Mandarin vs Cantonese | Is Cantonese a language or a dialect? 

One of the quickest ways to get into an argument is to accuse someone that what they're speaking is merely a dialect of another language, as opposed to a full-fledged language in and of itself. This is especially true when it comes to Cantonese and Mandarin. But why is that?

Can you say definitively whether Cantonese is a dialect or not?

What even is a dialect in the first place?

We have some answers.

In this blog post, we're going to cover:

What is a lect?

First, let's set some things straight.

Before we get too far along, I want to introduce the term lect.

A lect is kind of a catch-all term that can refer to all spoken communications, whether a language or dialect or pidgin. It's a form of a language as spoken somewhere, which is a very broad classification. Throughout this article, you'll see me use the term lect to sidestep the words "dialect" and "language", rather than killing discussion by using the term that aligns with my personal beliefs.

You see, everything is a lect, even if it's also a language or dialect.

Anyway, back to the main question.

What is a dialect?

Let's go to the source. If you boot up the good old Oxford Dictionary, you'll see this:

Alternatively, if we look at the etymology of the word, we can see that it comes from the ancient Greek dialektos, which meant "a way of speaking".

Literally, then, a dialect might be understood to refer to the scope of things that are contained within how people in a particular area speak.

Alas, we immediately run into a problem: "the language specific to a region" is about as clear as a foggy mirror.

The big problem with the term "dialect"

The term is ambiguous.

I'm not just splitting hairs, here, either.

There are literally no universally agreed-upon criteria that are used to draw a line and say "A is a completely separate language from B". None. In other words, different groups may be considering entirely different factors when trying to answer the "dialect" question.

Broadly speaking, though, you'll run into two different usages of the word:

Dialects, colloquially speaking

Colloquially, people will use the term dialect to refer to any lect that shares many features with another. These shared features could be history, culture, geographic proximity, and/or linguistic commonalities.

You might generally just think of this as being "how people from 'round here talk".

Dialects, more technically speaking

To get more technical, we might instead think about this in terms of language distance (how similar two lects are or aren't) and mutual intelligibility (if speakers of two lects can understand each other).

For example, if we talk about British vs American English:

They're quite different!

Nevertheless, British people understand American people just fine, and vice versa. Words generally go in the same order, nouns and verbs have the same forms and work in the same way, and while the way we pronounce "bottle" isn't quite the same as the way they pronounce "bottle", we're still both saying "bottle" and see ourselves as uttering an O or T or L sound.

Clearly, we can't say that British English and American English are different languages. They're highly intelligible—indeed, they're both just different flavors of English.

As such, we call them dialects.

Why does it matter if something is a language or dialect?

Simply put, there are political and sociocultural implications to saying that something is a dialect or a language—to saying that group A and B are different peoples, or saying that group A and B are different versions of the same group of people.

This matters (and gets complicated) because "languages" and "dialects" do not have equal footing in the world.

What do we mean by this?

You can call someone uneducated uneducated for talking like a hillbilly, but it would be ridiculous to say that someone is uneducated because they speak Spanish or Finnish instead of English.

That situation #2 happens because governments broadly seek to create well-functioning societies. To this end, it's often seen as advantageous to build a sense of unity among the populace. Having everyone speak the same language (and see themselves as speaking the same language) is one way to do this.

Some speakers may feel bitter about calling what they speak a dialect, as it seems to downplay the value of it—and, by extension, themselves.

(And there's a lot more political and cultural stuff you can get into, if you've got a moment. This discussion could go in many directions.)

A thought experiment for you

Consider these two situations:

If the first situation horrifies you, but you can see the second one as being reasonable in some lights, then you've sort of stumbled into the point.

Chew on this a bit as you work through the second half of this blog post.

Is Cantonese a language or dialect?

So, with all of that out of the way, let's start talking about Mandarin and Cantonese. We'll facilitate the discussion, but are going to avoid coming outright and calling it, one way or another. This is ultimately a distinction you'll have to make yourself.

To get the easy one out of the way:

If you accept a broad interpretation of the word dialect, then it's pretty reasonable to refer to Cantonese as a dialect of Mandarin. Both lects come from the same language family (the sinitic side of Sino-Tibetan) and have many historical, cultural, and geographic similarities—plus a number of linguistic similarities.

To dig into the meat of the harder question:

Language distance and mutual intelligibility is a spectrum, and it's hard to draw a line in the sand and say "dialect on that side, language on this side".

To answer this question, though, you need to draw that line in the sand.

To help you do that, let's take a closer look at Mandarin and Cantonese.

A few differences between Mandarin and Cantonese

We're in the process of expanding this into an entire blog post, but in brief:

Mandarin pronunciation vs Cantonese pronunciation

Mandarin and Cantonese have pretty different sound systems.

For example, Cantonese has 6 tones, while Mandarin has 4 plus a neutral/toneless tone. Each audio recording below is of a Cantonese or Mandarin speaker saying fu in a different tone. (Note that fu5 doesn't actually exist in Mandarin, but we've included it for the sake of reference. )

Viewed in the simplest way possible—pure sounds existing in isolation—Mandarin has 6 vowels to Cantonese's 11. (In reality, the quality of these vowels changes depending on what comes before and/or after them, making things more complicated in practice.)

A final important difference is that Mandarin syllables can only end in a vowel, N or NG sound, while Cantonese syllables can end with a vowel or N, NG, P, T, and K sounds. This means that many types of syllables are possible in Cantonese that do not exist in Mandarin.

All in all, these differences lead to very distinct-sounding languages that are largely not mutually intelligible when head spoken. (If you scroll down through the next few sections, there will be audio recordings of words and sentences so you can make this comparison for yourself.)

Mandarin vocabulary vs Cantonese vocabulary

While Mandarin and Cantonese have a very significant overlap in vocabulary, the uber-common words that get the most airtime tend to be very different between the two languages.

Here's a handful of examples:

And this is really only scratching the surface! There are totally different question words (who, what, when, etc.), different sentence final particles, different adjectives, nouns, adverbs, time expressions, curse words, slang, idioms, and on and on.

Anyway—those super common words aside, here's the pronunciation of a handful of words that are shared between the two languages. Even if you don't speak either language, you can probably hear the similarities between some word pairs.

Mandarin grammar vs Cantonese grammar

Mandarin and Cantonese grammar is pretty similar—there's often a one-to-one correlation between Cantonese and Mandarin sentences in terms of word order, syntax, grammatical features, and so forth. You can see this below:

There are some differences, though, if you look.

For example, Cantonese can express possesion with counters, using the format pronoun + counter + noun. (A counter is a word used to count an object, such as pieces of paper or loaves of bread.)

Conversely, whereas 本 is also the counter used for books in Mandarin, you can not express possession with it. Instead, you have to use the possessive particle de.

Then, in Cantonese, the indirect object goes before the direct object, whereas in Mandarin the direct object comes before the indirect object. (Nevermind the fancy grammar words; this will make sense when you see the examples.)

As a final example, the passive voice works differently in Mandarin and Cantonese. First, let's look at a couple English sentences to explain some terminology:

Mandarin, like English, can choose to whether or not to include an agent in its passive sentences:

By contrast, Cantonese requires that you include 人 (jan4, "person") in the sentence as a passive agent:

Mandarin writing vs Cantonese writing

This one, again, requires some nuance.

Many Cantonese speakers are bilingual in Cantonese and Mandarin, and they're taught to write Standard Written Cantonese in school—which is basically (but not quite) Mandarin. The result is that formal pieces of writing, such as the Cantonese you see in newspapers, government articles, and academic papers, will be largely intelligible to Mandarin speakers.

It's OK if you can't make any sense of the Chinese examples. Just notice how different Standard Written Cantonese is from the Cantonese that people use in everyday life.

(As an aside, a Taiwanese friend confirmed that the above "Standard Written Cantonese" is not only perfectly understandable to her, but exactly how she would write the sentences herself—though she'd say 跟 instead of 和.)

The thing is, ordinary people don't use Standard Written Cantonese in their normal everyday life.

If we take a more colloquial sentence and write it out as it would be spoken by Cantonese speakers, the result is something that's pretty much unintelligible to Mandarin speakers:

As you can see, then, "normal" written Cantonese differs very much from written Mandarin. In fact, the characters 哋, 嚟, and 唞 flat-out don't exist in Mandarin!

If Mandarin and Cantonese are so different, why do some people say Cantonese is just a dialect?

Well, I think you can boil this down to 3 main things:

Number one is a big one. Mandarin and Cantonese are both Chinese languages. The result is that it's easy to lump all Chinese lects into the same basket of one Chinese language with many dialects.

Here's a relevant comment from a 16th century missionary:

Unfortunately, in modern times, Chinese is often conflated with Mandarin. Just go look at Google Translate—there's no option to translate into Mandarin, just Chinese (simplified) and Chinese (traditional).

Another compounding factor is that most Chinese lects have no written form. Instead, they're spoken one way, but written in Standard Chinese. The result is that, to an outsider—and even to speakers of Chinese languages—Mandarin and Cantonese look very similar on paper.

Lastly, as we touched on earlier, there is political benefit to promoting unity and the idea of a shared language—not just within China but in general. As the saying goes: "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy." This doesn't really tell the whole story, but it underscores how important official institutional backing can be in shaping the perception of what people consider to be a language or not.

Conclusion: Mandarin vs Cantonese, Language vs Dialect, X vs Y

Ultimately, whether you consider Cantonese—or any language for that matter—to be a dialect comes down to your own definition of "dialect" and your own perception of the similarities and differences between the two lects in question.

If you're approaching this question from a linguistic perspective, then be aware of the limitations of mutual intelligibilty as a criterion. It's a subjective measure that can be hard to quantify. It's also susceptible to the influence of prior linguistic knowledge. Moreover, it's worth considering how Cantonese and Mandarin compare in distance to other lects like Spanish and Portuguese, or Swedish and Norwegian. If you find these latter pairs to be different enough to warrant the label of language, I think there is strong argument to be had that Cantonese meets that same threshold.

Wherever you happen to land on this matter, it's always good to be clear in your terms and strive for consistency.

(P.S.—Phew; this article impressed upon me just how much baggage their is wrapped up in the word "dialect")