nooj wrote: I would wager there are proportionally more multilingual chinese citizens than americans or citizens of european nations, if you take into consideration that they may speak multiple chinese languages.
nooj wrote:Han is an ethnic group, not a linguistic one. Therr are numerous chinese languages that the han speak and putting it all under 'chinese' obfuscates things. For example my chinese (han) friend speaks putonghua and cantonese and quite a bit of hokkien, all of which are chinese languages, as well as english. He is assuredly as multilingual as any european with three or four languages under their belt.
Given the massive slaughter of languages going on in China, I don't feel like singing kumbaya to Chinese multilingualism.
Europe is far from being a continent of perfect polyglots but the EU is actively supporting language learning and multilingualism, the literacy levels are higher than in China, English language proficiency is higher, and more people are formally studying other languages. Also, as you are well aware, Spain is not all about monolingual Spanish speakers and Italy is full of "dialects" that are often classified as languages.
Here's an interesting article about the linguistic diversity in China:
On Saving China's Dying Languages
Kellen Parker, co-founder of the Phonemica project, believes preserving a language means preserving history.
"So then there's the question of "what's a language and what's a dialect?" for which there is no real answer. The Mandarin a person from Xuzhou in Jiangsu would speak at home is pretty much unintelligible to a Beijinger. They form a continuum where people at the ends can't understand each other, but from one town to the next the degree of mutual intelligibility is pretty high, from town to town, all the way to Beijing. For Phonemica, we say that Wu and Mandarin and Cantonese are all different languages of the same language family, much like Italian and Spanish and French are grouped as Romance languages in Europe. Others might say that Cantonese and Mandarin are dialects of Chinese. Neither opinion is really wrong, because the language/dialect distinction is entirely arbitrary, and some scholars may have a broader or narrower focus in making such distinctions...
How quickly are these minor languages dying?
"The answer is different in different places. If we're just looking at a language like Wu, which is spoken in and around Shanghai, we can see clear changes from one generation to the next. In many of these places, the generation after today's children won't be able to speak the local language. Every day we talk to people who lament that they can only understand but not speak the language of their parents, or if they speak it, it's only at the most basic level. These aren't small languages either; we're looking at languages that have tens of millions of speakers. There are languages that are dying out because there are only 100 speakers, all of whom in their 70's or 80's, and there are languages that are dying out with millions of speakers. The reason is fundamentally the same, though: More and more people are consciously using Mandarin at home."
https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archi ... es/276971/