Accents and Dialects

In our "Asian group" at WWS, some of us speak Chinese, but this doesn't guarantee we can understand each other. For example, my roommate Leslie speaks Taiwan Mandarin, and Simona speaks Beijing Mandarin. What they say sound similar to me, but they have difficulties in understanding each other. Similarly I find it hard to understand those who speak English with accents: when I was in South Africa, my colleagues seemed to be fine with the English local people speak, but I was almost driven crazy by their accents.

For native speakers, it's simple to adapt to accents because you don't need to understand each word to get the idea of his/her talk; but for foreigners, it's substantial to catch the meaning of key words to understand the entire sentence. Therefore, if I come across someone from other parts of China, I may fail to understand some phrases or words, but it won't hurt - I still understand him/her, and not only that, I may learn some interesting new words. But when I'm in class discussions in Princeton, I can get very confused if I miss some words in the speech. That's what we call the difference between fluency and native-fluency.

Back to accents in Chinese. China is big, and populous. Thousands of years ago when transportation was undeveloped, most people stayed where they were born for the whole lives; and within these separate villages, people spoke dialects to their families, neighbors and friends. There was barely any demand for communicating with people outside, and dialects evolved separately over the time. One day, when people left their hometown in carts, they found themselves unable to understand outsiders. That's what we call "Five miles (are long enough to make) different tones, and ten miles (are long enough to make) different languages." In the end Chinese people speak thousands of dialects, each very different from the other, and some even sound like foreign languages, e.g. the pronunciation of one, two, three, etc. in some places in Zhejiang is more similar to Japanese than to Chinese. There is a rumor that in Qing Dynasty, emperors always had problems in understanding top candidates in the triennial imperial exams, most of whom were from south of Yangtze River and spoke dialects which were quite different from Mandarin. (Just think of a Mandarin-speaking emperor who tried to understand his chancellor from Guangdong, a Cantonese-speaking area.)

In 1950s, Beijing dialect was selected as the official language in China, known as Mandarin today. People in south China are required to speak Mandarin too ever since. The pronunciation and grammar of mandarin is tested in national college exam, as a benchmark for university recruitment. However, affected by people around, southern students always have a hard time in getting rid of accents derived from dialects when they are speaking Mandarin. For example, people in Fujian always fail to distinguish "Fu" from "Hu" and you may find them claiming to be from "Hujian"; people in Zhejiang always struggle with "z" and "zh", therefore they may tell you that they are from "Zejiang"; and those in Human can hardly pronounce "n" but always replace it with "l", thus you may find they're from "Hulan" instead of "Hunan". Even those in the north cannot confidently claim to speak good Mandarin and their trouble is more about rhyme, not initials. I know a friend from Liaoning who can't tell the difference between "you" and "yu"; local Beijingers tend to add "er" to the nouns in conversation,  Anyway Chinese Mandarin is difficult enough, let alone accents caused by dialects. Poor foreign students in China!

Some people claim Mandarin as a language hegemony in China as it sweeps away all the dialects and made Beijingers dominant the entire China. Old fictions with local tones and accents gradually lost their market share, and local dramas have increasing difficulties in recruiting performers. These may be the cost of honing national unity and breaking down domestic communication barriers, but local languages, as well as other local culture and traditions, may be preserved in better ways.