Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack
Not sure what you mean but this, but really I am more puzzled by why so many of you guys care.
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I think it's an easily digestible little nugget of information that people flatter themselves with by showing off that they're privy to insider knowledge that the average rube doesn't know (i.e. "not all French is the same, you know--what they speak in Quebec is different from what they speak in France").
I get this all the time when people learn I speak Chinese. "Mandarin?" they ask by way of clarification, being aware that there are different Chinese dialects and wishing to let on that I need not dumb things down for them by simply saying "Chinese."
Thing is, it would be the rare non-Chinese person who only spoke a dialect like Cantonese or Hakka or what have you. Learning Chinese means learning Mandarin, the lingua franca for well over a billion people, so the word "Chinese" ably and satisfactorily stands in for Mandarin. Which, ironically enough, is in Chinese a very old-fashioned way of referring to Mandarin that nobody uses anymore. The term in Chinese for Mandarin that everyone uses nowadays literally translates as "Common Speech" or "Common Language." In English the more academic way of referring to it is "Standard Chinese."