Chinatown Chinese

The following passage is adapted from an article 1981.

Chinese is a language of many distinct dialects that are often mutually unintelligible. Some linguists have argued that a new dialect of Chinese has evolved in the United States, which is commonly used in the Chinatown section of San Francisco. The characterization of this “Chinatown Chinese” as a distinct dialect is based Chinese Americans in San Francisco so long as one is proficient in the uniquely Chinese-American terminologies.

Regarding the first claim, much of the distinctive vocabulary of Chinatown Chinese consists of proper names of geographical places and terms for things that some people, especially those born and raised in villages, had never encountered in China. Some are transliterated terms, such as dang-tang for “downtown.” Others are direct translations from their meaning can be inferred from the context. The supposed language barrier is, therefore, mostly imaginary.

The second claim—that the sharing of a uniquely Chinese-American vocabulary makes possible communication among Chinese Americans no matter what their basic dialect of Chinese may be—is a misleading oversimplification. While many Chinese-American speakers of other Chinese dialects have become familiar with Cantonese, now the most common dialect of Chinese spoken in the constitute only a minute percentage of each dialect and are generally peripheral to the core vocabulary.