Is Chinese Really a Language?

If you tell someone that you’re learning Chinese, they might ask you, “So, are you learning Cantonese or Mandarin?” Over the years, there’s been some contention about whether or not “Chinese” is a language, and I’ve heard the claim that Chinese isn’t a language several times in my own life. So, which one is it? Is “Chinese” a language or not?

The truth is, if you’re studying any of China's 276 indigenous dialects, you’re studying Chinese! At least, you are according to most Chinese people.  Depending on who you ask, Chinese has between 7 to 10 distinct language groups. From a linguistic perspective, these groups are more like separate languages than dialects, but they are still widely considered to belong to a single Chinese language, if only as part of a common cultural/political identity. (It's been said that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.) The two most common dialects to study are Mandarin and Cantonese, but they only represent a fraction of China’s linguistic diversity.

Mandarin and Cantonese

In Mainland China, Mandarin Chinese (普通话 pǔtōnghuà) is the standard form of Chinese spoken on TV, taught in most schools, and used for communication between people of different regions. Its name in Chinese literally means “the common tongue,” and it’s also referred to as Standard Chinese in English. If you're looking to communicate with the widest set of Chinese people, this is likely the language that you want to be studying, as it's continuing to gain adoption over time. 

Cantonese is widely known in the United States because Hong Kong people were some of the first Chinese people to establish immigrant communities in the United States. Hong Kong also has a storied history as a center of media production for kung foo films, Cantonese music, and more. The prolific entertainment industry especially foiled the closed-off Mainland, whose complicated history of "opening up" was marked by deadly Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. Together with English, Cantonese is the main language spoken in Hong Kong.

How Mandarin Became the Standard

As is frequently the case, there is a clear political backdrop to China’s current linguistic landscape. In 1928, the Chinese Nationalists (the government currently located in Taiwan) reunified China. Although Literary Chinese had been a written lingua franca across China for thousands of years, it's only recently that there has been a national spoken language. For years the Chinese Nationalists had worked on establishing a unified spoken language, and in 1932 the National Languages Committee established the Beijing dialect as the basis for that standard. When the Communist People’s Republic of China took control in 1949, they continued to adopt Mandarin as the standard language. 

Opinions on Dialects

Depending on the context, it’s possible that someone might take issue with someone assuming that the “default” spoken Chinese is Mandarin, although it is certainly the default in both Mainland China and Taiwan these days. Non-Mandarin dialects are still forms of spoken Chinese (汉语 hànyǔ), but to some, they are second-class 方言 fāngyán, or non-standard dialects.

In my conversations with native speakers from various parts of China, I've found that opinions on fangyan vary from region to region. In some places like Sichuan or Hong Kong, local people are very proud of their regional languages, although in large swaths of China, the youngest generation is losing its ability to speak the local languages. Some regions with more autonomy, such as Inner Mongolia, Tibet, and Hong Kong continue to teach classes in their local dialect, although increased Mandarin instruction has caused large-scale protests in Inner Mongolia as recently as 2020.

I couldn’t find an authoritative English-language survey of Chinese opinions on fangyan, but the popular Q/A website Zhihu has a wide range of discussion on this topic, including questions like “Is it really lower class to speak fangyan?” and “Do fangyan make it harder to communicate? Should we get rid of them?”

Conclusion

In summary, Chinese is a broad word used by language departments in colleges and universities across the United States. It can refer to Mandarin, Cantonese, or any number of languages indigenous to China. If you’re learning any one of these remarkable languages, props to you!