Ukraine and Russia also mostly speak the same language. Doesn’t mean much if the great leader decides to make a move, actually it is another reason to make a move.
Whereas different dialects of Mandarin may not be mutually intelligible
> Many varieties of Mandarin, such as those of the Southwest (including Sichuanese) and the Lower Yangtze, are not mutually intelligible with the standard language
Nearly every Ukrainian understands Russian, but many Russians would only understand the gist of what Ukrainians are saying, because the languages only share about 60% of their vocabulary.
A lot of common, everyday words differ in Ukrainian and or arise from different roots (e.g Polish).
> Oh no, only 60%? Surely that's plenty for a conversation, no?
It's plenty for communication, not plenty for a conversation.
(It's also a mirror for colonialism, by the way, where the occupied speak the language of the occupier, but the occupiers can't be arsed to learn the language of the occupied.)
It's not even necessarily enough for communication. With the Pareto curve on word commonality it's really quick to get high percentages of vocabulary. But it's the words you don't know on a sentence that are usually the important ones.
Outside of Taipei, a lot of people speak Taiwanese. (While they also speak mandarin if you don’t know Taiwanese you can only understand a bit of what people say)
Hokkien which is primarily spoken across the strait in Fujian.
Hakka is primarily spoken in Guangdong, Fujian, and Jiangxi.
Xi himself was the Party head of Fujian for most of his career and Xi's father was the Party head of Guangdong when he was rehabilitated in the Deng Xiaoping era.
This is why most manufacturing in China ended up coastal Southern China - most Chinese Taiwanese trace their heritage to there barely 2-5 generations ago at most.
The younger generation (post-1989) in Taiwan speaks and understands Mandarin.
This whole thread has a bunch of answers which are confusing the topic.
The issue is why would Taiwanese businesses care about the China market? Aside from the fact that the China market is massive, there is a simple answer: Taiwan and China have the same business language, and that is Standard Chinese aka Mandarin.
Yes, lots of Taiwanese people also speak other Sinitic languages that are not Mandarin, and are not mutually intelligible with it. And lots of Chinese people also speak other Sinitic languages that are not Mandarin and are not mutually intelligible with it. And even some variants of Mandarin itself are not mutually intelligible. But - outside of Cantonese in HK and Macau - none of those languages are used as the primary business language anywhere in either China or Taiwan, so it's an interesting side note but doesn't change the point.
All that said, aside from the Chinese market being massive, and the common language being convenient, there is a much bigger elephant in the room that explains why Taiwanese companies might not have a fun time doing business in China: politics.
It doesn't matter how much money Taiwanese companies might want to make if the CCP can threaten to turn off the spigot any time they want to influence Taiwanese politics, which unfortunately nowadays appears to be all the time. Sure, it's leaving a lot of money on the table, but doing business with Japan or the US or other countries that aren't run as a single party dictatorship whose leadership has a stated platform of dismantling your own government might be a less risky option.
> none of those languages are used as the primary business language anywhere in either China or Taiwan
我同意。
I was just trying to dig into what OP meant by "Taiwanese" as a language.
It's always going to be Mandarin for anything commercial.
That said, you can't deny the benefit the Hakka and Hokkien diaspora provided to China's manufacturing capacity - it was diaspora Chinese from Thailand (CP Group was the first foreign private company to incorporate in China), Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and Taiwan had on PRC's catchup.
In Taiwan it’s called Taiwanese. It’s similar to Hokkien which is why it’s often referred to as Taiwanese Hokkien. But it’s not 1:1. And people outside of Taipei will assume you speak it and understand it.
> Xi himself was the Party head of Fujian for most of his career and Xi's father was the Party head of Guangdong when he was rehabilitated in the Deng Xiaoping era.
This is because the CCP does not trust southerners (people from Fujian/guangdong especially) and will send northerners in to manage/rule those provinces. China is still afraid of Fujian revolting and joining Taiwan.
Deng Xiaoping was born/raised in sichuan, only his ancestors were kejia. I’m sure if you look at anyone in china’s family tree long enough, you’ll find a lot of mixing, which is about as weird as a German having ancestry from Italy or France. It’s even weirder, as the paternal side was originally from Sichuan moving to GD during Ming and back to Sichuan during Qing.
> Deng Xiaoping himself was Hakka, as were most of the the core CCP leadership until recently [0]
I’m going to not believe your source given how much wrong you’ve gotten already. But even if true, Chinese identity politics are more attuned to region than ethnicity. Southerners also were trusted because the KMT was heavily southern biased while the communists were the opposite. This is why the capital is in BJ and not NJ.
> Hakka is the primary language spoken in TW after Mandarin btw.
No no no. It is definitely Hokkien, a dialect of Min, which is the base dialect for Fujian.
> If you're a fellow Bay Area native, maybe visit Fremont or Richmond District in SF sometime and actually learn about us Asian subcommunities
Is that some kind of Asian American thing? You can learn plenty about Chinese ethnicities in China, why bother doing it in the states? Southern ethnicities are also over represented in overseas Chinese communities given the propensity of people from GD or FJ to go abroad, and then cultures kind of diverge a bit (another reason the CCP doesn’t trust GD/FJ).
My perspective is primarily mainland where I lived for 9 years, and primarily interacting with mainlander coworkers (eg from Fujian, talking politics was ok).
I was born in Kiev and spoke Russian at home. Can barely understand Ukrainian unless it's spoken slowly by a native Russian speaker. I can get the gist of what Zelensky is saying in an interview but can pretty much never understand native Ukrainian speakers. I think there's also a gradient of dialects and accents West to East, so I'm sure you can find some Ukrainian villager I would understand better but in general they're not mutually intelligible (to me).
Moved to the US as a kid (by way of Estonia and then Italy), went to a year of Russian language "transitional" school here. So don't have any insight on the Ukrainian school experience.
> Whereas different dialects of Mandarin may not be mutually intelligible
Except for some slang words which nobody would use in business anyway, Sichuanese is largely intelligible to native Mandarin Chinese speakers if spoken slowly and repeated a couple times. People from Sichuan can also speak standard Mandarin. The written language is identical.
As for Taiwan and China it is even less an issue. The very few words that are different may be the source for some humor sometimes but that's it. It's kind of like how British people say "lift" and Americans say "elevator". If you're not brain-dead you'll figure it out pretty quickly and maybe crack a joke or two about it. When you see a sign that says "lift" you don't panic and say that it's not intelligible, you can make some sense of the word.
Maybe it should be more recognized that what the quote "a language is a dialect with an army" means is that borders of nations don't coincide with borders for languages, or put more simply, it has such two meanings that, there are languages that are realistically just weird accents on one another, and one "language" that are realistically two or more.
I have some confidence with dialects of my primary language(not Chinese) within ~150mi of where I am; beyond that, mutual intelligibility with local dialects isn't guaranteed. Yet, those dialects are rarely considered(including by speakers) to be separate from the standard. They're just local accents. That aren't even intelligible to city dwellers.
"Cantonese (traditional Chinese: 廣東話; simplified Chinese: 广东话; Jyutping: Gwong2 dung1 waa2; Cantonese Yale: Gwóngdùng wá) is a language within the Chinese (Sinitic) branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages"
I have warm memories as a kid going with my Mom to the daily market, and watching people communicating by furiously writing words in their hands, in addition to the simplified tradespeak between the language groups. It's an interesting thing, having both a shared writing system and mutually unintelligible spoken language!
Around 1/3 are native speakers but the number of know Russian is significantly higher as it’s the formal business language the way English is in a lot of the world. Hard to find exact numbers, but according to Wikipedia a 2008 gallop poll had 80% of Ukrainians claim to prefer Russian as the language of business.
I’m sure it is, but terrible relations doesn’t make people forget a language and we’re only speaking to the number who know the language. I’ve no doubt a generation from now that number will be a lot lower if things continue on this path.
It’s not “declining” but rather being actively replaced and rejected by the population. When your nation suffers brutal aggression perpetrated by the neighbor - it makes it no longer fashionable to speak the language of the aggressor. The fact that Russia also denies that Ukraine and Ukrainians are even a real nation and culture distinct from Russia fuels the sentiment too.
not anecdotal, I speak both languages. The trend now is to reject everything russian even though you do understand it, no way around this. And yes, the “kitchen language” for many ukrainians, especially east part, remained russian. However, on public or outside ppl try their best to speak Ukrainian. The younger generation will be more like the one in the baltic counties or Georgia. Understand russian but rather speak their native language.
But you may recall that in 2014, a few political directives regarding culture and language use have been made by the Rada, and then a few political decisions were made in the Kremlin, and then everything turned to shit (To put it simply).
It's easy to do a lot in 11 years when you start banning foreign-language media, stop using a language for government services, stop teaching it, etc, etc.
February 2014 Moscow occupied Crimea.
12.04.2014 Moscow occupied Slovyansk.
Name "few political directives" in 2014 before Moscow invasion. Ukraine actions are direct response to Moscow aggression. People don't want to be occupied by Moscow like Donetsk, Luhansk. Life is awful there, million fled from occupation. That's why changes were supported by majority of Ukrainians.
Still occupants language was learned in schools, media could use it though eventually quotas set to use Ukrainian too. And officials continued using it.
Ukraine policies fought discrimination of Ukrainian in Ukraine. Discrimination that stems from centuries of occupation by Moscow. In 2016 state stated at least 60% TV should be on Ukrainian. Only in 2017 education in schools was switched from occupants language to Ukrainian. Since 2019 Ukrainian should be used in services unless requested otherwise by customer. People switch to Ukrainian voluntarily, state provides means.
Ukraine is a democratic state, check out Euromaidan. Stop pretending like changes is anything but result of Moscow agression.
"Name "few political directives" in 2014 before Moscow invasion."
"On February 23, 2014, the second day after the flight of Viktor Yanukovich, while in a parliamentary session, a deputy from the Batkivshchyna party, Vyacheslav Kyrylenko, moved to include in the agenda a bill to repeal the 2012 law "On the principles of the state language policy". <...> The bill would have made Ukrainian the sole state language at all levels.
<...>
However, the move to repeal the 2012 law "On the principles of the state language policy" provoked negative reactions in Crimea and in some regions of Southern and Eastern Ukraine. It became one of the topics of the protests against the new government approved by the parliament after the flight of Viktor Yanukovich." [0]
And more generally: Ukrainization Post-1991: Independent Ukraine. [1]
"check out Euromaidan."
“The mob, whatever it is, has no legitimacy before the sovereign people expressing themselves through its elected representatives.” [2]
There was a bit of a coup against one of the branches of government on Feb 2014, it's odd that it's missing from your timeline, given that it kind of precipitated everything else that followed.
But perhaps that's how you think democracies work - when you don't like the government, you bring your friends to wear funny hats and storm the capitol, and get a new one... Should Americans do that the next time an unpopular politician ends up heading the executive? It certainly speeds up the transfer of power, even if it drops the 'peaceful' aspect of it...
Euromaidan was response to violent dispersal of protesters. Government escalated, eventually killed hundred of citizens. Do you claim Americans would do nothing if killed in hundreds? No persecution, approved by "unpopular politician", passed laws on dictatorship (16.01.2014).
Moscow invaded Ukraine (Crimea) 20.02.2014. Yanukovych fled 21.02.2014. Occupation does not just "happen", it was staged. Ukrainians felt that as betrayal, seen as occupants population cheared in support. That hurts, breaks cultural ties. In a few months Moscow invaded east of Ukraine while spreading lies. Lies obvious for Ukraine citizens, believed by occupants population.
> Do you claim Americans would do nothing if killed in hundreds?
They'd blame the people who died. At least, that's how Kent State went down (And the students there weren't even trying to overthrow the government).
There's a process for peaceful transfer of power. Some countries have good processes for this, some have bad ones, some are in between. As far as I'm aware, though, no country has a process of 'Enough people storm the capitol' for determining when that happens.
When you don't follow the permitted process, this compromises a democracy's legitimacy. Now, obviously the coup was only carried out against the executive, not the legislature, so the resulting government was partially legitimate - at least, the legislature remained representative of the public (And the issue was resolved in the subsequent election).
But that aside, just because the coup only finished on the 21st, and the invasion happened on the 20th, doesn't mean that the weeks of the revolution leading up to it weren't intimately related to the start of the war.
Peaceful transfer of power is not possible in Belarus or Russian Federation. Ukrainians have no guns, democracy is not stable, judiciary and special forces are not independent, media influenced by state and oligarchs. Euromaidan saved Ukraine from Belarus fate.
Moscow invasion staged not in preceding weeks but in years. Putin revealed intentions in 2007, occupied Georgia in 2008.
The only Ukrainians I've that that didn't speak Russian are 2nd gen immigrants outside of Ukraine. Often hilarious because their parents often barely speak Ukrainian themselves.
