Regionalisms and different ways of pronunciation

In addition to the examples mentioned above, what about the pronunciation pf the character 谁 - who is likely to pronounce it shui2, and who will say shei2?

I have noticed when some people pronounce zuo (eg 做) sometimes a j seems to go in, making almost a jwuo sound, am I just listening to the wrong people speak or have other people found this?

The only class distinction I know of is the usual Chinese one of "Everybody's dialect is bad except mine". An overstatement certainly, but an attitude that one runs into all the time. So, if you're in Beijing Cantonese are all low class... in Guangzhou, the reverse.

I agree with tvan! And would like to add that in the Chinese language, local "accents" do tend to be shaped by dialect. For example, most Southern Chinese dialects -- the 粤 (yue4) family of dialects -- lack some of the sounds of the Beijing dialect which Mandarin is based on. For example, Cantonese lacks the thick "zhi/shi/chi-etc" sounds of Mandarin, and it only has one sound for z/s/c, which sounds more like the Mandarin "zi/shi/chi?". Not only that, some dialects have additional tones -- Standard Cantonese has 9 tones, for example --, which does have an interesting effect on intonation. The rules for "tone changes" are also different. Eg. in Cantonese, two "third tones" in a row don't sound strange at all. What I would highlight is the fact that in China, dialects are very much more "alive" than they are -- say -- in the UK (outside of Wales, of course!). So even in a highly urban area like Shanghai, where educated people can all speak Mandarin fluently, the language spoken at home, in the market, between office colleagues etc might very well be Shanghainese rather than Mandarin. Just some food for thought...

[Oops, sorry, I made serious typos. Hope somebody kind will delete my above post. Thanks!" I agree with tvan! And would like to add that in the Chinese language, local "accents" do tend to be shaped by dialect. For example, most Southern Chinese dialects -- the 粤 (yue4) family of dialects -- lack some of the sounds of the Beijing dialect which Mandarin is based on. For example, Cantonese lacks the thick "zhi" sound of Mandarin, and it only has one sound for "Z-", which sounds more like the Mandarin "zi" (or "ji"). Not only that, some dialects have additional tones -- Standard Cantonese has 9 tones, for example --, which does have an interesting effect on intonation. The rules for "tone changes" are also different. Eg. in Cantonese, two Mandarin "third tones" in a row don't sound strange at all. What I would highlight is the fact that in China, dialects are very much more "alive" than they are -- say -- in the UK (outside of Wales, of course!). So even in a highly urban area like Shanghai, where educated people can all speak Mandarin fluently, the language spoken at home, in the market, between office colleagues etc might very well be Shanghainese rather than Mandarin. Just some food for thought...

On a subject only tangentially related to the post, how about writing differences in dialects? I know there are some words in CháoZhouHùa/潮州话/潮州話 that my mother-in-law can't write. I sometimes wonder if the words actually only exist in spoken form, or if there is a way to write them she doesn't know. And, if so, is this true of other dialects or only the smaller ones?

I was able to locate this thread from way back when I made the same discovery. Lots of good input in there from several people. I'm finding it really isn't that difficult to understand these "accents" once you listen for a little while. I've also learned that some of the "local dialects" aren't really as intimidating as they sound. Many of them differ from the standard Beijinghua in the same way that Australian English differs from American English. They use many of the same words, but different expressions (idioms, sayings, etc.) and slightly different pronunciation. With a little time, it's usually not that difficult for your ears to adapt. This isn't true of every dialect, but it's nice to know you can still communicate in cities other than Beijing.

Thanks a lot for your input! I think that dialects are still prevalent in countries like the UK - a kind of globalization has had a profound effect, but in everyday conversations you're gonna hear a lot of regional vocab (this is not that cob vs. batch debate ;-) ) , or more importantly, different accents. In the discussion you put a link to, amber mentions that in Chinese its the consonants that usually differ, while in English it's the vowels. I tend to disagree - what about rhotic speaking, subtle D's (like in the Spanish word universida(d), the same phenomenon can be found in a few British accents), dropping T's and other consonants? Are there any common examples of different vowel pronunciations withing Chinese? The word nage (that) has two pronunciations - nah-ge and nay-ge. Is this a matter of preference, or where does this distinction stem from? (that latter of which unfortunately sounds like the German word for an unacceptable term for "dark-skinned person", and although I'm not a native speaker of German, hearing nay-ge always makes me cringe :-/) . Another observation I've made is that some people are prone to dropping the Gs at the end - xin sounds extremely similar to xing. (But that problematic aspect cannot be blamed on the assumption that I'm simply not accustomed to spoken Mandarin, which is absolutely not true.)

By the way, what the heck is "Bettification"? ;-) Another thing I've always wanted to ask is how Chinese kids learn how a character that has various pronunciations is supposed to sound in which context.

P/s: One other major dialect which has developed a system of writing its vernacular form is -- of course -- the Beijing region dialect, which most of us know as "Mandarin".

Hee hee. Sorry, nevermind, "Bettification" is a silly word that is known to anybody who enjoys Ms America Ferrara's portrayal of Betty in the sitcom "Ugly Betty". It's like the opposite of "beautification", I suppose. Ms Ferrara, the actress, is a truly beautiful woman, yet she owns the word Bettification. Hmmm...

Oh, I suppose my ignorance of this sophisticated aspect of popular culture is due to the fact that I've spent the last 5 years living in less globalized countries, namely Cambodia and Lebanon. *wink*

Hi tvan. The impression I get from my limited studies in written Cantonese is that most major dialects would have local pronunciations of most words used in Wenyan (文言; wen2yan2) -- classical Chinese. I remember being told, as a child, that the senior members of a prominent Chao2Zhou1" family in Singapore were able to read "classical Teochew". My understanding today of this comment is that these people would have been able to read aloud the original scripts of the famous Chao2Zhou1 operas, which are all written in classical Chinese (albeit with special attention to euphony etc in the Teochew dialect, which they were meant to be performed in). In that sense, Chao2Zhou1 dialect is not one of the "smaller" dialects, because there is a substantial body of operatic words composed in Chinese characters which are meant to represent Chao2Zhou sounds. Vernacular -- ie, spoken -- speech is a different matter, though. For many dialects, the characters for certain particles/ vocabulary etc etc unique to that dialect simply did not exist. Because there was never perceived to be any need for them to be written down. People spoke their vernacular dialects, and wrote and read in classical Chinese using the sounds that their own dialects assigned to those characters. Cantonese is a dialect which -- because of the economic importance of the Pearl River Delta region -- has developed a system of writing down the vernacular (ie. spoken) form of the dialect. The interesting thing about modern Cantonese writing is that it is a mix of some very "classical"-feeling characters, and some relatively modern characters which are still being invented -- even as I type this -- to represent spoken Cantonese words which don't have a written, Classical Chinese reading (because they don't exist in written Chinese). I am told that if you read gossip rags published in Hong Kong in vernacular Cantonese, you will find new characters which are being minted at nearly the same rate as English words like "truthiness", "going pear-shaped", "Bettification" and "flaming". The "classical" characters are there because spoken Cantonese has not evolved very much from early forms of Chinese from the era when classical Chinese was being standardized into what we recognize today as Wenyan/ wen2yan2/ ie Classical Chinese. Hope that wasn't totally confusing! What we really need is for a multi-dialect Chinese scholar like dennisliehappo to step in and correct all my errors...