[Vision2020] Tibetan Fight for Freedom
Andreas Schou
ophite at gmail.com
Fri Mar 21 00:18:27 PDT 2008
>
> China doesn't share a genetic heritage, language, culture, religion,
> or cuisine with itself. There are 55 official minority nationalities
> in China, and 235 living languages (according to ethnologue.com).
> These are not like dialects in the US, where Bostonians understand
> Californians who understand Southerners, if with some difficulty.
> These dialects are so different that they are _literally_ mutually
> unintelligible.
That's truthy, in the same limited sense that every American Indian
tribe is a separate language and ethnic group in American. There's a
lot of indigenous diversity in China. On the other hand, over 90% of
the country belongs to the Han ethnic group, and over 90% of the
country speaks either Mandarin or Cantonese.
-- ACS
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