The anecdote in this post can be considered to be an extension of a previous post, “Fei Si Le: Languages, not Dialects”. At this time there is ongoing discussion in the comments of that post. As such comments here are closed.

I’ve been reading a lot the past few days on the status of Cantonese, most recently Julie Groves’ “Language or Dialect—or Topolect? A Comparison of the Attitudes of Hong Kongers and Mainland Chinese towards the Status of Cantonese” (available as a pdf from the Sino-Platonic Papers). I got to thinking on the idea of prestige within a dialect. I know there are people in Shanghai who consider one variation of the Shanghai parent-dialect to be more pure or more Shanghainese than others, but I’ve never really thought about other Wu dialects (though it could be argued Suzhou has historically held these distinctions, as it was formerly the prestige dialect for centuries).

So I asked a friend. Do you, in your local dialect of Wu, think there are people who speak a “better” form of it, and others who speak it worse? My intended meaning was lost, or rather deemed irrelevant. So I brought up Mandarin as an example. The answer: “With Mandarin it’s completely different, because Mandarin is never your first language“. Emphasis added. Of course in this case the rhetorical “you” could be said to stand strictly for Wu speakers.

I’m posting about this because it was a candid statement from a Wu speaker on the language-ness of Wu as separate from Mandarin. And for what it’s worth the above statement was given in English. So confusion on the definition of 方言 doesn’t really apply.