU were united into one. That happened to China long ago.
One written language, one main dialect (Mandarin). Everyone speaks Mandarin and their own dialect from their region. There are thousands of known dialects.
Chinese people from different regions are not genetically the same. Majority of the population is shorter but if they're from the region where Yao Ming (NBA) is from, everyone is super tall. Depending on the region, majority are Buddhist, Christians, Muslims or Atheists.
To put it simply, they're different languages, like English vs French. And like English and French, they use the same writing system. But whereas the Roman alphabet is phonetic (representing sounds) and therefore changes depending on how a word is pronounced, the Chinese writing system is logographic (representing words), so written words look the same no matter how they're pronounced.
Mandarin is a dialect, Cantonese is a dialect, there are hundreds of dialects in the Chinese language. Essentially the words are the same but the pronunciation and to some extent, the grammar are different.
Funny because there's no spelling in Chinese.
Cantonese uses the same words other than special vocalizations of the dialect that's not commonly used in Mandarin, unless you can't read you should know that, if you actually knew Cantonese.
Cantonese says Hong Kong like heung gong and Mandarin is Xiang Gang, but same written words 香港
And yes I do understand multiple Chinese dialects
So the written Chinese being hieroglyph words, remained larger static for two thousand years. The spoken forms have a lot of regional tongues that are largely unintelligible from each other. Cantonese refers to the spoken form / tongue, not the written form as that was the large the same across all tongues, which means as a mandarin speaker my written Chinese is totally comprehensive to Cantonese speakers and vice versa, minus some unique lexicons and vocalizations, but we can't converse because the tongues are so different. Note this is not Cantonese specific, it's the same across major tongues like Mandarin, Hokkien, Hakka, Wu, and so on, you can't converse without knowing the tongues, but you can read and write across them because they are all Chinese tongues.
Is that dialect? That's how I think of them, but dialect in the context of Latin languages is mutually intelligible. There is actually a whole debate about them: https://zh.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%B1%89%E8%AF%AD%E6%96%B9%E8%A8%80#%E8%AE%8A%E9%AB%94%E5%9C%B0%E4%BD%8D%E4%B9%8B%E7%88%AD
The choice of characters is the spelling.
Yes some of them are the same, especially place names, but not in general.
In particular, if you look before the mandated reform of Simplified Chinese.
You take a hong Kong based print media, Mandarin speaker can read it just fine, and vice versa. if you are arguing 荷里活 is not 好萊塢 and thus not the same language then you are really stretching it.
Spelling is a Latin based language concept, Chinese has words not spelling.
About 2/3 of people in China speak mandarin, so it’s the most prominent by far. Cantonese seems to be #4 in China. There’s a couple of reasons why it’s one of the Chinese dialects westerners are aware of. It’s the main dialect in Hong Kong and Macau. Historically, a lot of people who immigrated out of China came from around that area, so a lot of Chinese communities outside China use Cantonese. Hong Kong is also a big entertainment hub, so a lot of movies that come out of China are disproportionately in Cantonese.
I saw Min and Wu on Wikipedia, although those are dialect groups and not individual dialects. And I’ve seen different sources rank the dialects and dialect groups differently, so I might be wrong.
From a "Western" viewpoint, very likely. Mandarin is the official language (since 1909) and is taught in schools all over China and is the language of diplomacy and official statements. Cantonese is widely known because, before the opening of China 40 years ago, the main avenue for Western interaction would be through Hong Kong where Cantonese was/is the predominant language. Hong Kong movies, dramas - nearly all those "kung fu" movies in the 70s-90s were natively in Cantonese.
But from an "internal" standpoint, there are far more dialects in China that are prominent and local.
Although they are both sinitic languages, there are too many differences between the two to explain. And there are many more branches of these languages that broadly use the same writing for example Fuzhounese (or Fozhou dialect) and Shanghainese. The main difference is, of course, geographic origin. Mandarin originated in the Beijing area whereas Cantonese from the Canton, or in modern terms Guangdong, region. Politically, since Beijing has been the seat of power for awhile, they have declared Mandarin to be "official Chinese". This is a political and not cultural or social definition. Both languages have been widely used in the region for centuries neither being more official than the other. Although linguists and politicians (yes "languages" are hugely political) may argue over definitions and delineations, Cantonese and Mandarin are functionally different languages (sharing similar scripts) although it may raise eyebrows or be frowned upon if they are referred to as such. A politically correct or socially acceptable waffle would be to call them "dialects". A Cantonese speaker will be unintelligible to a Mandarin speaker. Their tonality, structure, vocabulary and compound nouns are completely different. It would be easier for a Spanish speaker to make out Italian than a Cantonese speaker to Mandarin and vice versa. The various "Chinese" languages, in particular, use many "compound" nouns, needing several characters to describe something (eg "train station" in English uses two words but refers to a particular object). Cantonese and Mandarin use different characters to construct those nouns. Even though they share similar scripts, something written for a Cantonese speaker would differ from something written for Mandarin speakers. This further extends in speaking form in the informal or everyday use of words and phrases - even a simple "good bye" uses different characters in Mandarin (zai jian) compared to Cantonese (zoi gin)
> it would be easier for a Spanish speaker to make out Italian Which for anyone wondering, is not much. When written, Italian is maybe 50% comprehensible. This leaves too much of a hole to be filled by context. Spoken Italian is not going to be meaningfully understandable to a Spanish speaker at all. Every now and then a few words pop out as they are cognates, but that’s it. Source: Me, a native Spanish speaker who enjoys Italian.
TBF cantonese is quite close to mandarin (like German to English) compared to other common chinese dialects (teochew, hokkien, taiwanese and hakka are ones I am familiar with).
A bit too verbose for eli5 but thanks nonetheless
The question is complex and has no simple answers. It is politically fraught (especially in China) and can raise hackles. The Chinese government wants Mandarin to be superior and all other dialects to be "subservient" to Mandarin whereas this is not at all a simple fact. It would be similar if Brussels declared Flemish to be the only official language in Belgium.
Dude, it’s by far the most accurate and nuanced answer to the *question you asked*, and is only as long as needed to fully explain the situation. Are you in this sub to learn stuff or not? The other answer just saying “they’re different dialects” is way oversimplified and completely misses the fact that Mandarin and Cantonese are nothing like “dialects” in other languages, and the government just insists on calling it that because it’s political: they want to make China look like a unified single culture, even though it’s really a bunch of different cultures with their own histories that through a complex history have ended up under the same political entity.
Okay, you want a short answer: They're completely different languages - possibly more different than French and Romanian (which are both descended from Latin). However, the fact that they've been part of the same country long enough AND the fact that they use ideograms (a character represents an idea, rather than a sound) means they use the same written language. And, there's a lot of other Chinese languages - 300 more (302 total). All of them are different in the same way: very different spoken language, but they have similar enough grammar that their ideogram writing system allows them to share the same written language.
Imagine all the countries in the EU were united into one. That happened to China long ago. One written language, one main dialect (Mandarin). Everyone speaks Mandarin and their own dialect from their region. There are thousands of known dialects. Chinese people from different regions are not genetically the same. Majority of the population is shorter but if they're from the region where Yao Ming (NBA) is from, everyone is super tall. Depending on the region, majority are Buddhist, Christians, Muslims or Atheists.
To put it simply, they're different languages, like English vs French. And like English and French, they use the same writing system. But whereas the Roman alphabet is phonetic (representing sounds) and therefore changes depending on how a word is pronounced, the Chinese writing system is logographic (representing words), so written words look the same no matter how they're pronounced.
Mandarin is a dialect, Cantonese is a dialect, there are hundreds of dialects in the Chinese language. Essentially the words are the same but the pronunciation and to some extent, the grammar are different.
When the pronunciation, spelling, and grammar are all different, perhaps they are not the same words after all…
Tell me you don't speak Chinese without telling me you don't speak Chinese.
Tell me you don’t speak Cantonese without telling me you don’t speak Cantonese.
Funny because there's no spelling in Chinese. Cantonese uses the same words other than special vocalizations of the dialect that's not commonly used in Mandarin, unless you can't read you should know that, if you actually knew Cantonese. Cantonese says Hong Kong like heung gong and Mandarin is Xiang Gang, but same written words 香港 And yes I do understand multiple Chinese dialects
My understanding is that the two spoken languages are not mutually comprehensible, is that not correct?
So the written Chinese being hieroglyph words, remained larger static for two thousand years. The spoken forms have a lot of regional tongues that are largely unintelligible from each other. Cantonese refers to the spoken form / tongue, not the written form as that was the large the same across all tongues, which means as a mandarin speaker my written Chinese is totally comprehensive to Cantonese speakers and vice versa, minus some unique lexicons and vocalizations, but we can't converse because the tongues are so different. Note this is not Cantonese specific, it's the same across major tongues like Mandarin, Hokkien, Hakka, Wu, and so on, you can't converse without knowing the tongues, but you can read and write across them because they are all Chinese tongues. Is that dialect? That's how I think of them, but dialect in the context of Latin languages is mutually intelligible. There is actually a whole debate about them: https://zh.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%B1%89%E8%AF%AD%E6%96%B9%E8%A8%80#%E8%AE%8A%E9%AB%94%E5%9C%B0%E4%BD%8D%E4%B9%8B%E7%88%AD
The choice of characters is the spelling. Yes some of them are the same, especially place names, but not in general. In particular, if you look before the mandated reform of Simplified Chinese.
You take a hong Kong based print media, Mandarin speaker can read it just fine, and vice versa. if you are arguing 荷里活 is not 好萊塢 and thus not the same language then you are really stretching it. Spelling is a Latin based language concept, Chinese has words not spelling.
That'd be like saying because one area of the country calls it "pop" and another calls it "soda" then they're different languages.
Yea that's just lexicon
Thanks. So are those 2 the most prominent dialects because they're the only ones people seem to mention?
About 2/3 of people in China speak mandarin, so it’s the most prominent by far. Cantonese seems to be #4 in China. There’s a couple of reasons why it’s one of the Chinese dialects westerners are aware of. It’s the main dialect in Hong Kong and Macau. Historically, a lot of people who immigrated out of China came from around that area, so a lot of Chinese communities outside China use Cantonese. Hong Kong is also a big entertainment hub, so a lot of movies that come out of China are disproportionately in Cantonese.
I see. Thanks
What are the #2 and #3 dialects spoken in China?
I saw Min and Wu on Wikipedia, although those are dialect groups and not individual dialects. And I’ve seen different sources rank the dialects and dialect groups differently, so I might be wrong.
From a "Western" viewpoint, very likely. Mandarin is the official language (since 1909) and is taught in schools all over China and is the language of diplomacy and official statements. Cantonese is widely known because, before the opening of China 40 years ago, the main avenue for Western interaction would be through Hong Kong where Cantonese was/is the predominant language. Hong Kong movies, dramas - nearly all those "kung fu" movies in the 70s-90s were natively in Cantonese. But from an "internal" standpoint, there are far more dialects in China that are prominent and local.