why do japanese and chinese dialects exist?

Question

why do chinese people from different regions who speak different dialects not understand each other? if it's basically the same language?
and i think japanese people have different dialects too.

and why don't we have this in the US? i think i can probably understand anyone from the US even if they are from the other side of the country

Answer 1

Yeah! I can only talk about Japanese. I'm Japanese from Tokyo and have been to country side of Japan and didn't understand what the people said at all. Seriously. It's same language but I really didn't know what they were talking about especially old people. Also, it's not a countryside but Osaka where western Japan and Tokyo where eastern part have huge difference too. I could mostly understand what they say but it just sounds very different. I don't know if this is involving with this question but did you know Japanese isn't one ethnic? If you go to far north or south of Japan, the face structures are so different like a different race.

Answer 2

If China was any other country in the world their 'dialects' would be considered languages. They are VERY different from each other and are not mutually intelligeable. It is just part of the Communist Propoganda, One-China machine. It is actually not "basically the same language"

Japan does have different dialects, but they differ from the Chinese in that they are actually dialects. People from different parts of the country have no trouble understanding each other at all.

As for the U.S. we absolutely have the same thing. For example I'm originally from the Appalachian area of Tennessee. Compare the followqing two sentences;

Standard English:

Would you like to go to my house later?

Appalachian English:

D'janta go'tha 'ouse affer wall?

Dialects exist in virtually every language on the planet, with the only exception being those that are spoken by only a very, very few people in a very localized area, but do keep in mind that from a linguistic perspective what makes a language different from a dialect is mutual intelligeability. If speakers of two different "dialects" don't understand each other at all, then they are very likely speaking different LANGUAGES.

Answer 3

Chinese people who speak the same dialect can pretty much understand each other. There is an ongoing error of calling all of the numerous languages spoken in China dialects of the same language, which is clearly not the case. Cantonese, for example, is not a dialect of Chinese, but is a very different language. Therefore, your problem in understanding is that you believe the mistaken word dialect to be accurate.

Answer 4

They aren't essentially the same language. If it's mutually unintelligible, it's a separate language. "Chinese" isn't one language. There are many languages which are called "Chinese." The one people usually think of is Mandarin.

Many of them DO share a written language, which is possible because they are closely related.

As an example: Japanese and Korean, while being completely separate languages, are close enough to one another in structure that they COULD share a written language and be intelligible to speakers of both languages.

Japanese IS one language, and yes, they do have multiple dialects. Just like English does. Yes, English has dialects. American English isn't a language, it's a dialect. And there are different American English dialects. "Ebonics" is a dialect.

They exist because different mixes of people associated with each other in different regions without mixing much between regions, or without mixing AS much as some other places. People from the south have the same linguist backgrounds, and no outside element has come into there in enough force to change how people there speak, for example. Same with every accent. All it takes is enough isolation that the local way of talking is never supplanted by an outside way of talking. (That isn't TOTAL isolation, of course)

Answer 5

Pardon my rudeness, but you don't make any sense.

Dialects occur in all languages. It's just natural that people in one area will speak a little different than people in other areas. Sometimes people will speak quite differently from area to area, so much as it becomes difficult to understand one another.

People who tend to stay in one area may find it difficult to understand other dialects, but people who travel a lot or meet a lot of people may find it easier. Isn't this common sense?

Also, there is a fine line between where one dialect becomes considered a different language.

For example, it's said that Okinawan Japanese is so far removed from standard Tokyo Japanese, that although it is considered a dialect, that the differences are as different between English and French.

Looked at a different way, perhaps a Japanese could consider English and French dialects of the same language.

Of course there are dialects in the U.S., as there are in Canada, although they are less pronounced than other countries probably due to widespread TV watching coupled with a relatively short history of the English language being used in those countries.

Maybe you need to do some more travelling, like into the various mountain regions of the U.S., or Newfoundland in Canada.

And regarding China, that is a massive country with the largest population of all countries. It would be almost crazy to think that all people in that country would speak the same way.

Try going to the U.K. to see the variety of dialects within the English language within a relatively small area. Did you know that in some American movie theaters that subtitles were used for the movie "Trainspotting"? Apparently the Glaswegian (that means "from Glasgow") dialect was too difficult to understand.

What's the purpose of your question other than to show your ignorance?

Answer 6

One dialect differs from another dialect in pronunciation, vocabulary, and (sometimes) grammar.

Every language that covers more than a very small geographical area has dialects (including U.S. English).

What has happened in China (I don´t think that it is as true in Japan) is that because of historical isolation of one area from another, the pronunciation of the different words has tended to vary in the extreme, such that over time the "pronunciation" of a "word" (character is the case of Chinese) becomes very different, hence unintelligible to people from other geographical regions of the same language. It is still the same language--if the people from one dialect write what they want to say to people from another dialect, all can read and understand the written language, even though the spoken language may remain incomprehensible.

Answer 7

Well, first of all, the dialects are all very different. The main language used is Mandarin, but there are also others such as Cantonese. Also, even the dialects that are the same are spoken with hugely different accents, especially comparing the country and the city. It would be like an extremely British person trying to understand an extremely Southern person. They might understand a lot of it, but it would be very hard, especially with slang. We don't have this because of our history, although we do have many different accents and slang words. We decended from mostly Europeans, and sort of formed our own version of their English. China is much bigger, and Chinese is a very difficult language. Many words sound extremely similar, and only differ in tone and symbol. For example, there are five tones: a high tone, a rising tone, a dipping tone, a falling tone, and a flat tone. The word ma is a very good example. Ma high means mother, ma rising means flax, ma dipping means horse, ma fallng means scold, and ma flat is used to indicate a question. Therefore it is very hard to tell the difference, especially for foreigners. If you have any more questions, try a search engine.

Answer 8

First, it is not true there are no dialects in the US. There are many geographical dialects in the US, and there also class-based and culture-based dialects.

It is not entirely true that people from different dialects in China may not understand each other. Usually Chinese dialects are divided in Southern (Yue, Min,etc) and Northern (Mandarin, Wu, etc) family of dialects. It is more likely people will be able to understand each other if their dialects belong to the same family.

In Japan, with exception of some dialects in Kyushuu and Okinawa, it is usually only minor differences in grammar structure and word choices, so with a little bit of training it is highly intelegible to other speakers. Okinawa actually has a completely different language and it is only considered a dialect for political reasons.

Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Catalan, etc. are essentially Latin dialects that evolved to be independent languages. From this perspective, I think "dialects" for Chinese can be a misnomer for language such as Cantonese and others, which exist quite independently from Mandarin.

Italy has several dialects. Many of them would be barely understood for someone who only knew the standard language. In Spain, I believe any person in Barcelona would be offended if you said Catalan is a Spanish dialect.

There also some strange anomalies. For instance, Galician is essentially almost the same as Portuguese. However, it uses Spanish ortography, for mostly political reasons.

There are many reason why dialects exist. Sometimes, it is because geographical isolation. Other times, it is because certain areas absorbed considerable number of indigenous population or immigrants. Sometimes, it may be class-based or culture-based, such as Jewish dialects and Hakka dialect in China.

Many times dialects exist as a continuum. For instance, population close to borders would have different influences than population far away from borders, but this could be very difficult to pinpoint in a map, since there may a be a continuum between 0 influence and 100% influence.

Answer 9

Dialects evolve from common speech and vocabulary used by the same group of people who live together and are isolated from other groups over a period of time.

Historically, China with its vast region and people migrate to different areas and are isolated from their origins and hence developed the various dialects. The same for Japan.

However in the US, given the short 200-300 year history and the modern transportation and communication developments in the past 200 years, dialects have not developed to the extent of that in China and Japan.

Answer 10

Check it out. Go down to the bold heading of North America.

There is at least a partial list of dialects within North America.

I've traveled fairly extensively and there are places in America where if both sides don't work at it a bit, there's not going to be any communication. Fo' Sheazy!