I asked my family what is the difference between Chinese and Mandarin. My sister said that Mandarin is the language, and Chinese is nationality, and my other sister said that Mandarin and Chinese are languages.
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March 13th, 2010 at 7:24 pm
Mandarin is one of the Chinese,and Chinese is nationality.
March 13th, 2010 at 7:10 pm
Well, Chinese can be a language, or rather a group of languages. Mandarin refers specifically to one language, spoken in Mainland China and Taiwan. Chinese can refer to any Chinese dialect which could include Cantonese (spoken in the south and Hong Kong), Taiwanese (spoken in Taiwan), Fukianese (spoken in Fujian province and Taiwan), Hakka (spoken by a minority group in China).
Mandarin is the official language and is meant to bridge all these people together under one identity, regardless of what region of China they come from.
Although there are thousands of dialects in China and amongst the Chinese community living outside of China, there is a common writing system. Everyone who speaks these dialects all read the same script (there are actually two sets, one used in Taiwan and Hong Kong and another used in the PRC. The traditional characters are used in TW and HK and are the original set of characters. The revised set used in the PRC is referred to as ’simplified characters’ because they are a simplified version of the before mentioned trads, created sometime in the 1920s by government conscripted scholars. The simplification was meant to improve literacy among common people).
Basically, Mandarin only refers to one single language but Chinese can refer to lots of things (nationality, writing system, language group, identity, etc.)
Hope that clears things up
March 13th, 2010 at 6:44 pm
As a spoken language,
Chinese consists of many dialects: Mandarin, Cantonese, etc…
As a written language, Chinese is the language used to write the spoken dialects, but mostly based on Mandarin.
As a proper noun, Chinese is used to describe those from China or have ancestors who were Chinese, just as long as one ancestor is Chinese then the descendant is Chinese, and it doesn’t matter where you were born.
Chinese is also anyone who lives in China and has become a citizen on Mainland China or properly, The People’s Republic of China, or PRC for short or Hong Kong or Macau.
Chinese = any one of the minorities living in Mainland China.
Chinese as an ethnic identity is anyone who’s of Han Chinese descent.
vladkeren44,
There’s no such thing as “thousands of dialects” in Chinese, but they are rather dialects + subdialects + sub-subdialects!