#like why are people willing to split hairs about mutually intelligible scandinavian languages | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

liu-anhuaming · 1 year ago

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My biggest pet peeve in language learning circles is and always has been when people call Mandarin "Chinese" even though there is not one Chinese language but rather many different Chinese languages (plural! china is linguistically quite diverse), and "Mandarin" 官話 is actually considered its own language family with even more dialects under it and not just one language. I think accuracy matters when talking about what languages you're studying

anyways, here's a tweet on this topic that has been stuck in my mind from the moment i first saw it

#i understand that not everyone is aware of this #but i have gotten in arguments with people On Here before where they were aware of this all and just didn't think it mattered #i think accuracy is super important in general for like. communication purposes?#but also just lumping everything under “chinese” feels really disrespectful and dare i say...racist #like why are people willing to split hairs about mutually intelligible scandinavian languages #but it's crickets when mandarin is given the label of “chinese”#also the idea of different chinese languages being called 'dialects'#i understand that's the word that chinese people themselves use: 方言 #but i think the implications of 方言 is different than the english 'dialect' in this situation #this is my hill i am willing to die on #like it's not a relationship ender or anything for me but i do feel it's very important to be. specific.

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