Chinese is not spoken by over 1 billion people

Are Taishanese and Zhongshanese dialects? I thought most people from Guangdong spoke Cantonese.

Yes, they are true dialects. But with a slight twist. Speakers of those dialects understand standard Cantonese, but it doesn't go the other way. Cantonese speakers who speak the regular dialect cannot understand them. Like the Jeju dialect of Korean with respect to the other dialects.

That's interesting.

That could be considered similar to the situation that exists for a Scots speaker in relation to, say, a southern(England) English speaker.

Can anyone suggest an audiobook (with English translation) that you have found to be outstanding in learning Cantonese or Mandarin?

Mandarin Chinese is spoken by more than a billion people, because they don't just speak it in China.

To Bob:
I can't comment on the utility of Cantonese outside China proper as I myself hail from Singapore and not a Chinatown ghetto in North America or any other occidental society. However, I doubt that the usefulness of Cantonese'd be transient at best. Many Chinese nowadays are flocking to learn Mandarin, regardless of their nationality. There is this misconception that speaking Mandarin defines a Chinese and one who cannot speak Mandarin is induitably not a proper Chinese, even if he speaks a dozen other Chinese languages to boot.

To call other languages as "dialects" is erroneous as Mandarin is no more a dialect of the North than say, Cantonese is a dialect of most of Guangdong province. In fact, not all overseas Chinese communities are necessarily dominated by Cantonese speakers. Paris enjoys a unique aberration in that the majority of the Chinese there are in fact Teochew speakers.

Despite being rather fluent in Mandarin myself, I enjoy unsettling Mandarin speakers by replying in Teochew, Cantonese or Hainanese. It's not a display of my arrogance here. It's just my own way of schedenfreude - amusing myself by playing upon the linguistic gauncheness of Mandarin speakers.

To be fair, there're quite a few Mandarin speakers who pick up other Chinese languages. But they're sadly in the minority.

To Louis:
"However, I doubt that the usefulness of Cantonese'd be transient at best."

In place of "doubt", you mean "think"?

Mandarin chauvinism is tied to the chauvinism of the PRC. Mainland Chinese immigrants to Vancouver get annoyed if Cantonese speaking shopkeepers reply to them in Cantonese or English rather than Mandarin.

I sometimes participate on a Chinese language online Forum and if I say that Cantonese is a language, at least as different from Mandarin as two Romance languages are from each other, this is taken as an affront to China, almost akin to saying that people on Taiwan should have a say in their future.

To Bob:
Yes, you're right. I was typing so fast that my fingers got well ahead of my train of thought. A pity I didn't proofread it before I submitted my response.

To Steve:
That's one thing that really riles me. Besides the inflected superiority which Mandarin speakera have, they also erroneously assumed that their language has been the de jure if not the de factor tongue of China since Qinshihuang.

And that's arrant nonsense. In fact, the language used during the Tang dynasty would have been a lot more similar to the southern Chinese languages. In fact, the poems composed by Li Bai are known to sound better if recited in a southern Chinese tongue instead of say, Mandarin. Mandarin is limited in this aspect because of her rather limited capacity in the rising and falling of tones. Teochew, for example, has 12 different intonations for a single word as opposed to 4 for Mandarin.

Even if we count only the native speakers of Mandarin, we would still get more native speakers than English, Spanish and Russian put together. It is still very impressive size! Generally speaking, I think China has gone a different way of development than say W. Europe. In Europe different languages diverged because of the decentralized power and thus nations like France, Italy, Spain (or Denmark, Sweden, Norway) etc appeared. While in China the power was centralized so all the different related languages were and still are concidered as "dialects". Would the situation have been more akin to that of Western Europe, we would now have not "dialects" but separate codified and official languages of Mandarin, Kantonese, etc. just like we have Spanish, Portugese, Italian, French etc.

Spoken dialects of Chinese are not entire languages unto themselves; they differ mostly in pronunciation. The written forms are intelligible to all.

Logically there's no reason to have more than one language in the world, although I'll grant that having multiple languages can provide variety, if and when variety is needed (but it also creates needless complication).

Mandarin and Cantonese differ in more than just simple pronunciation.

<<Spoken dialects of Chinese are not entire languages unto themselves;>>

Yes they are. When dialects become mutually unintelligible, they cease to be dialects.

<<they differ mostly in pronunciation.>>

Duh!

<<The written forms are intelligible to all.>>

So if French and English started using one logographic alphabet, then they would be the same language? Get out of my face.

Mxsmanic, they are most definitely separate languages, and there is no reason to believe otherwise; just because there is a common written verison of Mandarin that most Chinese individuals understand does *not* mean that there is a common Chinese language (and by the way, there are written versions of, say, Cantonese, even though such are not used as commonly the written version of Mandarin). Were they a single language, they one should consider all the West Germanic languages just "dialects" of one language, and likewise for all the Romance languages besides the South and East Romance languages should be considered just one "language" as well, for example.

Lazar, I don't think Mxsmanic should be taken seriously whatsoever on anything having the least relation to languages or linguistics, as he clearly hasn't the least clue about such things, as much as he may think has such a clue.