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Ms G

As the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics grab intense attention from around the world, a number of interesting details, other than the events themselves, are also widely covered by the media. 

One of them is the dialect spoken by most of the Chinese athletes. 

Winter sports are most popular in northeast China, where temperatures can fall to as low as  minus 30 degrees Celsius in the coldest season. 

Naturally, this part of the country is home to most of China’s lead winter sports stars and world champions. So they speak in dialects very similar to one another. 

At one press conference during the Olympics, Chinese speedskater Gao Tingyu, when asked about how he would describe his character, used a term that was unique to the local dialect. 

It was impossible to understand for someone outside the area. The moderator was confused; she thought Gao did not answer the question. 

She waited for a few, embarrassingly long seconds and reminded him about the question. Gao was also confused.

 He told the moderator, “I’ve already answered it.” 

It was funnier in the booth of simultaneous interpreters. The interpreter, in the split of a second, simply blurted out the word “glue”, the pronunciation of which is quite like Gao’s slang but the meaning is nowhere close.

People in China speak Chinese. 

This may seem like a no-brainer. But the real picture about the Chinese language is far messier. 

Many of you may know there is Mandarin. This is the country’s lingua franca. Its pronunciation is based on the phonological system of Beijing dialect; the language itself is adapted from the northern dialects. 

Other than that, there are 10 major dialects across the country and each is also divided into many sub-dialects. 

The country’s 55 ethnic minorities also use different languages. 

It is hard to say exactly how many dialects there are in China. Some say 1 500 varieties of spoken Chinese have been identified, with significant intelligibility between one another. 

This is captured in a Chinese saying, “Every 5 kilometres there is a different way of speaking; every 50 kilometres there is different way of life.” 

If you are not from the region, the “Chinese” they speak may very well strike you as a foreign language. 

The dialect in the Chinese city of Wenzhou is even nicknamed the “devil’s language” for its difficulty.  

When people from different parts of the country speak Mandarin, they bring in their local flavours and with them some cultural undertones. 

For example, northeast China is famous for producing comedy stars. So Mandarin laced with the north-eastern dialect tend make people laugh. 

The same can be said for the dialect in Tianjin, a coastal city near Beijing where “xiangsheng”, a traditional performing art in Chinese comedy is very popular. 

But if one speaks Cantonese, people tend to assume a deep pocket because Guangdong is an economically advanced area. 

Generally, dialects used in less developed areas are considered not very refined, while those in the richer regions are thought to be fancier. 

I guess it is the same anywhere around the world. 

If you are a Mandarin learner, it might be a good idea to check if you are picking up from your Chinese tutor the flavours of one of the dialects.