Americans discover the 3000 year old continent spanning nation of 1.4 billion people... might have regional differences. honestly, who knew?
western ignorance is truly a form of exceptionalism
tfw you realize that "this massive continent only has one language" is a belief that directly results from imperialism wiping out the hundreds of other languages that used to be in North America.
Sometimes people will try to point to the Chinese adoption of Mandarin as an official lingua franca as some kind of equivalent form of colonialism, and it's just not.
As always, the context of how Mandarin Chinese became prominent is absent in smug libs and their "analysis"
there's like 56 ethnic groups in China and that's just the ones officially recognized. americans really do be living in a monoculture
Every language has accents, dialogs, and so on. Even sign language (and they still won't know not everything is American Sign Language. There's British, French, Japanese, etc.) has accents. I'm struggling to think of a language that doesn't. Maybe Basque? Really it's a question of geography and time. You drop a canyon in the middle of Rhode Island, wait 1,000 years, and the people on either side won't be able to understand one another.
bud, in southern China you can travel between neighbouring cities their dialects would not be mutually intelligible with Mandarin or even each other
the distance between Cantonese and Mandarin is wider than spanish and italian
and thats not even talking about non-chinese langauges like Mongolian and Uyghur or whatever
As a Spaniard I always found it funny that I can just read Italian and understand like 95% of it. Like, what did the Fr*nch do to their language that fucked it up so bad smh
Fujian has Min bei (Sanming, Nanping, Wuyi Mt. I think), Min dong (Fuzhou), Putian, Min nan (Quanzhou, Zhangzhou), Min xi (Longyan), and Hakka. That's six different, not mutually intelligible, languages.
Even Zhangzhounese and Quanzhounese, while mostly mutually intelligible, are different enough from each other that they would be called different languages if it was europe (like serbian-croatian, portuguese-galician, czech-slovak, icelandic-faroese, norwegian-swedish etc)
Really doesn't help that China insists on calling them 'dialects' and not 'languages', which is what they really are, though the added confusion of them being basically the same when written down muddles things.
There are already different American accents based on where in America you are, this is what happens when the us mass media depicts an entire country as a non human other.
France has a dozen regional accents and regional languages that still have some speakers for a population of just 75m, and I'm not even talking about their remaining colonial empire, only the core in Europe
Sometimes Americans are too stupid for words.
I honestly don’t even know what to say.Just wait until they find out there's 21 recognized official languages in India.
Honestly surprising levels of ignorance, given how Chinese-American restaurants will have several different styles on display. Just based on that and two popular languages in both Mandarin and Cantonese...
But then until recently I didn't know shit about Greenland.
It’s such a shame that China is always depicted as this nebulous monolith, even though it has such a rich history and diverse culture.
Every response I’ve seen to an American on that platform is far, far too kind
They're not as sick of American ignorance as American leftists are. We gotta see this shit all day every day.
It also seems many of these people are expressing their ignorance in a very sincere way, too, so I think that helps. A lot of the ignorance within western countries is much more toxic and poisoned by underlying assumptions.
They have different accents based on where they live in China? Probably from forcing immigrants to live there to inflate the number of accents.
Next you're tell me these people eat different kinds of food outside rice?!
Well yeah, they also eat chow mien, honey chicken and egg rolls.
Don't forget General Tso's Chicken, invented by General Tso himself!
Chinese children subsist on a diet that is 80% fortune cookie.
Wait until they discover England, where accents can vary depending on what part of the city you're from.
pretty much all of Europe is like this, as are most non settler parts of the world. I learned Spanish in school from a woman who was raised in the basque country, and could not understand even spanish speakers in barcelona let alone catalan when I went there. those 2 areas are 300 miles apart. America is so much more homogeneous than they realise
china is big with multiple ethnicities just like nigeria or south africa.
they're still grappling with Africa having multiple countries, telling them about Igbo or Hausa might blow their mind
Thanks for reminding me of the book on Igbo culture that I bought and have been meaning to read.
