[lg policy] "In Chinatown, Sound of the Future is Mandarin" (NYT)

[Damien Hall]

> Question to the list members...Do you have some recommended sources that 
> touch on the designation/conversation of Cantonese as a "dialect"?
>
>"In Chinatown, Sound of the Future is Mandarin"

[...]

> Cantonese, a dialect from southern China [...]

I don't know the sociolinguistics of China particularly, but this just 
looks to me like the writing of a journalist who doesn't know them either! 
There is a tendency for people from more-or-less monolingual societies who 
are confronted with countries with complex linguistic situations (ie more 
than one variety spoken) to call the individual varieties 'dialects', maybe 
because they feel that they must in some way be subdivisions of some larger 
national 'language'. So, in this case, I imagine that the journalist 
described Cantonese as a 'dialect' because they thought of it as a 
subdivision of 'Chinese', which is a 'language' (quotes to mark off what 
the journalist might have thought, not to call the terms into question 
generally). In other words, this piece in the _NYT_ doesn't mark any 
general designation of Cantonese as a 'dialect' - it's simply sloppy 
writing. I might have expected better from the _NYT_, but even the great 
Homer nods occasionally, I suppose.

Does anyone else know different?

Damien

-- 
Damien Hall

University of York
Department of Language and Linguistic Science
Heslington
YORK
YO10 5DD
UK

Tel. (office) +44 (0)1904 432665
     (mobile) +44 (0)771 853 5634
Fax  +44 (0)1904 432673

BORDERS AND IDENTITIES CONFERENCE, JAN 2010:
http://www.york.ac.uk/res/aiseb/bic2010/

http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/lang/people/pages/hall.htm
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