北方话，Vs. 普通话，Who will emerge victorious?

I dont think that any southern dialects will ever trump DongBei hua. The only advantage I can forsee would be eavesdropping on conversations of those who are knowinly trying to keep you in the dark in a business situation. E.g. they switch from Mandarin to another dialect to talk about you or other things, which is just bad business anyway. Otherwise, I believe the market to be almost entirely Mandarin.

Yeah, the southern dialects are kind of dying out right now. Well maybe not dying, but losing their prominence in the country. Especially 廣東話。 東北話 and 北京話，seem to be the ones that are the most relevant other than 普通話，but also 山東話，seems to be a dialect a lot of foreigners learn. Jenny and Le Guan even mentioned that in the Chinese Dialects podcast.

It seems to me Putonghua and Beijinghua are so similar, if you speak one you can easily understand the other...granted Beijinghua has a lot of R's in it...hahah they dont quite say that...but maybe you get the point???for the other dialects, why bother?

BTW, where is your wife from in Liaoning? I lived in Dandong for a year...kickass town

My wife is from Shen Yang, alot of our friends are from Tie Ling. Most of my Chinese friends are from Liao Ning Province.

I live and work in Sichuan and learned 普通话here, which is a bit of a joke, really. The fact is that the people I work with all speak 四川话and if I speak standard Mandarin it feels like I am putting a distance between me and them (many of them officials and school teachers who should be speaking Mandarin but have a very limited grasp of that variant of the language). Over the years I have picked up a lot of the colloquials and have started to speak a mixture between Mandarin and Sichuanese. I thought about learning 四川话 instead of 普通话. But I don't think it's workable. Actually, I love it when I have a telephone conversation and people take me to be from one of the 少数民族of Sichuan. Makes me feel like a local...

I visited Sichuan (成都), and I absolutely LOVED IT! 峨眉山和樂山大佛都漂亮得很！I'm so absolutely fascinated with local (方言）dialects！ I remember my first teacher telling me one of his students lived in a small remote area of China for 7 years or so to learn their local dialect so he could be the one and only translator in the world who knows their particular dialect (it seems to me there would also very rarely if ever be a need for a translator of that dialect, but that's besides the point), and when he told me that I though, "man I really want to be that guy!". But one also has to be practical and so of course learning 普通話 is the most practical choice. I would still love to learn as much about local dialects as I can. I'd love to learn 四川話, I have a book and a series of CD's for leaning 上海話，but alas my poor small brain can only handle so much language input at one time and I really want to get my 普通話 to the highest possible level first before delving into another dialect. Now I just have to pick which one I want to learn first. Hhhhhmmmmm....

I highly recommend 四川话.It's fun and I find it very expressive. Interestingly I am now nearing a point where 四川话 is more intelligible to me than standard mandarin. I have heard of people here who have taken lessons in Sichuan hua or even Chengdu hua. But often when I suggest such a thing to my local friends, they tell me to stick with mandarin, since Sichuan hua is not a proper language... There is an inferiority complex at work, which I find sad.

in my opinion, learning local dialects won't help you get a better teaching job,but those local dialects are a part of chinese culture.

Ivizhang: You don't feel it gives a little edge to the person who knows multiple dialects in the eyes of the employer?