Forum letter writer Chong Lee Ming says it is a misconception that Mandarin and Chinese dialects are different languages, as “Mandarin and dialects share the same writing system and grammar” (Mastering written Chinese in school will help in learning dialects, Feb 16).

Speaking as a linguist, I find these characterisations inaccurate. 

The grammar of a language does not merely comprise the rules for putting words together to form sentences. For instance, every speech variety also has its own rules on how the sounds it contains can be combined to form syllables and words, which is also part of the grammatical structure of the language.

Thus, it cannot be right to say that Mandarin and dialects share the same grammar, given that they contain different sounds and different rules for putting those sounds together. 

Even if we were to restrict the notion of “grammar” to the level of sentence structure, it is still not the case that Mandarin and all dialects behave in the same way.

When expressing a giving event, for example, the object is typically expressed before the recipient in Cantonese – “I give money to them” – whereas the order is reversed in Mandarin – “I give them money”.

To reverse the order in either language would lead to ungrammaticality. 

Moreover, even though the various vernaculars can be expressed in written form using the same script, the result is often incomprehensible to speakers of other vernaculars.

Even the Cantonese examples cited in the letter may not be fully understood by a Mandarin speaker with no prior exposure to Cantonese, if the examples were to be faithfully expressed in written form. 

From a linguistic perspective, Mandarin and many of the Chinese dialects that we are familiar with in Singapore are in fact different languages with different grammar, even though they can be written using the same script.

Leslie Lee