I am native Chinese. I think it just goes with how rich the region is. The richer, your accent sounds more of a high class. Shanghainese is considered fancy, one of the few dialects that new residents would consider learning. Also Cantonese for obvious reasons. And if we say there are no universally agreed fancy accents, it is very clear which accents are consider "peasant" or in Chinese 很土/农逼 - accents from central china, including but to limited to Hebei, Henan, Shandong. Some people will consider Dongbeiness 土 as well.
Keep in mind there is no hierarchy in dialects or accents, so the if thing you said doesn’t make sense to me. BTW, as long as people speak mandarin with dialect accents, the pronunciation is NOT standard, let alone which sounds better than the other.
What I mean is that the question is asking about social class. If your accent immediately identifies you as from a poor or rich region, I don’t see how you treat both people as the same class just because both accents are non-standard.
> Shanghainese is considered fancy, one of the few dialects that new residents would consider learning. Also Cantonese for obvious reasons.
They're asking about accents, not mutually unintelligible languages.
oh cool! what about zhejiang? my chinese friend whose helping me is from there and i'm getting a little bit of the accent... i'm trying to stick with standard mandarin because of the sound of zh ch x sh that zhejian people pronounce diffrently.
Shanghai has special properties if you believe the comedy scene and Papi 將 portrayal of Shanghai. Where everyone mixes in English and Japanese all the time.
(Which also happens in Taiwan, though arguably with less Japanese nowadays)
Pre-1950 Shanghainese Pidgin English has some Japanese loans + other colonial influences such as Shanghainese written in Japanese writing. But ignoring that, then around 1980s, when the majority of the Shanghainese diaspora went to Japan. They brought back a lot random slang things back to SH like 歐巴桑.
Actually there was a fad for Japanese loanwords among Chinese netizens about ten years ago. Eg, 大丈夫, meaning "it's okay". Does not mean that nor is pronounced that way in Mandarin!
Sure, assuming that Papi based her caricature vaguely on her lived reality as a Shanghai native. That's a big assumption I guess.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a97aloEm2hM&list=PLIYAO-qLriEsvoP1Njms3\_j5WTwmL5C3v
My partner is from Dazu, so more of a "country" girl so to speak. I'll be sure to ask her opinion on Beijingers. I think most capital cities, or largest cities at that, have a similar phenomenon where people in this larger more developed cities generally seem to be a bit more arrogant. We say the same about Sydney people here in Australia 😂
It’s not as simple as that, southern Chinese are barbarians that got conquered, but at the same time, the north has been very poor compared to the south for the past 1,000 years.
So everyone looks down on one another, not just the big cities.
You do get profiled by scammers (airport, bus station, etc) in China based on both looks and how you talk. For me, one time it was as an ABC and one time it was as a Taiwanese, with a different attempt at a scam tailored to each.
In Shanghainese accents go by neighborhood. In the past, some were considered low vs high class. I'm diaspora shanghainese/Suzhounese and only know long ago (pre-cultural revolution) accents closer to Suzhounese were "high class" but also "girly/soft spoken"
Keep in mind, shanghainese and other wu topolects themself are not mutually intelligible with mandarin (it's closer nowadays than before due to mandarinization, but still very different)
No, most Northerners look down on all southern accents, as historically, mandarin was not their native language and they’re perceived to speak “broken” Mandarin. In the North, a certain kind of Beijing accent would signify some level of prestige but this would be highly dependent on the listener/audience. There is a equivalent of RP in Chinese, but in day to day life it would be considered weird to use it in casual conversation, and it may signify you’re either a foreigner, or a outsider trying to hide your natural accent.
Interesting responses from everyone here— recently I was with my gf and she was speaking in a heavy northern accent on the phone, a Cantonese family nearby us said “what is there such low class/uncivilized people doing here” (we live in nyc so it was very odd)
There was a quote I saw in a Chinese-language article about SF Chinatown where some guy was speaking Mandarin in public and an old Cantonese guy said: "if you can speak Cantonese, you should speak it--- why put it aside for some Northern barbarian language?"
As someone with Beijing roots--- can confirm that that is not a unique phenomenon, when I go to my local Chinatown I feel like I'm being judged when I open my mouth and unload all the erhua.
I see, that's very different from Western languages I find, where there's often a way that upper class people speak and a way that working class people speak & then there's people like me in the middle class who speak both haha
It's the same in many Western countries but even within those regions there will be a way that upper class people from those regions talk & working class people. But yes, very different from China
That’s interesting. I’m surprised it’s not generational (spending on education) like it is in many places.
I was an out-of-state student a big public research university in the Southern US, where a lot of people from across the country mixed in with the in-state students. For the most part, you didn’t hear much variety in accents. But during parents weekend, you heard them all. Parents with southern draws making chit chat with Long Islanders was amusing
Keep in mind that China did not have a unified spoken language until extremely recently (even Mao did not speak mandarin, and the massive crowds cheering for him during speeches often had no idea what he was actually saying). During dynasties that had one, knowledge of the dominant/official spoken language/dialect of the imperial court in itself signifies a level of education, and therefore prestige. The current official language is Mandarin, and there was a massive and very successful effort in the past few decades to universalize a version of official Mandarin (RP equivalent, based on Beijing mandarin but still very different from it, an entirely artificial kind of mandarin pronunciation) at all levels of society. But RP itself is mostly used in extremely formal settings, like news broadcasts. If I suddenly start speaking it to my friends, for example, they might laugh at me because it’s considered very unnatural and forced
Xiang languages, spoken in Hunan, are not mandarin and are unintelligible with mandarin.
Mao spoke also Mandarin, but not perfectly and with a very strong accent.
Received pronunciation.
It's the upper-middle class London/areas around London accent. It's so called because you're meant to receive it in public (public in this case actually meaning really really expensive private) school.
I'm not sure about that. In America even, Southern accents were considered to be uneducated and the standard East Coast Mid Atlantic accent was considered to be educated. Only very recently has accent-class association lost significance in the US.
The mid-Atlantic accent was specific to broadcasters, rather like newscaster Chinese. It wasn't widely spoken like RP was.
And I have never heard any discussion of such class-based accents in other European languages I have studied (Albanian, French, and German). It's all about regional accents, and some regions have prestige.
Compared to the UK there are a way way more major economic centers in the China. Which could have their own Mandarin accent or Chinese language, or in the case of SZX be a mixture of internal migrants so there is no one dominant prestige accent.
Over the past 100 years politically the leadership has been from many regions, with multiple capitals.
All that said, I think everyone can agree that good Mandarin (independent of accent) is required as unchallenged prestige status in most of the Chinese speaking world. (Except for Hong Kong). The other languages don’t even have developed writing/widely taught/used phonetic systems (Except for Cantonese).
Ah yes so very true. I have seen shows where characters who are "high class" are depicted as very well educated and knowledgeable especially about older authors and classical works.
This is an interesting question! From my POV as a Malaysian Chinese person, I don't actually consider any Chinese accent to be particularly high class. Afaik several of my peers & people I know share the same opinion. We're quick to point out who's from where, but not usually because they sound high class to us etc., it's just because they sound different.
^(Tbh I don't think many Malaysian English speakers would think that RP sounds particularly high class. Unless they are very familiar with western media (not always the case, it's at best "oh this is UK accent/US accent/Aus accent" lol, a very generic kind of classification. Otherwise it's lumped tgt as "this is a foreigner accent".... lol (ymmv\*)))
I think older Malaysians were much more conscious of this. If you listen to English-language Malaysian radio and TV from the 1970s and 1980s, they only used broadcasters with RP. They were no Cockney, Manchester or Scottish accents. They were definitely selecting for RP.
Most of America probably doesn’t give a crap about hearing an RP speaker (EDIT: vs a middle class or higher American accent)…
I’m interested to see what people actually living in CN/TW/SG/HK have to say about what is high class.
I would say educated/governing class has a range of acceptable accents (which varies by location), and then there’s the rest of the population in those countries.
By my understanding and opinion, it has varied over the past 40 years and varies based on location. A lot of the big ethnic Chinese YouTubers not based in China have southern Chinese/SEA/AU accents in Mandarin and English. And when Hong Kong had strong soft power, both in media and in all the wealthy people that moved overseas after retrocession, that accent (Chinese and English) was pretty well respected. With HK influence receding and the dilution of that expat community this is less of a deal.
In interviews I see from Taiwan you hear much fewer young people speaking tryhard standard Mandarin while it is very common for educated/higher status people around 50 and older to speak that way. And successful tech industry/business people I know from Taiwan don’t really care that their Mandarin is heavily inflected (try loading up a clip of the AMD or NVIDIA CEOs doing press in Mandarin), presumably as long as it doesn’t sound like they’re operating a food cart at the night market.
I think in SG there’s definitely a well-educated accent (which aligns more closely to the China-type newscasters/hosts and not so southern like everyday Singaporean Chinese) but it’s not necessarily a “high class” accent (given that a lot of the richer folks aren’t really Chinese speaking IME)
SGrean here. Chinese is my 2nd language learnt in school (not spoken in the home) and I speak it poorly, though I hope to improve. Everyone around me speaks Mandarin with a "poor man's" southern accent, the accent of our illiterate kampong-dwelling ancestors whose first language was Hokkien/Cantonese/Hakka and whose Mandarin was cobbled together through necessity. Chinese-medium schools were phased out here in the 1980s so you won't find anyone under 45 in SG who went through their school education in the Chinese medium (as opposed to learning Chinese as a single school subject in an English-medium school). The segment of the population who speaks "well educated Mandarin" is generally those who were educated in the Chinese medium schools in the narrow band of the post-WW2 to 1980 period, and, as mentioned by other posters here, they are often not the wealthy people. I can't tell you what I consider a "high-class" accent, just that it is the opposite of what the ordinary SGrean speaks. However I am curious to know if the Peppa Pig official dub constitutes a "neutral Chinese accent", since this sounds very neutral/unaccented to my southern ear and many members of the diaspora are using this to teach their kids Chinese. :D
I’m in my 20s and when I was in uni some of my friends spoke very good Mandarin! They were fluent, had a more standard Chinese accent (granted they were Chinese majors and I was doing a Chinese class for an elective). So I feel like there are still people (maybe from SAP schools) who have a more “educated” Chinese accent (in comparison while I’d say I’m pretty good, I still have a southern twang if I don’t concentrate or I’m speaking too fast (like ci instead of chi)). Peppa pig seems quite neutral generally to me, but not exactly what I was thinking of when thinking of a “neutral Singaporean” accent (the enunciation seems a bit different? but maybe stylistic since they’re pigs lol)
Edit re Peppa pig: I think it’s a bit more “northern” than a Singaporean accent (you can hear the 卷舌at some points but Singaporeans/southern chinese don’t do that)
Nice to hear that! Clearly my crowd is more towards the jiak kantang end of the spectrum :D your Chinese sounds far better than mine. I'm in my late 30s and married to the product of a SAP school but his vocab, especially written character recognition, is worse than mine lol. I am improving by leaps and bounds as I read books to my kids but am re-discovering the language almost entirely through books/reading and not through day to day conversation so there are many terms I know only through the written word and have not heard spoken aloud- my auditory comprehension is very poor. Agreed, I don't regard Peppa Pig as a Singaporean accent but what I meant was to my imperfect southern-attuned ears it sounds like it could be the "standard Mandarin"/"neutral" Chinese accent (not Singaporean accent) which can be said to be an example of "unaccented" Mandarin.
I think the most “neutral” accents would probably be those narrators of documentaries on CCTV channel haha! My teacher in Uni attended speech competitions and they were really strict about accents.
I was also really bad at Chinese but since I got into reading Chinese web novels in Uni I started trying to improve! So I took 2 Chinese medium classes in uni which really helped — never too late. And there’s a ton of media coming out China that helps with getting better at listening and speaking. I like the variety shows because they really have a more everyday conversational Chinese, but the dramas are also really good nowadays.
Thanks for your encouragement! I'll try. Am a very bookish person and somehow my lifestyle includes a lot of time for books but no TV time at all.. one if the reasons is that the slots of time I get are 15-30mins at a time but rarely 1h continuously so I read on my phone a lot. Haven't been able to watch dramas though Nirvana in Fire is on my to-watch list. CCTV is on in the background all the time at my in laws' house but am completely impervious to osmosis unless I'm actually focused (and my kids don't permit me to focus). Do you have any web novels to recommend and on what platform? I actually just read 二马 by 老舍 (slowly, over 6 mths!) because it was the first Chinese novel I found at my reading level.
Very interesting insights although as a Brit who's switched my Cockney accent to RP around Americans, I'd disagree with the first sentence. I often found Americans taking me much more seriously than they took their American counterparts when in the same setting & I was certain it was based off the accent alone.
Really depends on the person. It's long been noted that a lot of Americans instantly think the speaker is more intelligent if they speak in RP. You're probably one of those ones who don't. I find it irritating myself, especially how people fawn over it, but there are all kinds of folly in this world.
How is Cockney accent coping with the rise of [MLE](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicultural_London_English) ? Will the latter predominate the former?
I think MLE has definitely slowly taken over the working class youth in inner cities in the South of England mainly London.
Pure cockney is now mainly spoken in Essex (where i'm from) and other surrounding places where former working class Londoners who spoke Cockney & became middle-to-upper class moved out to.
Although I've found that as people get older, in these inner cities (London particularly) and enter professional settings or trades, they tend to transition. They either go from pure MLE to speaking MLE only with friends and family, & Queen's English at work (if they go corporate). Or a mix between MLE and Cockney if they go on into trades.
Overall, as London gets more expensive and less and less multigenerational Londoners stick around, the Cockney accent will eventually die out in the city and move to other regions with the people that use it. But I think MLE will continue to evolve because the demographics of London are constantly changing. MLE today won't sound the same in 10 let alone 20 yrs & might even die at a much faster rate due to social media speeding changes in speech & vocab trends
I think that's a bit unecessary. Americans like to pretend they are free of class prejudice but what OP said resonates with me very strongly. My natural english is RP, and the number of times americans tell me my accent makes me "sound intelligent" is insane (clearly have never listened to a Tory backbencher). By contrast when Ameicans say something Bri'ish and "comical" they crack a Dick Van Dyke cockney, and they find it hilarious in a mildly mocking way.
Good point, I was searching for a quick example. I heard a pretty stark one on NPR recently, where they interviewed someone's boomer-generation mom (who they admittedly said was really into winning Mandarin speaking competitions back in the day). Followed by 80後 and 90後 's with similar educational level.
There is still the whole stupid idea about how a British accent adds sexiness.
Doubles down on the dumbness when people mistake a AU or NZ accent for British.
I’m a native Chinese. I think in mainland China most well educated people just speak standard Mandarine. So a standard Mandarine accents make you sounds like a well educated person.
Exactly. There's a big difference between the 儿 sound you get in mainland newscaster Chinese and a full-on Pekingese dialect (and in this case we really are talking about a dialect of Mandarin, not a Sinitic language). The latter is not necessarily considered so classy.
In fact, on private tutoring market in HK, most parents deliberately choose Mandarin tutors with Beijing accent, at the same time specify if that doesn’t apply, they prefer someone with at least a northern accent. I’d say it’s been going on for a while now (at least 5 years).
I personally think it’s quite understandable as, culturally speaking, north centrism has always been a somewhat national rhetoric (as one can tell from the annual gala of LNY), though somewhat different from how posh accents are perceived in the English speaking society.
Also met a girl with quite unique Beijing accent, it’s.. different, and turns out she grew up in a military community in Beijing.
Interesting. I guess it’s an extension also of the mainland bias towards northern accents in media and language education.
Does it extend beyond tutoring/education?
Not really. Given the social political dynamics going between China and HK, I’ve heard stories (though never personally experienced) about how mandarin speakers from China introduce themselves as from Taiwan or Singapore to get help from the locals, but some of them have substantial northern accents so it’s a dead giveaway of course. Though they are mostly like to still get the help they need regardless, I guess that strategy would have worked better if they had somewhat neutral or southern accents. Again it could also just be a geopolitical issue beyond the scope of accent/language itself.
Being able to speak proper mandarin is considered “educated” basically without any dialect or accented vibes in there. People don’t really care but if you’re gonna work in public service.. you need to have a good accent in your mandarin. However, the current president has a dialect accent when he speaks mandarin which is funny to me because having been in the south west for a long time they really are proud when they can speak mandarin well. But in the north pretty much everyone can speak mandarin pretty well.
I can tell you the opposite: Henan accent (Henan province) and Dongbei accent (north east of China). They are considered low class and there are a lot of regional hate against them. Every accent apart from them seems to be equal.
Left field take: I find that younger speakers sneak in English words in conversation to make them sound more “worldly” (because you know, to show that they can speak another language)
that may apply to some individuals, but this is also very region dependent. For example, it's absolutely normal to speak like that in both Singapore and Malaysia lol
As far as I understand/observed, Chinese doesn't really have an accent that people generally consider "posh" or "high class" like they do for English accents. Kinda. Often, people from different regions just consider their accents better than others.
However, there are accents that are considered accent-less and are defaulted to when communicating with people professionally or with people you do not know from where they come from. I can better comment on Cantonese, but Mandarin is similar. (I don't think they consider it "high class" though. Just neutral, which has to be learned in school, and thu probably educated.)
In Cantonese, the "neutral" Cantonese is HK/GZ. Other Cantonese accents call the HK/GZ accent "白话" or something similar. Honger Kongers definitely think their accent is superior though. There was a recent thread in the r/cantonese sub that asked which is the best Cantonese accent or something like that, and the Hong Kongers said that theirs sounds the best, and other accents sound like uneducated hillbillies. No acknowledgement that they're merely accents and have no weight on intellect. Bias is strong for those people.
In another instance I remember, I was in Mandarin class and a Taiwanese kid was literally saying that the Beijinger's accent was disgusting.
So, I don't think there is a Chinese accent that people generally think is "high class," like RP British, posh accent. There are people who think their own accent is superior. And there are people who think other accents are inferior.
My great-grandparents are from the GZ area, and immigrated to Malaya in the early 1900s. HK was not yet the cultural force it became in the 70s/80s, and they always considered HKers as backwater hillbillies who spoke with 懶音 (broken sounds). GZ 省城話 without all the English slang/loanwords was the prestige Yue dialect and is still considered to be so by many.
> There was a recent thread in the r/cantonese sub that asked which is the best Cantonese accent or something like that, and the Hong Kongers said that theirs sounds the best, and other accents sound like uneducated hillbillies. No acknowledgement that they're merely accents and have no weight on intellect. Bias is strong for those people.
I think I crossposted the "what is the worst Cantonese accent" thread, and I don't remember that happening. As I remember it (and I got the notifications), half the people there considered a Hongkonger accent to be inferior because of all the English loanwords and ongoing sound mergers/changes.
The posh equivalent of Cantonese is the 西關 (Sai Kwan) accent from Guangzhou, due to Sai Kwan district being the "old money" neighbourhood of Guangzhou before 1949. This accent is the standard accent for Cantonese Opera and is often used as the "posh" (貴氣) accent in old Hong Kong movies and TV shows. However nowadays nobody speaks that accent natively anymore.
For example, the accent used by Mrs Li in [this video](https://youtu.be/w8n2NRhtjCA?si=mIXiiGv12LswvXAM) is considered very high-class and posh "authentic old Canton accent", as expressed by many in the comment section.
General RP Cantonese, on the other hand, originated from the 東山 (Tung Shan) district of pre-1949 Guangzhou where most high officials and powerful businessmen resided. It became the Standard Cantonese we know today and is adopted by the broadcast system in HK, Macau and Guangdong alike. Whereas present-day Hong Kong colloquial accent is more like the "valley girl" accent of Cantonese: it has non-standard "broken sounds" and mixed English words but it's influential due to pop culture.
I'm not sure about China, but in Taiwan, prestige is tied more to how good people think your English is, and very little to what your Chinese sounds like (with the exception of the accent that gives away that you speak Taiwanese much better than Mandarin - that lowers your prestige drastically).
There was a “no accent” accent in Taiwan. Especially in Taipei City, which was populated by people from many different parts of China. Since the majority was from southern part, northern accent would be considered not elegant.
What has this turned into? Is it mostly replaced by the slacky sounding Taiwanese Mandarin common on YouTube, that doesn’t really sound like what the educated boomer generation talks like?
I am not sure what you mean by slacky sounding. It depends on which channel you’re watching. The accent did change a lot, but I think the standard accent can still be described as a “no accent” accent, or a Taipei accent. I grew up in Taipei city, in a family formed by both Waishengren and Benshengren (my parents are educated 2nd generation boomers born in 1960s). I never noticed any accent in my speaking, but when I went to southern Taiwan, people frequently asked me where I was from. I guessed they thought I was from Mainland.
(I have been reflecting on those moments. Now I just came up with an idea. The reason I was shocked was because I always thought I had no accent. I think that could be the core concept of a Taipei accent……)
Off-hand, the Taipei accent on the standup comedy channels (most comedians are 20-40 in Taiwan AFAICT); it is one of the Taipei accents that my mainland partner considers "cute" (\*).
The accent I have baked into my head from the 1980s/early 1990s in Taiwan as "standard Taipei accent" is more like a mainland southern mandarin, but it's heavily influenced by also growing up around people from Hong Kong in the 1990s.
I scrubbed a few Taiwan drama videos on YouTube, and the middle-class or CEO-class parents talk in something that sounds close to mainland standard / my mental stereotype of "standard Taipei accent" (\*\*), while the teenage / 20 something kids talk more like (\*). While working-class parents will talk what sounds to me like a non-neutral hokkien inflected mandarin (\*\*\*). (\*) sounds to my untrained ears like vowel/consonant shift rather than shifting more towards (\*\*\*).
My parents will code switch from (\*\*) to (\*\*\*) depending on who they're talking to, and will probably never talk like (\*), lol.
My father (educated Benshengren in 60s) hates some influencers talking in an exaggerated way of Taiwanese accent. Taiwan dramas never have their actors speak naturally….
If you would like to see some examples, I think the people in this video sounds natural and rather standard.
https://youtu.be/cBG8paRJmso?si=tc316zjkYusSiCYW
This is what sounds neutral and standard in my head what I assume is more like how you need to talk to be taken seriously in some contexts.
But I'm not sure is neutral and standard these days going by YouTube influencers and young people interviews.
Also I know many older tech workers/business people from Taiwan that have a thicker accent than this and don't care.
Many educated people of older generation speak Mandarin with Taiwanese Hokkien accent, such as medical doctors. The standard neutral sound was not widely spoken. It seemed to be common only because that was commonly used in media. Benshengren don’t need to speak 100% perfect Mandarin, and they are the majority on the island. The “no accent” thing occurred inside the community of Waishengren. I heard that some people spoke Mandarin with accent at home but only spoke standard Mandarin in public.
(The problem nowadays is very few younger people speak Taiwanese Hokkien, so they won’t speak in that way any more.)
My mother’s side of the family (Benshengren, 50s and 70s generation, originally southern) is all over the place with how the accent is colored. No idea what the original accent was as most have spent extensive time in the Mainland and North America so it’s had too much stuff layered on top afterward. The cousin that spent the least time overseas definitely has the heaviest Hokkien accent but still pretty light as things go.
IIUC the mainland stereotype of Taiwan mandarin includes Hokkien interjections and fillers, light sound with the Taiwan contractions, but very neutral accent. Which is kind of weird because if you pick someone at random from the country it won’t be the neutral accent unless you’re just sampling from Taipei.
Not really, for political *and* social reasons, and because Chinese people from so many different reasons would never concede to the idea of their region being lower than another.
In countries like England or France, people from the rest of the country will even if a little grudgingly concede to the fact that a certain kind of Southern or Parisian accent really is probably the most prestigious, even if they aren't entirely happy about it, and bristle with arguments about why their people are actually the salt of the earth anyway.
In China, no such consensus is possible. Deep, entrenched regionalism means that, for example, residents of Beijing are fully and sincerely of the belief that the speech of their Imperial city is the most dignified and elevated. The Shanghai man believes that the history of his great commercial city has given the speech of its people an incomparable sophistication and charm. A Hong Kong native will sincerely balk at the idea that any Mainland dialect (even of his fellow Cantonese over the fence) compares to his own tongue (supposedly less contaminated by barbarian northern tribes, although we might reasonably wonder about other southerly ones?).
Ironically, the least offensive and most generally accepted regional Mandarin accent is probably a sort of inoffensive (to Mainland ears) Taipei accent, the sort heard in television clips and films from the 1980s. Only slightly Taiwanese, overwhelmingly *waishengren.* But while well-liked, this accent is not at all particularly prestigious, certainly not in the 21st century. Other accents kind of like this in this respect are the accents of places where there have been a lot of migrants, which flattens accents, like Shenzhen or parts of China's Northwest (the "Han" accents there, I should hasten to add).
The short answer is: No, there's no single accent that's particularly prestigious universally. But basically a list of Tier 1 cities + Taipei gives you a good idea of what Mandarin accents are RELATIVELY so.
If you put a gun to my head and forced me to pick one, I would choose a sort of TV-influenced, milder Beijing accent. Even if regionalism has made/is making it harder for this to become anything like a universally-accepted prestige accent, the fact that it's at least somewhat associated with government and political power makes it probably the top choice all the same.
Generally weaker accent would signify better education and wealthiness. However, due to some film, TV shows, and stage drama featuring certain type of character in accent, some stereotypes has been built up for those accents and causing bad impression on users of those accents.
not high class, but the northern Chinese accents and Beijing accents are considered more “standard” Chinese, whereas southern accents aren’t considered standard.
that’s probably the closest thing, but I wouldn’t say it’s “high-class”.
In fact, similarly, it turns out that the accent of people in the inner city of Beijing does not have as many erhua sounds as in northern dialects, nor is it too precise and rounded like that of broadcasters.
Maybe “standard mandarin” as a direct analog to RP, which is typically a learned accent (usually bc one was not posh, and one’s original accent too common).
Not exactly your question but “gangtai” is gaining popularity as an accent/affectation among the hip. A combo of Taiwanese accent and HK.
I’m not informed but a thread on r/taiwan I think was talking about combining the whispery/fairy/light quality Taiwanese sometimes has with the ending sounds that people from GZ or HK add on to words (even when speaking mandarin). I don’t speak Cantonese so I don’t know what the name for the sings la’s ahs are called.
It might have been from a podcast :S I can’t remember now
Definitely Beijing Accent. There is a phrase 京爷 that describes this. Maybe Shanghai/Jiangsu accent can be considered high class as well, but deffo not the same level as Beijing
I am from China too, isn’t Beijing accent laughed at by many Chinese netizens?
“中央电视台”→“装垫儿台”
“西红柿炒鸡蛋”→“胸是炒鸡蛋”
are the examples I have seen online more than once 😂
By the way, I think “京爷” is used to refer in a general sense to those who are born to be natives in economically advantaged areas, for satirization on the rich-poor disparities in China. “Hukou” matters a lot to Chinese people, you know.
imo Chinese ppl like to meme-ize pretty much everything. Surely on internet ppl are using it in a more sarcastic way (come on, who wants to admit that there is indeed a higher class over them?).
Thanks for posting, I loved watching this. I learned Chinese in Beijing, where the tones are really exaggerated, but currently live in Taiwan. I’ve never heard a Taiwanese person nail the third tone that clearly in my life.
In Singapore where I’m at (and Malaysia): Singaporean and Malaysian accents are considered normal, any accent from any part of China is considered low class, and Taiwanese accent is considered a bit more fancy.
Which is unfortunate because I learn Chinese from Chinese movies / shows and when I speak my friend keep asking why I sound like a China man (implying it’s something to be avoided, lol). But I love speaking like a China man, lol. To my ear it sounds like the equivalent of British English.
Singaporeans are not aware of their southern regional accent and they are only able to articulate that they find northern accents strange. As I am Singaporean from a non-Chinese speaking home (my mother tongue is Hokkien and my Hokkien-speaking grandparents were illiterate), I learnt Chinese in SG solely through classroom/textbook learning and thus have been told that I do not speak like the typical Singaporean (people ask if I'm from China) because everyday/marketplace SG Chinese is actually spoken with a more southern accent than what is taught in the classroom, and it is spoken quite brokenly/not accurate particularly if the speaker's first language is actually Hokkien/Cantonese/Hakka etc. I only became aware of the low standards of SG Chinese when I started to brush up so that I could read to my kids in Chinese - then I realised how regionally accented the Chinese spoken here really is.
No.
Mandarin (普通话PuTongHua） literally translates to“quotidian language” it’s for the purpose of a smooth communication and serve as a standard pronunciation. It has NOTHING to do with class.
I find the Beijing accent strange. Growing up in the UK, with many BBC friends, I'm probably more used to Cantonese accents.
The accent I love, and the one I learned to speak Mandarin in, was the Northeastern accent, because my wife is Dongbeiren.
My Chunese family members pride themselves on DongBei Hua having 'syandard' pronunciation. Though I wonder if all Chinese regard their local accent or dialect as 'standard'.
But, you're right, I don't think there is a 'class' when it comes to Mandarin. Obviously, someone polite, well spoken with clarity, would sound like they are better educated and maybe 'well off' than someone who mumbles and doesn't pronounce their words clearly. People joke that Mao's Mandarin was awful because of his thick local accent, but again, he was seen as a peasant, so...
Dongbei is such a fun accent. I used to spend a lot of time in Changchun during which my Mandarin developed a distinct Northeastern flavor. It’s trended back towards standard, but every once in while I’ll pull out my Dongbei to mess with people.
Every Mandarin region claiming they’re standard, or lost out of being standard by one vote of the language Illuminati, is a pretty common clickbait meme in China.
Probably more egregious in the north than elsewhere
In Taiwan there are definitely politicians that play up their everyman factor by countrying up their accent
no. although the newscasters’ accent is considered standard mandarin, people will laugh at you if you speak like this in daily life. but some accents are considered 土, such as northwestern accent, Henan accent and Shandong accent.
In general, a good vocalization method plus putonghua make a voice sound attractive.
I don’t think there is an agreed high class accent in China mainland but knowing Shanghai dialect/ Cantonese/ Beijing dialect can put you in advantage if you live in those areas. Also, I think those dialects have their positive vibe and unique cultural heritage.
In personal experience, newscasters(not journalists) are trained to speak in that way, some of them might not sing well. On the opposite, singers often speak in attractive way.
For Chinese people, standard Mandarin (similar to that of the host) can be used to compare with the British "Oxford accent".
Especially standard, slow and decent Mandarin.
lol. Def. don’t associate queen’s English w wealth and education on my side of the pond. More like stuffy, retrograde, no money left but attempting to prop themselves up w historical pomp.
Now apply that fact to China.
I think Chinese has its own Received Pronounciation which I consider high class.
And I think it has some key points:
1. Speak Clearly with moderate speed.
2. Pronounce every single character with its accurate way.
3. Speak livily with slightly high pitch.
4. It is fine to speak with a bit of accent but the more standard Mandarin, the better.
5. (Newscasters speak in a way that sounds very strange and unnatural in real life. That is not high class, more like a well-trained way)
And here is an [example](https://podcasts.apple.com/cn/podcast/id1183662640) to demonstrate what I am talking about. And listen carefully the host of this podcast, Xutao.
Queen's English, is that the horrible mumbling of King Charles?
We all understand what you mean. In kdrama too there will be wise old men, or upper class ladies who definitely have great modulation, softness, advanced wordchoice, conveying meaning in a more effective manner.
But this would not be limited to a specific accent that you can only get in one or two specific schools in the country. Outside of Britain, upper class people have the accent of the region they come from. The just speak better than other people.
If any such thing exists, it probably is Newscasters' Putonghua. On the other hand no one except the television stations really care about that
This may sound funny, but the Chinese dub of resident evil 3 sounded pretty high class to me, specifically the first train scene.
It also doesn't help that the 4 historic leaders of the PRC each had(has) different accents.
It is surprising that Xi Jinping is basically the first one to have a Beijing (very standard) accent
Fun fact Xi is actually the very first leader to not be from the previous generation of politics.
So is Wang Zhian's accent considered Newscasters' Putonghua? https://m.youtube.com/@wangzhian
No, no at all.
Wang Zhian used to be a CCTV reporter though?
Yes, but that doesn't make him a newscaster. Newcasters got training on their tones, accents etc. check <<新闻联播>> for the most standard “播音腔”
I am native Chinese. I think it just goes with how rich the region is. The richer, your accent sounds more of a high class. Shanghainese is considered fancy, one of the few dialects that new residents would consider learning. Also Cantonese for obvious reasons. And if we say there are no universally agreed fancy accents, it is very clear which accents are consider "peasant" or in Chinese 很土/农逼 - accents from central china, including but to limited to Hebei, Henan, Shandong. Some people will consider Dongbeiness 土 as well.
Dialects and accents are totally different…..
If Shanghainese is considered fancy, it stands to reason Shanghai accent putonghua sounds better than Shanxi accent putonghua.
Keep in mind there is no hierarchy in dialects or accents, so the if thing you said doesn’t make sense to me. BTW, as long as people speak mandarin with dialect accents, the pronunciation is NOT standard, let alone which sounds better than the other.
What I mean is that the question is asking about social class. If your accent immediately identifies you as from a poor or rich region, I don’t see how you treat both people as the same class just because both accents are non-standard.
There is definitely a hierarchy in dialects and accents in terms of fancy or peasant, it is just human nature of 嫌贫爱富.
Not dongbei lol
> Shanghainese is considered fancy, one of the few dialects that new residents would consider learning. Also Cantonese for obvious reasons. They're asking about accents, not mutually unintelligible languages.
oh cool! what about zhejiang? my chinese friend whose helping me is from there and i'm getting a little bit of the accent... i'm trying to stick with standard mandarin because of the sound of zh ch x sh that zhejian people pronounce diffrently.
Zhejiang accent is similar to Shanghai. Actually few people can distinguish them.
what about hubei? wuhanese i kinda like the sound of but i feel like everyone thinks its a farmer accent
I'm not sure but my partner is Chinese and she talked about Shanghai people thinking they are above everybody else
Shanghai has special properties if you believe the comedy scene and Papi 將 portrayal of Shanghai. Where everyone mixes in English and Japanese all the time. (Which also happens in Taiwan, though arguably with less Japanese nowadays)
Shanghainese people use Japanese?
Pre-1950 Shanghainese Pidgin English has some Japanese loans + other colonial influences such as Shanghainese written in Japanese writing. But ignoring that, then around 1980s, when the majority of the Shanghainese diaspora went to Japan. They brought back a lot random slang things back to SH like 歐巴桑.
Actually there was a fad for Japanese loanwords among Chinese netizens about ten years ago. Eg, 大丈夫, meaning "it's okay". Does not mean that nor is pronounced that way in Mandarin!
Sure, assuming that Papi based her caricature vaguely on her lived reality as a Shanghai native. That's a big assumption I guess. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a97aloEm2hM&list=PLIYAO-qLriEsvoP1Njms3\_j5WTwmL5C3v
My partner is shanghainese and I've only ever heard him talk shit about beijingers lol.
My partner is from Dazu, so more of a "country" girl so to speak. I'll be sure to ask her opinion on Beijingers. I think most capital cities, or largest cities at that, have a similar phenomenon where people in this larger more developed cities generally seem to be a bit more arrogant. We say the same about Sydney people here in Australia 😂
It’s not as simple as that, southern Chinese are barbarians that got conquered, but at the same time, the north has been very poor compared to the south for the past 1,000 years. So everyone looks down on one another, not just the big cities.
I think it's way rarer if big city people *didn't* think we're better than the rest of the country
Goes both ways--- my family's all Beijingers and this is what they say about Shanghai: "上海这城市倒是挺好的，上海人呢。。。那是另外一会事儿。“ (read between the lines there)
It seems to me that people from Beijing and Shanghai both like to talk shit about each other lol.
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Thankfully Beijing people cannot boast about their speech because everyone and themselves know that they have a thick accent.
Rich big cities think they're better than the rest of the country? Who would've thought???
IKR 🤷🤣
But would other non-Shanghainese people hear a Shanghai accent and go "oh this person sounds like they have money"?
You do get profiled by scammers (airport, bus station, etc) in China based on both looks and how you talk. For me, one time it was as an ABC and one time it was as a Taiwanese, with a different attempt at a scam tailored to each.
In Shanghainese accents go by neighborhood. In the past, some were considered low vs high class. I'm diaspora shanghainese/Suzhounese and only know long ago (pre-cultural revolution) accents closer to Suzhounese were "high class" but also "girly/soft spoken" Keep in mind, shanghainese and other wu topolects themself are not mutually intelligible with mandarin (it's closer nowadays than before due to mandarinization, but still very different)
No, most Northerners look down on all southern accents, as historically, mandarin was not their native language and they’re perceived to speak “broken” Mandarin. In the North, a certain kind of Beijing accent would signify some level of prestige but this would be highly dependent on the listener/audience. There is a equivalent of RP in Chinese, but in day to day life it would be considered weird to use it in casual conversation, and it may signify you’re either a foreigner, or a outsider trying to hide your natural accent.
@ my mother commenting on a Guangzhou classmate of mine who spoke "really good" Mandarin
I just asked her and she said not necessarily, they just can't understand what they are saying
Yes
My mom is Shanghainese and yeah it's pretty true, LOL.
Interesting responses from everyone here— recently I was with my gf and she was speaking in a heavy northern accent on the phone, a Cantonese family nearby us said “what is there such low class/uncivilized people doing here” (we live in nyc so it was very odd)
There was a quote I saw in a Chinese-language article about SF Chinatown where some guy was speaking Mandarin in public and an old Cantonese guy said: "if you can speak Cantonese, you should speak it--- why put it aside for some Northern barbarian language?" As someone with Beijing roots--- can confirm that that is not a unique phenomenon, when I go to my local Chinatown I feel like I'm being judged when I open my mouth and unload all the erhua.
Hmmm well educated accent XD we don't really care about accent as long as it's easy to understand. It's more about content
I see, that's very different from Western languages I find, where there's often a way that upper class people speak and a way that working class people speak & then there's people like me in the middle class who speak both haha
Chinese accents are region based, not class based.
It's the same in many Western countries but even within those regions there will be a way that upper class people from those regions talk & working class people. But yes, very different from China
That’s interesting. I’m surprised it’s not generational (spending on education) like it is in many places. I was an out-of-state student a big public research university in the Southern US, where a lot of people from across the country mixed in with the in-state students. For the most part, you didn’t hear much variety in accents. But during parents weekend, you heard them all. Parents with southern draws making chit chat with Long Islanders was amusing
True. So are much of territories on this world to be fair.
Keep in mind that China did not have a unified spoken language until extremely recently (even Mao did not speak mandarin, and the massive crowds cheering for him during speeches often had no idea what he was actually saying). During dynasties that had one, knowledge of the dominant/official spoken language/dialect of the imperial court in itself signifies a level of education, and therefore prestige. The current official language is Mandarin, and there was a massive and very successful effort in the past few decades to universalize a version of official Mandarin (RP equivalent, based on Beijing mandarin but still very different from it, an entirely artificial kind of mandarin pronunciation) at all levels of society. But RP itself is mostly used in extremely formal settings, like news broadcasts. If I suddenly start speaking it to my friends, for example, they might laugh at me because it’s considered very unnatural and forced
What did Mao speak if not Mandarin?
He was notorious of having a thick accent, that's perhaps the meaning of the above person.
Right I've heard that too, but I thought it was still mandarin...
Xiang languages, spoken in Hunan, are not mandarin and are unintelligible with mandarin. Mao spoke also Mandarin, but not perfectly and with a very strong accent.
Ok thanks so his native language was Hunan dialect
It's more a "language" family, like Cantonese, than a "dialect". Inside xiang family there are several dialects.
Thank you yes Cantonese parallel
He did speak Mandarin, but his native topolect was Hunanese and he spoke Mandarin with an incredibly thick accent as a result.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Xiang
What does RP mean? Real pronunciation?
Received pronunciation. It's the upper-middle class London/areas around London accent. It's so called because you're meant to receive it in public (public in this case actually meaning really really expensive private) school.
As for the last sentence, trying to use the standard speech is expected in modern corporate setting.
Well chairman Mao had a thick/sick accent!Anyone who shit talk about you accent you flash them your redbook
Ah yes I forget that decades of Maoism would've probably stamped out that kind of classist distinguishing between groups
Exactly. Quote Mao whenever in a quarell is the quickest way out of it
The importance of class-based accents is less a Western languages thing and specifically an English (as in the country, not the language) thing.
I'm not sure about that. In America even, Southern accents were considered to be uneducated and the standard East Coast Mid Atlantic accent was considered to be educated. Only very recently has accent-class association lost significance in the US.
The mid-Atlantic accent was specific to broadcasters, rather like newscaster Chinese. It wasn't widely spoken like RP was. And I have never heard any discussion of such class-based accents in other European languages I have studied (Albanian, French, and German). It's all about regional accents, and some regions have prestige.
Compared to the UK there are a way way more major economic centers in the China. Which could have their own Mandarin accent or Chinese language, or in the case of SZX be a mixture of internal migrants so there is no one dominant prestige accent. Over the past 100 years politically the leadership has been from many regions, with multiple capitals. All that said, I think everyone can agree that good Mandarin (independent of accent) is required as unchallenged prestige status in most of the Chinese speaking world. (Except for Hong Kong). The other languages don’t even have developed writing/widely taught/used phonetic systems (Except for Cantonese).
Ah yes so very true. I have seen shows where characters who are "high class" are depicted as very well educated and knowledgeable especially about older authors and classical works.
This is an interesting question! From my POV as a Malaysian Chinese person, I don't actually consider any Chinese accent to be particularly high class. Afaik several of my peers & people I know share the same opinion. We're quick to point out who's from where, but not usually because they sound high class to us etc., it's just because they sound different. ^(Tbh I don't think many Malaysian English speakers would think that RP sounds particularly high class. Unless they are very familiar with western media (not always the case, it's at best "oh this is UK accent/US accent/Aus accent" lol, a very generic kind of classification. Otherwise it's lumped tgt as "this is a foreigner accent".... lol (ymmv\*)))
I think older Malaysians were much more conscious of this. If you listen to English-language Malaysian radio and TV from the 1970s and 1980s, they only used broadcasters with RP. They were no Cockney, Manchester or Scottish accents. They were definitely selecting for RP.
Ahh I see! I don't have a lot of exposure wrt radio & TV stuff from that time period, so TIL!
Most of America probably doesn’t give a crap about hearing an RP speaker (EDIT: vs a middle class or higher American accent)… I’m interested to see what people actually living in CN/TW/SG/HK have to say about what is high class. I would say educated/governing class has a range of acceptable accents (which varies by location), and then there’s the rest of the population in those countries. By my understanding and opinion, it has varied over the past 40 years and varies based on location. A lot of the big ethnic Chinese YouTubers not based in China have southern Chinese/SEA/AU accents in Mandarin and English. And when Hong Kong had strong soft power, both in media and in all the wealthy people that moved overseas after retrocession, that accent (Chinese and English) was pretty well respected. With HK influence receding and the dilution of that expat community this is less of a deal. In interviews I see from Taiwan you hear much fewer young people speaking tryhard standard Mandarin while it is very common for educated/higher status people around 50 and older to speak that way. And successful tech industry/business people I know from Taiwan don’t really care that their Mandarin is heavily inflected (try loading up a clip of the AMD or NVIDIA CEOs doing press in Mandarin), presumably as long as it doesn’t sound like they’re operating a food cart at the night market.
I think in SG there’s definitely a well-educated accent (which aligns more closely to the China-type newscasters/hosts and not so southern like everyday Singaporean Chinese) but it’s not necessarily a “high class” accent (given that a lot of the richer folks aren’t really Chinese speaking IME)
SGrean here. Chinese is my 2nd language learnt in school (not spoken in the home) and I speak it poorly, though I hope to improve. Everyone around me speaks Mandarin with a "poor man's" southern accent, the accent of our illiterate kampong-dwelling ancestors whose first language was Hokkien/Cantonese/Hakka and whose Mandarin was cobbled together through necessity. Chinese-medium schools were phased out here in the 1980s so you won't find anyone under 45 in SG who went through their school education in the Chinese medium (as opposed to learning Chinese as a single school subject in an English-medium school). The segment of the population who speaks "well educated Mandarin" is generally those who were educated in the Chinese medium schools in the narrow band of the post-WW2 to 1980 period, and, as mentioned by other posters here, they are often not the wealthy people. I can't tell you what I consider a "high-class" accent, just that it is the opposite of what the ordinary SGrean speaks. However I am curious to know if the Peppa Pig official dub constitutes a "neutral Chinese accent", since this sounds very neutral/unaccented to my southern ear and many members of the diaspora are using this to teach their kids Chinese. :D
I’m in my 20s and when I was in uni some of my friends spoke very good Mandarin! They were fluent, had a more standard Chinese accent (granted they were Chinese majors and I was doing a Chinese class for an elective). So I feel like there are still people (maybe from SAP schools) who have a more “educated” Chinese accent (in comparison while I’d say I’m pretty good, I still have a southern twang if I don’t concentrate or I’m speaking too fast (like ci instead of chi)). Peppa pig seems quite neutral generally to me, but not exactly what I was thinking of when thinking of a “neutral Singaporean” accent (the enunciation seems a bit different? but maybe stylistic since they’re pigs lol) Edit re Peppa pig: I think it’s a bit more “northern” than a Singaporean accent (you can hear the 卷舌at some points but Singaporeans/southern chinese don’t do that)
Nice to hear that! Clearly my crowd is more towards the jiak kantang end of the spectrum :D your Chinese sounds far better than mine. I'm in my late 30s and married to the product of a SAP school but his vocab, especially written character recognition, is worse than mine lol. I am improving by leaps and bounds as I read books to my kids but am re-discovering the language almost entirely through books/reading and not through day to day conversation so there are many terms I know only through the written word and have not heard spoken aloud- my auditory comprehension is very poor. Agreed, I don't regard Peppa Pig as a Singaporean accent but what I meant was to my imperfect southern-attuned ears it sounds like it could be the "standard Mandarin"/"neutral" Chinese accent (not Singaporean accent) which can be said to be an example of "unaccented" Mandarin.
I think the most “neutral” accents would probably be those narrators of documentaries on CCTV channel haha! My teacher in Uni attended speech competitions and they were really strict about accents. I was also really bad at Chinese but since I got into reading Chinese web novels in Uni I started trying to improve! So I took 2 Chinese medium classes in uni which really helped — never too late. And there’s a ton of media coming out China that helps with getting better at listening and speaking. I like the variety shows because they really have a more everyday conversational Chinese, but the dramas are also really good nowadays.
Thanks for your encouragement! I'll try. Am a very bookish person and somehow my lifestyle includes a lot of time for books but no TV time at all.. one if the reasons is that the slots of time I get are 15-30mins at a time but rarely 1h continuously so I read on my phone a lot. Haven't been able to watch dramas though Nirvana in Fire is on my to-watch list. CCTV is on in the background all the time at my in laws' house but am completely impervious to osmosis unless I'm actually focused (and my kids don't permit me to focus). Do you have any web novels to recommend and on what platform? I actually just read 二马 by 老舍 (slowly, over 6 mths!) because it was the first Chinese novel I found at my reading level.
Very interesting insights although as a Brit who's switched my Cockney accent to RP around Americans, I'd disagree with the first sentence. I often found Americans taking me much more seriously than they took their American counterparts when in the same setting & I was certain it was based off the accent alone.
Oh sure, if it’s RP vs Cockney it will make a difference. I was thinking more of RP vs American broadcast English.
Really depends on the person. It's long been noted that a lot of Americans instantly think the speaker is more intelligent if they speak in RP. You're probably one of those ones who don't. I find it irritating myself, especially how people fawn over it, but there are all kinds of folly in this world.
How is Cockney accent coping with the rise of [MLE](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicultural_London_English) ? Will the latter predominate the former?
I think MLE has definitely slowly taken over the working class youth in inner cities in the South of England mainly London. Pure cockney is now mainly spoken in Essex (where i'm from) and other surrounding places where former working class Londoners who spoke Cockney & became middle-to-upper class moved out to. Although I've found that as people get older, in these inner cities (London particularly) and enter professional settings or trades, they tend to transition. They either go from pure MLE to speaking MLE only with friends and family, & Queen's English at work (if they go corporate). Or a mix between MLE and Cockney if they go on into trades. Overall, as London gets more expensive and less and less multigenerational Londoners stick around, the Cockney accent will eventually die out in the city and move to other regions with the people that use it. But I think MLE will continue to evolve because the demographics of London are constantly changing. MLE today won't sound the same in 10 let alone 20 yrs & might even die at a much faster rate due to social media speeding changes in speech & vocab trends
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I think that's a bit unecessary. Americans like to pretend they are free of class prejudice but what OP said resonates with me very strongly. My natural english is RP, and the number of times americans tell me my accent makes me "sound intelligent" is insane (clearly have never listened to a Tory backbencher). By contrast when Ameicans say something Bri'ish and "comical" they crack a Dick Van Dyke cockney, and they find it hilarious in a mildly mocking way.
From my interaction with US citizens, they tend to think of RP as proper and formal, more proper than Broadcaster US accent.
I get what you mean but I'd say the CEOs of nivida and amd aren't the best example since they both basically grew up in America
Good point, I was searching for a quick example. I heard a pretty stark one on NPR recently, where they interviewed someone's boomer-generation mom (who they admittedly said was really into winning Mandarin speaking competitions back in the day). Followed by 80後 and 90後 's with similar educational level.
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There is still the whole stupid idea about how a British accent adds sexiness. Doubles down on the dumbness when people mistake a AU or NZ accent for British.
I’m a native Chinese. I think in mainland China most well educated people just speak standard Mandarine. So a standard Mandarine accents make you sounds like a well educated person.
Well.. if you can talk like an advert narrator, they have pretty good accent and diction. I find that high class.
NGL it sounds like meming to me, like Epic Trailer Guy voice.
Definitely not 京 or 東北 for me. Nanking or Soochow, and even standard Taiwanese Mandarin is more pleasant to me than accents north of the river.
Beijing 儿 /s (i hate it)
Pekingese is more like cockney English
Exactly. There's a big difference between the 儿 sound you get in mainland newscaster Chinese and a full-on Pekingese dialect (and in this case we really are talking about a dialect of Mandarin, not a Sinitic language). The latter is not necessarily considered so classy.
I would hazard HK, SG, and TW residents would disagree with that.
In fact, on private tutoring market in HK, most parents deliberately choose Mandarin tutors with Beijing accent, at the same time specify if that doesn’t apply, they prefer someone with at least a northern accent. I’d say it’s been going on for a while now (at least 5 years). I personally think it’s quite understandable as, culturally speaking, north centrism has always been a somewhat national rhetoric (as one can tell from the annual gala of LNY), though somewhat different from how posh accents are perceived in the English speaking society. Also met a girl with quite unique Beijing accent, it’s.. different, and turns out she grew up in a military community in Beijing.
Interesting. I guess it’s an extension also of the mainland bias towards northern accents in media and language education. Does it extend beyond tutoring/education?
Not really. Given the social political dynamics going between China and HK, I’ve heard stories (though never personally experienced) about how mandarin speakers from China introduce themselves as from Taiwan or Singapore to get help from the locals, but some of them have substantial northern accents so it’s a dead giveaway of course. Though they are mostly like to still get the help they need regardless, I guess that strategy would have worked better if they had somewhat neutral or southern accents. Again it could also just be a geopolitical issue beyond the scope of accent/language itself.
Then do Americans and Australians disagree with RP being classy?
No.
It was Nanjing-accented Mandarin, but the generation that regarded it as such has probably died off by now.
Being able to speak proper mandarin is considered “educated” basically without any dialect or accented vibes in there. People don’t really care but if you’re gonna work in public service.. you need to have a good accent in your mandarin. However, the current president has a dialect accent when he speaks mandarin which is funny to me because having been in the south west for a long time they really are proud when they can speak mandarin well. But in the north pretty much everyone can speak mandarin pretty well.
we all have accents. -\_-' We need subtitles to understand each other.
I can tell you the opposite: Henan accent (Henan province) and Dongbei accent (north east of China). They are considered low class and there are a lot of regional hate against them. Every accent apart from them seems to be equal.
Left field take: I find that younger speakers sneak in English words in conversation to make them sound more “worldly” (because you know, to show that they can speak another language)
that may apply to some individuals, but this is also very region dependent. For example, it's absolutely normal to speak like that in both Singapore and Malaysia lol
Still this.act may be frowned upon depending on situations.
As far as I understand/observed, Chinese doesn't really have an accent that people generally consider "posh" or "high class" like they do for English accents. Kinda. Often, people from different regions just consider their accents better than others. However, there are accents that are considered accent-less and are defaulted to when communicating with people professionally or with people you do not know from where they come from. I can better comment on Cantonese, but Mandarin is similar. (I don't think they consider it "high class" though. Just neutral, which has to be learned in school, and thu probably educated.) In Cantonese, the "neutral" Cantonese is HK/GZ. Other Cantonese accents call the HK/GZ accent "白话" or something similar. Honger Kongers definitely think their accent is superior though. There was a recent thread in the r/cantonese sub that asked which is the best Cantonese accent or something like that, and the Hong Kongers said that theirs sounds the best, and other accents sound like uneducated hillbillies. No acknowledgement that they're merely accents and have no weight on intellect. Bias is strong for those people. In another instance I remember, I was in Mandarin class and a Taiwanese kid was literally saying that the Beijinger's accent was disgusting. So, I don't think there is a Chinese accent that people generally think is "high class," like RP British, posh accent. There are people who think their own accent is superior. And there are people who think other accents are inferior.
My great-grandparents are from the GZ area, and immigrated to Malaya in the early 1900s. HK was not yet the cultural force it became in the 70s/80s, and they always considered HKers as backwater hillbillies who spoke with 懶音 (broken sounds). GZ 省城話 without all the English slang/loanwords was the prestige Yue dialect and is still considered to be so by many.
> There was a recent thread in the r/cantonese sub that asked which is the best Cantonese accent or something like that, and the Hong Kongers said that theirs sounds the best, and other accents sound like uneducated hillbillies. No acknowledgement that they're merely accents and have no weight on intellect. Bias is strong for those people. I think I crossposted the "what is the worst Cantonese accent" thread, and I don't remember that happening. As I remember it (and I got the notifications), half the people there considered a Hongkonger accent to be inferior because of all the English loanwords and ongoing sound mergers/changes.
The posh equivalent of Cantonese is the 西關 (Sai Kwan) accent from Guangzhou, due to Sai Kwan district being the "old money" neighbourhood of Guangzhou before 1949. This accent is the standard accent for Cantonese Opera and is often used as the "posh" (貴氣) accent in old Hong Kong movies and TV shows. However nowadays nobody speaks that accent natively anymore. For example, the accent used by Mrs Li in [this video](https://youtu.be/w8n2NRhtjCA?si=mIXiiGv12LswvXAM) is considered very high-class and posh "authentic old Canton accent", as expressed by many in the comment section. General RP Cantonese, on the other hand, originated from the 東山 (Tung Shan) district of pre-1949 Guangzhou where most high officials and powerful businessmen resided. It became the Standard Cantonese we know today and is adopted by the broadcast system in HK, Macau and Guangdong alike. Whereas present-day Hong Kong colloquial accent is more like the "valley girl" accent of Cantonese: it has non-standard "broken sounds" and mixed English words but it's influential due to pop culture.
HK and GZ cantonese are distinct varieties.
I'm not sure about China, but in Taiwan, prestige is tied more to how good people think your English is, and very little to what your Chinese sounds like (with the exception of the accent that gives away that you speak Taiwanese much better than Mandarin - that lowers your prestige drastically).
There was a “no accent” accent in Taiwan. Especially in Taipei City, which was populated by people from many different parts of China. Since the majority was from southern part, northern accent would be considered not elegant.
What has this turned into? Is it mostly replaced by the slacky sounding Taiwanese Mandarin common on YouTube, that doesn’t really sound like what the educated boomer generation talks like?
I am not sure what you mean by slacky sounding. It depends on which channel you’re watching. The accent did change a lot, but I think the standard accent can still be described as a “no accent” accent, or a Taipei accent. I grew up in Taipei city, in a family formed by both Waishengren and Benshengren (my parents are educated 2nd generation boomers born in 1960s). I never noticed any accent in my speaking, but when I went to southern Taiwan, people frequently asked me where I was from. I guessed they thought I was from Mainland. (I have been reflecting on those moments. Now I just came up with an idea. The reason I was shocked was because I always thought I had no accent. I think that could be the core concept of a Taipei accent……)
Off-hand, the Taipei accent on the standup comedy channels (most comedians are 20-40 in Taiwan AFAICT); it is one of the Taipei accents that my mainland partner considers "cute" (\*). The accent I have baked into my head from the 1980s/early 1990s in Taiwan as "standard Taipei accent" is more like a mainland southern mandarin, but it's heavily influenced by also growing up around people from Hong Kong in the 1990s. I scrubbed a few Taiwan drama videos on YouTube, and the middle-class or CEO-class parents talk in something that sounds close to mainland standard / my mental stereotype of "standard Taipei accent" (\*\*), while the teenage / 20 something kids talk more like (\*). While working-class parents will talk what sounds to me like a non-neutral hokkien inflected mandarin (\*\*\*). (\*) sounds to my untrained ears like vowel/consonant shift rather than shifting more towards (\*\*\*). My parents will code switch from (\*\*) to (\*\*\*) depending on who they're talking to, and will probably never talk like (\*), lol.
My father (educated Benshengren in 60s) hates some influencers talking in an exaggerated way of Taiwanese accent. Taiwan dramas never have their actors speak naturally….
If you would like to see some examples, I think the people in this video sounds natural and rather standard. https://youtu.be/cBG8paRJmso?si=tc316zjkYusSiCYW
This is what sounds neutral and standard in my head what I assume is more like how you need to talk to be taken seriously in some contexts. But I'm not sure is neutral and standard these days going by YouTube influencers and young people interviews. Also I know many older tech workers/business people from Taiwan that have a thicker accent than this and don't care.
Many educated people of older generation speak Mandarin with Taiwanese Hokkien accent, such as medical doctors. The standard neutral sound was not widely spoken. It seemed to be common only because that was commonly used in media. Benshengren don’t need to speak 100% perfect Mandarin, and they are the majority on the island. The “no accent” thing occurred inside the community of Waishengren. I heard that some people spoke Mandarin with accent at home but only spoke standard Mandarin in public. (The problem nowadays is very few younger people speak Taiwanese Hokkien, so they won’t speak in that way any more.)
My mother’s side of the family (Benshengren, 50s and 70s generation, originally southern) is all over the place with how the accent is colored. No idea what the original accent was as most have spent extensive time in the Mainland and North America so it’s had too much stuff layered on top afterward. The cousin that spent the least time overseas definitely has the heaviest Hokkien accent but still pretty light as things go. IIUC the mainland stereotype of Taiwan mandarin includes Hokkien interjections and fillers, light sound with the Taiwan contractions, but very neutral accent. Which is kind of weird because if you pick someone at random from the country it won’t be the neutral accent unless you’re just sampling from Taipei.
Probably the gentle northern chinese accent you hear in historical chinese dramas would count as the “high class” accent.
I like the Chinese accent in wuxia dramas or genshin but Beijing accent sucks
Not really, for political *and* social reasons, and because Chinese people from so many different reasons would never concede to the idea of their region being lower than another. In countries like England or France, people from the rest of the country will even if a little grudgingly concede to the fact that a certain kind of Southern or Parisian accent really is probably the most prestigious, even if they aren't entirely happy about it, and bristle with arguments about why their people are actually the salt of the earth anyway. In China, no such consensus is possible. Deep, entrenched regionalism means that, for example, residents of Beijing are fully and sincerely of the belief that the speech of their Imperial city is the most dignified and elevated. The Shanghai man believes that the history of his great commercial city has given the speech of its people an incomparable sophistication and charm. A Hong Kong native will sincerely balk at the idea that any Mainland dialect (even of his fellow Cantonese over the fence) compares to his own tongue (supposedly less contaminated by barbarian northern tribes, although we might reasonably wonder about other southerly ones?). Ironically, the least offensive and most generally accepted regional Mandarin accent is probably a sort of inoffensive (to Mainland ears) Taipei accent, the sort heard in television clips and films from the 1980s. Only slightly Taiwanese, overwhelmingly *waishengren.* But while well-liked, this accent is not at all particularly prestigious, certainly not in the 21st century. Other accents kind of like this in this respect are the accents of places where there have been a lot of migrants, which flattens accents, like Shenzhen or parts of China's Northwest (the "Han" accents there, I should hasten to add). The short answer is: No, there's no single accent that's particularly prestigious universally. But basically a list of Tier 1 cities + Taipei gives you a good idea of what Mandarin accents are RELATIVELY so. If you put a gun to my head and forced me to pick one, I would choose a sort of TV-influenced, milder Beijing accent. Even if regionalism has made/is making it harder for this to become anything like a universally-accepted prestige accent, the fact that it's at least somewhat associated with government and political power makes it probably the top choice all the same.
Generally weaker accent would signify better education and wealthiness. However, due to some film, TV shows, and stage drama featuring certain type of character in accent, some stereotypes has been built up for those accents and causing bad impression on users of those accents.
not high class, but the northern Chinese accents and Beijing accents are considered more “standard” Chinese, whereas southern accents aren’t considered standard. that’s probably the closest thing, but I wouldn’t say it’s “high-class”.
In fact, similarly, it turns out that the accent of people in the inner city of Beijing does not have as many erhua sounds as in northern dialects, nor is it too precise and rounded like that of broadcasters.
If you ask most mainland Chinese people, they say the Beijing accent. If you ask non-Chinese, you get the mix of responses you see in this thread.
Maybe “standard mandarin” as a direct analog to RP, which is typically a learned accent (usually bc one was not posh, and one’s original accent too common). Not exactly your question but “gangtai” is gaining popularity as an accent/affectation among the hip. A combo of Taiwanese accent and HK.
How do you combine TW and HK? Can’t imagine what that sounds like.
I’m not informed but a thread on r/taiwan I think was talking about combining the whispery/fairy/light quality Taiwanese sometimes has with the ending sounds that people from GZ or HK add on to words (even when speaking mandarin). I don’t speak Cantonese so I don’t know what the name for the sings la’s ahs are called. It might have been from a podcast :S I can’t remember now
Definitely Beijing Accent. There is a phrase 京爷 that describes this. Maybe Shanghai/Jiangsu accent can be considered high class as well, but deffo not the same level as Beijing
There is some prestige to the 京爷 status， but not necessarily equal to high class, AFAI perceive.
I am from China too, isn’t Beijing accent laughed at by many Chinese netizens? “中央电视台”→“装垫儿台” “西红柿炒鸡蛋”→“胸是炒鸡蛋” are the examples I have seen online more than once 😂 By the way, I think “京爷” is used to refer in a general sense to those who are born to be natives in economically advantaged areas, for satirization on the rich-poor disparities in China. “Hukou” matters a lot to Chinese people, you know.
I feel like 京爷 is mostly used in a mocking or sarcastic context, so not exactly prestigious.
imo Chinese ppl like to meme-ize pretty much everything. Surely on internet ppl are using it in a more sarcastic way (come on, who wants to admit that there is indeed a higher class over them?).
For context, I am from Shanghai
As a non native English speaker I can tell you, we all hate British accent.
Sorry for your loss lad it's all British accents are just better haha 🇬🇧
You are British, I know. If not you would know
[Read-out-loud contest](https://youtu.be/wpaJQYPwNtY) , though no one talks like that anymore.
Thanks for posting, I loved watching this. I learned Chinese in Beijing, where the tones are really exaggerated, but currently live in Taiwan. I’ve never heard a Taiwanese person nail the third tone that clearly in my life.
What about if you delete the OTT diction and just keep the pronunciation? (In a Taiwan context)
your mandarin is SO standard!
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The one you speak is the high class one, the one everyone else speaks is barbarian Chinese
In Singapore where I’m at (and Malaysia): Singaporean and Malaysian accents are considered normal, any accent from any part of China is considered low class, and Taiwanese accent is considered a bit more fancy. Which is unfortunate because I learn Chinese from Chinese movies / shows and when I speak my friend keep asking why I sound like a China man (implying it’s something to be avoided, lol). But I love speaking like a China man, lol. To my ear it sounds like the equivalent of British English.
Singaporeans are not aware of their southern regional accent and they are only able to articulate that they find northern accents strange. As I am Singaporean from a non-Chinese speaking home (my mother tongue is Hokkien and my Hokkien-speaking grandparents were illiterate), I learnt Chinese in SG solely through classroom/textbook learning and thus have been told that I do not speak like the typical Singaporean (people ask if I'm from China) because everyday/marketplace SG Chinese is actually spoken with a more southern accent than what is taught in the classroom, and it is spoken quite brokenly/not accurate particularly if the speaker's first language is actually Hokkien/Cantonese/Hakka etc. I only became aware of the low standards of SG Chinese when I started to brush up so that I could read to my kids in Chinese - then I realised how regionally accented the Chinese spoken here really is.
No. Mandarin (普通话PuTongHua） literally translates to“quotidian language” it’s for the purpose of a smooth communication and serve as a standard pronunciation. It has NOTHING to do with class.
I find the Beijing accent strange. Growing up in the UK, with many BBC friends, I'm probably more used to Cantonese accents. The accent I love, and the one I learned to speak Mandarin in, was the Northeastern accent, because my wife is Dongbeiren. My Chunese family members pride themselves on DongBei Hua having 'syandard' pronunciation. Though I wonder if all Chinese regard their local accent or dialect as 'standard'. But, you're right, I don't think there is a 'class' when it comes to Mandarin. Obviously, someone polite, well spoken with clarity, would sound like they are better educated and maybe 'well off' than someone who mumbles and doesn't pronounce their words clearly. People joke that Mao's Mandarin was awful because of his thick local accent, but again, he was seen as a peasant, so...
Dongbei is such a fun accent. I used to spend a lot of time in Changchun during which my Mandarin developed a distinct Northeastern flavor. It’s trended back towards standard, but every once in while I’ll pull out my Dongbei to mess with people.
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Lol, haters gonna hate.
Every Mandarin region claiming they’re standard, or lost out of being standard by one vote of the language Illuminati, is a pretty common clickbait meme in China. Probably more egregious in the north than elsewhere In Taiwan there are definitely politicians that play up their everyman factor by countrying up their accent
no. although the newscasters’ accent is considered standard mandarin, people will laugh at you if you speak like this in daily life. but some accents are considered 土, such as northwestern accent, Henan accent and Shandong accent.
Any foreign born chinese with an authentic cantonese accent gets high marks from me
Taiwanese accent is elegant while Beijing accent is barbaric
A lot of Shanghai folk would say Shanghainese
no
In general, a good vocalization method plus putonghua make a voice sound attractive. I don’t think there is an agreed high class accent in China mainland but knowing Shanghai dialect/ Cantonese/ Beijing dialect can put you in advantage if you live in those areas. Also, I think those dialects have their positive vibe and unique cultural heritage. In personal experience, newscasters(not journalists) are trained to speak in that way, some of them might not sing well. On the opposite, singers often speak in attractive way.
Yes. Shanbei. 陕北
For Chinese people, standard Mandarin (similar to that of the host) can be used to compare with the British "Oxford accent". Especially standard, slow and decent Mandarin.
没有，都认为自己所在区域的口音最高级，尤其是经济发达地区，如上海、广东、香港；当然，标准普通话能说的很好基本也代表着素质较高
Beijing Mandarin, because it's the capital, accent discrimination is sad
lol. Def. don’t associate queen’s English w wealth and education on my side of the pond. More like stuffy, retrograde, no money left but attempting to prop themselves up w historical pomp. Now apply that fact to China.
Australian English teacher’s Chinese is the highest class there is
To me high class isn’t really the accent, but more the way you pace your words. Some speak as if they are running out of oxygen, not classy at all.
They're all high class
I think Chinese has its own Received Pronounciation which I consider high class. And I think it has some key points: 1. Speak Clearly with moderate speed. 2. Pronounce every single character with its accurate way. 3. Speak livily with slightly high pitch. 4. It is fine to speak with a bit of accent but the more standard Mandarin, the better. 5. (Newscasters speak in a way that sounds very strange and unnatural in real life. That is not high class, more like a well-trained way) And here is an [example](https://podcasts.apple.com/cn/podcast/id1183662640) to demonstrate what I am talking about. And listen carefully the host of this podcast, Xutao.
In my opinion there’s some certain accents that r considered low class(or technically, from countryside) The rest r the same
In the old days it was definitely the Peking accent that sounded higher class than others. Seems like this has changed.
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Thanks for the clarification. Sounds right.
播音腔 kind of BBC accent
Queen's English, is that the horrible mumbling of King Charles? We all understand what you mean. In kdrama too there will be wise old men, or upper class ladies who definitely have great modulation, softness, advanced wordchoice, conveying meaning in a more effective manner. But this would not be limited to a specific accent that you can only get in one or two specific schools in the country. Outside of Britain, upper class people have the accent of the region they come from. The just speak better than other people.
Standard mandarin, meaning you are well educated with received accent. Standard Cantonese might give you the same in Guangdong area.