Talk:Wenzhounese

Move?

There is no doubt in my mind that based on mutual intelligibility alone, Wenzhou speech is a separate language. However, this does not change the fact that most people refer to the language (in Chinese, anyway) as "Wenzhou dialect" (Wenzhouhua). This conforms to WP:COMMONNAME. Very few people actually refer to the language as "Wenzhou Chinese". Besides, it is already explained in the article that Wenzhou speech can be considered a separate language. Colipon+(T) 13:55, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

What it's called in Chinese is irrelevant to WP:Commonname. Besides, hua does not mean "dialect": if that were true, we should rename Chinese language "Chinese dialect". This is the kind of thing that sparks edit wars in Chinese language articles; both "Wenzhou dialect" and "Wenzhou language" are used in the lit, and consensus has been to avoid the word "dialect" in the titles of Chinese varieties unless they are unambiguously dialects. And "Wenzhou Chinese" is not unheard of: there's Velar palatalization in Wenzhou Chinese, for example, and Prosodic realization of Information Focus in Wenzhou Chinese, and an article w an intro "This paper is a metrical analysis of disyllabic tone sandhi in Wenzhou Chinese." So the name is established, and the question here is, not which name is the most common by Google count, but which one does not misrepresent the situation. kwami (talk) 07:46, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

The issue is more complex than it seems. While I see your point that there is dispute about whether the Wenzhou vernacular is a dialect or language, for all practical purposes it has always been classified as a dialect under Wu. One could make an argument that it is a creole of Wu and Minnan. Whatever the nature of the language may be - it is explained sufficiently in the intro without the need to compromise the article name. It is not at all practical to call the language something that no one knows it as. Even linguists generally refer to it as "Wenzhou dialect" and then go on to explain that it could be considered a separate language. The use of a term like "Wenzhou Chinese" is essentially nonexistent. If we don't consider the linguistics science behind it, and treat it as purely a cultural reference, people certainly regard the Wenzhou vernacular to be simple a "notoriously eccentric" dialect, but a "dialect" nonetheless. In academic literature, the use of "Wenzhou dialect" clearly overshadows "Wenzhou Chinese" (only been able to find 2 academic journals calling it "Wenzhou Chinese", with over 50 calling it "Wenzhou dialect). If "Wenzhou dialect" is not the right name or the common name, then "Wenzhou Chinese" is certainly even less so. "Wenzhounese" also comes to mind, but this is not used nearly as much as "Shanghainese" in English literature. Colipon+(T) 18:47, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

Three points: By your argument, we should move Mandarin to "Mandarin dialect". Wenzhounese is not a synonym. "No one" knows it as anything--Wenzhou is not something one in a thousand English speakers would recognize. kwami (talk) 20:29, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

No you missed the point completely, I will summarize my argument again:

1. Academic sources overwhelmingly say "Wenzhou dialect" over "Wenzhou Chinese"
2. Linguists (Chinese and non-Chinese) refer to it mostly as "Wenzhou dialect", not "Wenzhou Chinese". (see: Rose, P. (2002) Tonal Complexity as Contitionaing Factor – More Depressing Wenzhou Dialect; Wenzhou fangyan de liandu biandiao (Tone sandhi in the Wenzhou dialect) S Zheng-Zhang - Zhongguo Yuwen Disyllabic Lexical Tone Sandhi. In Catherine Bow (ed.))
3. Cultural status of Wenzhou speech as a "dialect"
4. "Wenzhou dialect" may not be "proper" but "Wenzhou Chinese" is even less so.
5. Article name changed to "Wenzhou dialect" does not compromise unique status of Wenzhou speech.

In contrast, your argument that it should be named "Wenzhou Chinese" and not "Wenzhou dialect" hinges on one thing - that Wenzhou speech is unique and there are disputes about whether it's a dialect or language. By naming the article "Wenzhou dialect" and not "Wenzhou Chinese" the article does not imply that it is universally recognized as a dialect. The same debates exists for every article on the Chinese language that has "dialect" appended to its name - but the articles themselves clarify that the debate exists. It will not lead to an edit war provided that there is a clear explanation.

If you are still dissatisfied we can RfC this discussion or go thru some other channel. Colipon+(T) 20:43, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

1. You need a ref. A crude Google search with "Wenzhou X" and "linguistics" finds 60% "dialect" and 40% "Chinese" or "language"—hardly overwhelming. (Google does not prove anyone's point, but it shows that your argument is not obviously correct, thus, you need to support it with something other than your opinion.)
2. You need a ref. In Google books, there are no instances of "Wenzhou dialect" within linguistic publications since 2000. (The latest is from 1987). There are, however, one instance each of "Wenzhou language" and "Wenzhou Chinese".
3. Mandarin also has the cultural status as a dialect, so, again, this is a non-argument: It's why we have the problem in the first place!
4. Subjective opinions as to what is "proper" are irrelevant.
5. False. Changing the name to "dialect" tells our readers that we have decided that it is a dialect. That's not a decision for us to make.

kwami (talk) 21:11, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

I need a ref? I just ref'ed Rose (2002) above. *sigh*. Colipon+(T) 22:46, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

Also, responding to your comment on Mandarin. Mandarin is not at "Mandarin dialect" because "Mandarin Chinese" or "Mandarin" is the way most linguists, academics, and ordinary people refer to the language. Similar cases are Cantonese, Teochew, Hokkien etc. In the absence of a standard the most common name should be used, and I have established in this case the most common name is "Wenzhou dialect". Even the locals in Wenzhou refer to the language as a "fang yan" - i.e. dialect. Colipon+(T) 20:48, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

You have established nothing. You merely make statements as fact. As for locals calling it fang yan, of course they do. Don't you realize this is the source of the problem for all Chinese lects? If the Chinese people did not insist that Cantonese, Mandarin, Hakka etc. were fang yan, we would simply label our articles "Cantonese language", "Mandarin language", "Hakka language", as we do with other languages everywhere else in the world. kwami (talk) 21:11, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

With all due respect, I see there is a much, much larger debate that never really reached consensus at the Naming Convetions (Chinese) talk page, and that you moved this page (and many others) without prior consensus. I will raise the issue at the Naming conventions page to calibrate opinions of other users as well. This entire issue of Chinese languages is far too complex for you and I to hash out over an exchange of words. Colipon+(T) 22:18, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

It seems to me that Kwami is using the formula "xxx Chinese" for any of the "primary branches" of Chinese. This is to avoid using either "language" or "dialect". While I can understand the rationale, in many cases the result is more awkward than what it is meant to replace. I agree with Colipon that "Wenzhou dialect" is the most common name of this language/dialect. I have doubts about the use of "xxx Chinese", because it is "cheating" in a way -- "Chinese" is naturally going to be understood as "Chinese language"; because it makes judgements about the status of Wenzhou as a "primary branch (how far down do you go before you stop using "xxx Chinese" and start using "dialect")' and because the name itself is simply rather awkward.

Personally I don't have a great problem with the term "dialect". The reason is that mutual intelligibility isn't and never should have been posited as a criterion for deciding what a "language" was. Sorry to hark back to German again, but most of the German dialects are, in my understanding, not mutually intelligible, except when apprehended as a "dialect continuum", where each dialect is intelligible to its neighbours, but dialects of distantly separated places are not intelligible at all. Similar things apply to Japanese dialects, where Aomori and Kagoshima are so different that it is hard to see how they can be said to belong to a single language.

The reason the Chinese dialects are "dialects" is because they lack the full range of use of a standardised language in the Western sense. While Minnan and Cantonese may, for instance, be as different as Spanish and Italian, Spanish and Italian are fully-fledged national languages with a full range of uses (informal, formal, academic, official, etc.) whereas Minnan and Cantonese are simply "dialects" without the status of a "full language".

At any rate, the use of "Wenzhou Chinese" to avoid the problems presented by using "language" or "dialect" seems to be a rather unsatisfactory and one might say awkward solution.

Bathrobe (talk) 14:00, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Common Name

• "Wenzhou dialect": 68 results on Scholar, 985 on Web
• "Wenzhou Chinese": 11 results on Scholar (of which 3 actually talk about the language), 618 on Web (most of these results have nothing to do with the language)

The choice should be very clear. Colipon+(Talk) 17:53, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

If Wenzhou is considered a separate language, then it is not a dialect. QED. kwami (talk) 10:21, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Kindly consider what Bathrobe wrote above, please. Colipon+(Talk) 09:49, 4 October 2009 (UTC)

Yes, he has some good points. This isn't a clear-cut case. kwami (talk) 10:59, 4 October 2009 (UTC)

Actually, he stated that he was supportive of "Wenzhou dialect" and that "Wenzhou Chinese" is unsatisfactory. In light of this third opinion I ask that you move this page back to "Wenzhou dialect". Thanks. Colipon+(Talk) 12:57, 4 October 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I know. I do read English. Bathrobe is using a sociolinguistic definition of 'language', which would mean that Min is also a 'dialect' of Chinese. But there are others who disagree (and where Min would constitute half a dozen languages; AFAIK Wenzhou is not part of a dialect continuum), and 'language' is used in the lit. His best point is that 'Wenzhou Chinese' might imply a primary branch, which it is not. But it doesn't do any harm to leave it for discussion - there's hardly been any. kwami (talk) 18:42, 4 October 2009 (UTC)

What? There has been hardly any discussion? Two other editors with experience in editing these articles both express opposition to this name, and both bring good reasons to move the page back. The page move wasn't discussed in the first place, there was no consensus; you just did it because you wanted to, and now it cannot be reverted because you have administrator's rights. With all due respect, please, just move the page back to where it was. Colipon+(Talk) 20:41, 4 October 2009 (UTC)

He thinks it's rather "awkward". You're the only one up in arms about it. Yes, I'd call that "hardly any discussion".

Now at "Wenzhounese", a common name that avoids implying it's a dialect. kwami (talk) 22:30, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

I think "Wenzhouhua" would be vastly superior for a few reasons: 1. It is way more common on the Internet than either of the proposed names, and roughly 5 times as common as "Wenzhounese". 2. Most of those who run into the dialect are likely to hear it as "Wenzhouhua". 3. "Wenzhounese" just sounds awkward. The Jade Knight (talk) 21:05, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

WP:English. "Wenzhouhua" is like using "Kiswahili" for Swahili language. Even the Journal of Wenzhou Normal College uses "Wenzhounese" in English. Also, what is your evidence that -hua is more common on the internet? The number you gave suggests a Google count. However, Google is absolute garbage for any count over about 700, which is one reason we don't decide anything based on Google counts. (Try viewing the last item in the count: of the alleged 12,700 hits for "Wenzhounese", there are only 558, an error of 96%; of the alleged 61,900 hits for "Wenzhouhua", there are only 351, an error of 99.4% and actually less common that the smaller count! Also, if you include the quotes, the ratio increases to 538 Wenzhounese, 285 Wenzhouhua. In English, 339:187 and 317:183. In Google Scholar, w quotes, it's 55 "Wenzhounese", 9 "Wenzhouhua", of which at most 4 are in English. Of course, many of the hits for "Wenzhounese" are for the people, but even so, Google count is not a good way to decide anything. --kwami (talk) 22:21, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

I know this is a old inactive discussion. Sorry to add to the discussion But I would like to just add. Wenzhouhua doesn't imply its a language. I assume you know Putonghua as well. Hua is 话 and its most used in dialects and can be defined as language. Putonghua means common dialect or language. But for actual languages we got 文 and 语 which denotes for proper languages e.g. 华文，国语. Wenzhouhua sounds far superior. I checked the website for Journal of Wenzhou Normal College. I doubt the authority the webmaster has over language. The webmaster is probably limited in his command of English and decides to use whatever suits him or whats approved for use on the web by the college. Plus, because its just a webpage, it aids in the discussion but its reliability is questionable at best. I would agree Wenzhouhua could be the possible more accurate description. As nese can always be slightly ambiguous as it could mean people as well in Wenzhounese. Whereas if you have Wenzhouhua, its distinct and clear what it means. --Visik (talk) 02:35, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

The Journal of East Asian Linguistics and Studies in Linguistic Sciences have both used Wenzhouhua. Virtually all Google Scholar hits for "Wenzhounese" which are published by English sources are for the ethnicity, not the language. The Jade Knight (talk) 22:48, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

But in English, the same terms are used for language and ethnicity. One can always substitute a word for the language with the ethnicity or the ethnicity plus "language". — kwami (talk) 10:37, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

But it appears that in Google Scholar, at least as many Academic English sources are using "Wenzhouhua" as "Wenzhounese". The Jade Knight (talk) 07:46, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Traditional Chinese

Why is traditional Chinese preferred when only one variant is given? Wenzhou is located on the mainland. --2.246.10.93 (talk) 16:50, 13 December 2014 (UTC)