"The English of China"

At a birthday dinner for my suitemate Omar that Lucas and I attended, I was seated to the immediate left of three of his Chinese classmates. It was both fun and humbling trying to hold a conversation in Chinese with the three of them, who were all from different parts of China; thankfully they knew some English, which kept the dialogue from coming to an abrupt halt on several occasions.

Anyways, at some point during the meal, all ten of us fell silent as one of the Chinese waitresses was loudly and angrily communicating something to one of her co-workers. I didn’t understand a word of what she was saying, and chalked it up to the fact that my Chinese still kinda sucks; but before I could ask my new friend what was going on, he leaned in and said, “Wo-men dou ting bu dong ta—We all have no idea what she’s saying!”

The reason none of us could understand her was because she was not speaking Putonghua (Mandarin Chinese) at all, but Shanghainese, the language native to the area; it is actually one of the 292 languages and dialects that are currently being spoken in the nation of China (ethnologue.com).

It was a little while ago that I learned the somewhat disappointing fact that when I had been told, “Oh everyone speaks Mandarin in China,” that was really only half true; I know now that that is kind of like saying, “Everyone speaks English in the West”—I guess it’s true that most do, especially the young people, but it certainly is not everyone’s first language. As a percentage of the total population, not very many people speak Putonghua as their first language, but most—especially the young people—have learned it as a second language to communicate with those outside their small region.

By the way, here’s a related fun fact: despite there being just short of 300 spoken languages, there is only one writing system. Well, two I guess: Traditional and Simplified—but simplified directly comes from traditional so I don’t think that counts. I think that’s crazy though, that two Chinese people who may not be able to verbally communicate with each other at all, can both look at the same written sentence and understand it perfectly.