In the comments, James Schipper suggests that Mandarin is to Sinitic what German and Russian are to Germanic and Slavic. He also offers that most Sinitic speakers also speak Mandarin and makes a comparison with Welsh and English and Frisian and Dutch, where every Welsh speaker speaks English and every Frisian speaker speaks Dutch, and each one would rather write in English or Dutch than in Welsh or Frisian.
My comments:
English and German have 60% lexical similarity. English and French have about 25% and English has about 29% with Russian (I need to check on that one!). I need to look at some charts here.
It’s not uncommon for Chinese lects to have 5-30% lexical similarity. Further, there are deep differences in tones, and even grammar and structure. Even the pronouns can differ. But clearly they are all related to German and they all derived form Chinese.
So yes, your analogy with Russian and German as super-languages on top of their families is correct, but it is important to note the vast differences in the lects. It was said that no one could understand Chairman Mao’s dialect, Xiang Nan (Mandarin dialect). Apparently his secretary could understand him, but few others could. I’m not sure how he got his points across.
Further, at this point probably most speakers of the Sinitic languages for sure speak Putonghua, which is the Standard Mandarin. It’s a standard the same way that High German is Standard German and Standard Italian is the standard for that language. However, overseas, many do not speak Putonghua, and in the Cantonese area, I believe many still do not speak Putonghua. English is a Germanic language.
Look at the vocabulary – closest language is Frisian with 64%. Dutch is 62% and German is 60%. French is 25%. English is clearly a Germanic language. There are similar cases with the English Latin layering in the Chinese languages. Some of them have heavy layers of non Sinitic tongues like Zhuang or Hmong.
Besides Putonghua, you are correct that the vast majority of Sinitic speakers are native speakers of some kind of Mandarin.
I believe that a lot of the older folks do not have very good Mandarin and may be monolinguals of their Sinitic tongue, but I’m not sure. The government has been pushing Putonghua very hard for the past decade or so, almost too hard. It’s been killing the smaller tongues. So it’s not quite the same way with Frisian and Welsh yet. I believe it’s pretty common in the South to find Cantonese speakers who don’t speak Mandarin, and it’s for sure the case overseas.
As far as writing, I don’t believe it’s a problem. An ideographic system was perfect for Chinese as it was the one way that all of the speakers of the various Chinese lects could communicate. My father was in China in 1946 and he said that the rickshaw drivers often could not understand each other, but they could all write Chinese, so they would communicate by writing notes.
All Chinese can write to each other, no matter what language they speak, assuming they are literate. A decade ago in a college in Henan, a professor said that the students would come to the college from all over the province and for the first month would communicate by writing notes to each other, so they all wrote a common language. In that province, every county has its own language, and there are even separate languages within counties. It took them about a month or so before they could start working out each other’s languages.
Some comment that the Chinese languages are like a Cockney accent of English. On a website, a commenter said that that’s not true. He said he can understand Cockney, but they had a speaker of an Anhui Mandarin lect as a professor at the university and no one could understand what he was talking about. So it’s quite common for the various Chinese lects to be pretty much incomprehensible to each other.
There are other comments around the Net that say that the Chinese lects are close enough to pick them up if you spend a bit of time there. That’s not really true. The differences between the Chinese lects are often as different as English and German. Now suppose you are an English speaker and you go to Germany. Are you going to “just pick up” German really vast? Forget it. I mean, if you stay there 3 years, maybe. Maybe! Someone else compared the differences between Chinese lects to the gulf between English and Irish. That may be too distant, but it may also be correct.
Differences between the lects ecompass tones, grammar and lexicon. All of them boil down to intelligibility. The major Chinese lects regularly score around 50-60% intelligibility. That is pretty bad and certainly does not qualify them as dialects. A dialect should have 90% intelligibility or more.
This is especially true in the center and south of the country. In Anhui, Fujian , Henan, Hunan , Jiangsu and Zhejiang there is an incredible diversity of tongues. It is said in Fujian that every 3 miles the culture changes and every 6 miles the language changes.
In these parts of China, there are lots of mountains and it is very rural. Many people never left their home village to go over the mountain to talk to the people over there, so a multitude of tongues arose. I understand that in this part of China there are even incomprehensible tongues inside major cities where the downtowners can’t understand the suburbs.
