Hanzi Smatter--- Chinese Tattoo Fails

BarnBuster said:

@neosapien is it correct to say the language is Chinese and, say Mandarin, Cantonese and Wu are just "dialects"?
I've wondered about this.

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Olive Drab Green said:

Yes. Cantonese and Mandarin are on a Southern Country-Northern Country kind of scale, or at least mostly. I forget which is which. However, there are legitimate differences in words and phrases.

I think Beijing is more Mandarin, Hong Kong is more Cantonese.

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It depends on who you ask about it lol. For simplicity sake they call all the languages, dialects, but they are all actually unintelligible from each other and from a linguistics view, their own languages, I believe is the general consensus. There are hundreds of languages with 8 major groups and many subsets from those groups.

Olive is correct on the regional aspect.