User:Colipon/Cantonese

Editors are confused

Kwami, editors are extremely confused because these names don't conform with reality. Thus even if editors know a lot about the subject, they don't know which subject fits under which article and so on, and then they look at this discussion page to see the on-going disputes, and thus feel they need to contribute. There's now two articles which describe supposedly two different topical areas, but editors either do not understand this or do not find it inappropriate. This confusion is caused by the naming of the articles, and the fact that two articles exist to describe overlapping topical areas. That is perfectly understandable, especially if native speakers are contributing - because they need to establish what "Cantonese" means first.

Let's get to the root of the confusion here. Most editors who contribute to these articles are either native speakers of the language or people with significant knowledge about the language. They all come to these articles having a good idea in their head of what "Cantonese" means to them, and just because Wikipedia wants a strict definition of "Cantonese", it does not change the meaning of Cantonese in common usage. Let's try to look at a multitude of perspectives on the simple question, "What does Cantonese mean?", to see why this conflict is happening at all.

• In Southeast Asia, Cantonese can refer to the language of anyone who have migrated from Guangdong, though there is a tedency to translate Cantonese to "广府话", which ostensibly limits "Cantonese" to the speech to Guangzhou.
• In Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, "Cantonese" means 粵語 or 廣東話, and is called such in the communities that speak it. This can be easily verified with any bilingual publications. In this case, "Cantonese" refers to all Yue dialects, with the exception of Taishanese, which is often listed separately (this is the convention I've grown used to).
• In Hong Kong and Macau, "Cantonese" is officially translated as 粵語, and colloquially as 廣東話. And 粵語, as all Chinese linguists agree, is the official designation given to all Yue dialects, including Taishanese.
• In Guangdong, three distinct names are used - all of which are translated as "Cantonese" - these are 广州话，广东话 and 粤语. These do not mean the same thing, but they are also not mutually exclusive. Many people simply confuse the usage altogether and think they all mean the same thing.
• In many places with native Cantonese speakers, but most prominently in Guangxi, the endonym used to describe "Cantonese" is 白话 (Baakwa).

I hope you get what I mean. Each editor who have had a different experience with the language will have a different idea on what it means, and thus edit the articles differently, and possibly having different definitions of "Cantonese".

Linguists, on the other hand, cannot seem to agree on what to call the language. They do seem to agree, however, the Yue dialects (aside from Taishan), are largely mutually intelligible and have minimal variation compared to say, the Min languages in Fujian. Some choose to call the larger dialect group "Yue" for the sake of avoiding confusion and keep consistency with other topolects, some will choose to call it "Cantonese"; many discuss the names in detail. Indeed, as user John Blackburne points out, many books instructing Cantonese teach the dialect of Guangzhou and Hong Kong - but does this really mean that "Cantonese" is strictly defined as GZ+HK, or does it mean that dialect has simply emerged as the de facto standard?

If Wikipedia were to cater to linguists and linguists alone - then our two articles should appropriately be named "Yue" and "Guangzhou dialect". The problem is, Wikipedia must follow WP:COMMONNAMES policy. This means that we must define "Cantonese" as what most people know it as - especially when there is no consensus even within the linguistics community about what to call the language. In my view, this is very problematic because "Cantonese" means different things to different people, even different things to different linguists. As such, this two-year-long names debate about what to call this article isn't actually about the name per se, the root of the problem is that people cannot agree on what "Cantonese" is.

Until we solve that problem, we will never move on from the current deadlock. Colipon+(Talk) 02:13, 3 April 2010 (UTC)